Politics & Power Quote by Walter Salles

Salles is talking like a filmmaker who’s had to negotiate not just art, but geography. The line is dry, policy-coded, almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point: it frames cultural exchange as something that doesn’t happen naturally in Latin America, even among neighbors with shared histories, aesthetics, and anxieties. It has to be engineered. Incentives and reciprocity are a quiet admission that the default system rewards the opposite: siloed national markets, thin distribution networks, and a regional audience trained to look north (to Hollywood) before looking sideways.

The specific intent is practical optimism. Salles is pointing to a lever that actually moves something: distribution. For Latin American cinema, production is often the glamorous struggle that gets discussed; exhibition is the invisible choke point. A film can win Cannes and still be a rumor in nearby countries. By emphasizing premieres and distribution, he’s signaling that recognition without access is cultural theater.

The subtext is also political. “Vice versa” matters. It implies parity and a shared regional project rather than Brazil acting as a cultural superpower that “imports” prestige. In the 2000s and after, Latin American filmmakers increasingly operated in a transnational ecosystem of co-productions and festival circuits, while domestic audiences remained fragmented. These laws try to turn regional cinema from an export product into a regional habit.

Underneath the wonky language is a director’s frustration: you can’t build a Latin American public sphere if your stories can’t cross the border.