Sitges Launches WomanInFan LatAm at Costa Rica Market
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- Monica Garcia, Sitges Film Festival director general, announced the launch of WomanInFan LatAm at the Costa Rica Media Market (July 14-15), a Latin American extension of the genre initiative WomanInFan that has grown the share of female genre directors at Sitges from 6% to roughly 30% over six years.
- Garcia screened a trailer for her documentary on women in genre filmmaking, featuring interviews with directors including Katharina Kubrick, who described the marginalization she suffered for being Stanley Kubrick's daughter and a woman.
- Pablo Guisa, CEO of Morbido, tied Spain and Latin America through a shared "Judeo-Christian imagination" — virgins, saints, demons, hell — that he called perfect fuel for genre cinema, citing Guillermo del Toro as part of that legacy.
- Garcia credited Argentina with setting the standard for Latin American genre cinema, pointing to the Blood Window program at Ventana Sur and Demián Rugna's "When Evil Lurks" becoming the first Latin American film to win Sitges' best feature award in 2023.
- Luis Javier Henaine, Mexican director of "Disappear Completely" — which Guisa called the best Mexican horror film in 20 years — argued comedy and horror both depend on authentic human emotion rather than genre mechanics.
- Garcia said the festival is "waiting for the next Issa López" and for Laura Casabé to return with new work, adding that "continuity is difficult for any filmmaker — and even more so for women."
Why it matters: Sitges is franchising a proven inclusion model to Latin America at a moment when the region — anchored by Argentina's Blood Window infrastructure and films like "When Evil Lurks" — has become the engine of Spanish-language genre cinema. The documented 6%-to-30% rise in female genre directors at Sitges over six years gives Latin American organizers a concrete benchmark, and the program's stated promise of continuity targets the exact gap — stalled second or third features — that most threatens women filmmakers' careers.
