Sanfic Industria Bows a Queer Incubator: Latin America and the Chile Industry Academy (EXCLUSIVE)

Chile’s Sanfic Industria, one of the most significant industry meets in South America, has unveiled two new sections aimed at promoting both a cutting-edge diversity in Latin American filmmaking and TV creation as well as powering up its international reach.

A development program targeting queer narratives and directors and screenwriters across Latin America, Queer Incubator: Latin America will select and showcase six projects, tutored by industry experts in developing dissident, queer or non-normative film-TV storytelling.

Organized with Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival, the Chile Industry Academy will notably focus not on production but, as other Locarno Academies around the world, on the craft of international, distribution, programming and marketing.

As in other Academias classes are given by seasoned practitioners whose informed, learnt-by-experience advice, guidance and information is often not found in public sources. Given students are themselves often already practising agents and distributors, sometimes at major film companies, one consequence of the Academy will be to increase Sanfic Industria’s buyer heft from 2025.

Unveiling its two new sections, Sanfic Industria also announced a call for applications across the Queer Incubator and its other six strands which take in the 14th Ibero-American Works in Progress; the 13th Ibero-American Santiago Lab for fiction and doc projects and the 6th Sanfic-Morbido Lab, a genre development initiative which often brings to Sanfic Industria weighty works of interest such as last year’s “El Show del Gran Luciferio,” from Spain’s Caye Casas whose “The Coffee Table” was called by Stephen King “horrible and also horribly funny. Think the Coen Brothers’ darkest dream.”

Also included in the 2025 edition is the 6th Series Lab Fiction/Documentary and the 3rd edition of Sanfic ODS Lab and the Female Producers Lab.

“We believe that a solid audiovisual industry is built by public-selector policies which guarantee a diversity of voices and equitable access to the tools of development and international projection of our industry,” said Gabriela Sandoval, director of Sanfic Industry and founder of Sanfic.

“Sanfic Industria has been from its beginning a space of training, development and strategic articulation for Ibero-American audiovisual production,” she added, noting that “the incorporation of a Queer Incubator reenforces our commitment to a more inclusive and representative industry.”