German Films in Latin America and the Second World War: A Comparative Study on Argentina and Ecuador

Before the Second World War, German cinema was an important competitor to the Hollywood industry. With the Nazi regime, film policies tried to expand distribution to foreign markets, both for commercial and ideological purposes, including Latin American countries. In this chapter, we explore the distribution and exhibition of Nazi films from 1936 to 1943, in the main cities of Argentina (Buenos Aires) and Ecuador (Quito and Guayaquil). The number of German feature films released in the central movie theatres between those years was considerable and a number of highly ideological films were exhibited. Based on archival data from journalistic sources and drawing inspiration from recent work on the new history of cinema, we compare the cases of Argentina and Ecuador with the aim of achieving a better understanding of the German cultural policy in Latin America during the Third Reich regime.