It seems clear that without the support of transnational collaborative funding and support initiatives, filmmakers from so-called ‘small’ Hispanic countries such as Peru where ‘everything would seem to be against the idea’ would lack the means to create and release their works in traditional formats even onto the specialist festival circuit let alone via commercial exhibition networks. As Randal Johnson, in his study on film policy, pointed out in 1996, in Latin America ‘political turmoil, economic instability, high inflation rates and debt crises have contributed to the instability of national industries’, and the context for cinematic activity emanating from Peru has changed little since he wrote that paper. Even relatively established and internationally acclaimed directors from (and based in) Peru such as Alberto Durant and Francisco Lombardi have consistently struggled to access the small amounts of state-administered funding that is available via competition most years. This essay argues that more complex financial networks than those relied upon by Lombardi and Durant are now required by most Latin American directors, and that these in turn set up new relationships and power dynamics that bring potential complications and interferences that hark back to the concerns about imperialism that preoccupied their predecessors of the 1960s. Despite such risks, new models of funding have emerged that allow for a certain degree of freedom from the constraints and expectations of local politics, some of which rely on networks of state funding devolved to other groups (such as festivals), while others have been established by businesses as philanthropic ventures.