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A Lima filmmaker with 25 festival awards behind his shorts explains why one of the world’s fastest-growing screen markets still cannot train its own storytellers, and what a school without tuition changes.
In 2025, downloads of the top 20 short-drama apps across Latin America increased by roughly 402% year-on-year, according to a 2026 report from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, continuing a surge that began the year before. Over the same period, the region’s total streaming market revenue grew 9.1% between 2024 and 2025, more than triple the rate of the United States, according to Omdia. Latin America has become one of the fastest-growing audiovisual markets in the world. The infrastructure to train the people who will fill it with stories has not kept pace.
Cristian García Zelada has been working at that gap’s front edge for nearly a decade. The Lima-based filmmaker founded BienAventurados Films in 2018, writing and directing more than 15 short films that have accumulated 25 awards and 84 official festival selections internationally, among them Pieces of Me, named Best Drama at the International Hollywood Short Film Festival in 2025, and Our Island, awarded Best Disability Film at the Power24 International Film Festival in South Africa. By March 2026, he was sitting on the jury of that same Hollywood festival. Earlier that year, he had founded Cinema Libertá, the first nonprofit free film school in Peru, and started building the training pipeline his industry never built for him.
Access Before Craft
Streaming platforms have been looking increasingly to Latin America for new storytelling voices, yet the pipeline that would make it possible to answer that demand barely exists. In most of the region, formal film education is concentrated in a handful of expensive private institutions in a handful of major cities, priced and placed beyond the reach of the people the streaming boom most needs to find.
“The barriers are not about talent,” says Cristian García Zelada, founder of Cinema Libertá. “They are about access. For most aspiring filmmakers in Latin America, a realistic path to professional training simply does not exist. Cinema Libertá exists because that is a problem with a practical solution.”
Access is only part of it. Even where formal training exists, it tends to concentrate on craft, the mechanics of directing and editing, while the industry itself remains opaque to students until long after graduation. Distribution, festival strategy, co-production, and professional networks are treated as secondary, if film schools address them at all. For a filmmaker in an emerging market, trying to build a career without that knowledge is a separate difficulty stacked on top of the first one.
Direct Lines to the Industry
Cinema Libertá operates as a free educational school: conferences, workshops, courses, and open online discussions across the core disciplines, from directing and screenwriting to cinematography, editing, and distribution. The school is built around direct access to working professionals, connecting students with people already inside the industry. Since launching in January 2026, it has drawn more than 3,000 registrants, with over 1,250 actively participating in its sessions and workshops. Those numbers point to the scale of demand that was waiting before the school opened its doors.
What no course catalog can offer is proximity to people already working at the level the students are trying to reach. Among the professionals García Zelada has brought into the school is Timothy Good, the Emmy-winning editor of HBO’s The Last of Us.
“Bring someone like Tim Good into a session with a young filmmaker in Lima who cannot afford a paid filmmaking class, and a real path into the industry opens for that student,” García Zelada says.
His Own Best Argument
García Zelada did not arrive at film education through an institution. He built BienAventurados Films across eight years of independent production, starting with a debut short, One-to-One, that earned 13 awards on the international circuit; his work has since screened in venues as far apart as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood and the 2024 conference of WIPO, the UN’s intellectual property agency. The company has broken ground at home along the way, producing the first Peruvian short film starring an actor with intellectual disabilities and marking its release with a festival of performances by artists with intellectual disabilities on World Down Syndrome Day in 2019.
In April 2020, García Zelada delivered a talk at INDECOPI, Peru’s national competition and intellectual property institute, on filmmaking under quarantine; the subject was Claustrophobia, a short he assembled from footage that 50 Peruvian actors each shot from home, produced through improvised remote collaboration before any formal framework for it existed. He later completed programs in screenwriting and film directing at UCLA between 2022 and 2024, formalizing training he had largely been building on his own.
“I am not convinced that the struggle of finding my path to filmmaking education independently made me a better filmmaker,” he says. “If Cinema Libertá means the next generation gets to spend that energy making films instead of searching for ways in, then it is doing what it is supposed to do.”
For García Zelada, the question of who gets trained is inseparable from the question of what gets made. Most of his films circle faith, human suffering, and the question of freedom; stories he makes, he has said, to amplify voices that rarely find an audience. The filmmakers trained at Cinema Libertá have the potential to bring their own specific, Latin American stories to a global industry that has historically preferred to imagine those stories for itself.
The streaming boom has created sustained demand for stories from parts of the world the industry has historically undertrained, and Cinema Libertá is one early response. García Zelada is currently developing his first feature film, planned as a co-production between BienAventurados Films and American production companies. The filmmakers his school is training today may be among the collaborators on the projects that follow.
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