Chile
Chile is a small country whose cinema reaches a long way. Sebastián Lelio's Una mujer fantástica won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2018; Pablo Larraín's production company Fábula has become a genuine bridge between Santiago and Hollywood, behind work from No to Jackie to Spencer; and the country sustains one of the most internationally respected documentary traditions in the Americas, from Patricio Guzmán's decades of work on memory and dictatorship to Maite Alberdi's Oscar-nominated The Eternal Memory. For a country of barely twenty million people, that is a remarkable concentration of international standing. The co-production agreement Canada signed with Chile in 1994 is an older instrument — and it connects to both a stable, favourable funding environment and an incentive that is built, almost by design, for treaty co-production.
The 1994 agreement is an older instrument and carries no automatic incentive of its own — Chilean and Canadian benefits each flow from domestic programs. On the Canadian side, CPTC and provincial credits apply to eligible Canadian expenditure. The Chilean draw is the IFI Audiovisual cash rebate, relaunched in 2024 and given roughly double its budget for 2025; because it requires the foreign producer to partner with a local producer, it fits a treaty co-production almost perfectly. Confirm the current call windows and terms with CORFO and the Ministry of Cultures before budgeting. Current as of June 2026.
Chile's production sector is compact, professional, and well connected internationally. Santiago holds most of the crew and facilities, and the country's varied geography — desert, coast, Andes, the far south — has long made it attractive for location work. Production companies such as Fábula (the Larraín brothers), Quijote Films, and Forastero carry strong festival and international co-production track records, and the documentary scene in particular operates at a level far above what the country's size would suggest.
What distinguishes this corridor is the alignment between Chile's incentive and the treaty itself. The IFI Audiovisual rebate returns 30% of qualified Chilean spend — and 40% for productions shot entirely outside the Santiago metropolitan region — capped at roughly US$3 million, with a minimum local spend of about US$2 million. Crucially, it requires the international producer to sign a co-production agreement with a Chilean producer, which is precisely the relationship the treaty exists to formalize. The program was relaunched in 2024 and its 2025 budget was roughly doubled, a signal of a stable and deliberately outward-facing policy environment. Alongside it, the Fondo Audiovisual and the Fondo CNTV provide domestic film and television support.
The festival calendar centres on FICValdivia, the country's most prestigious festival, with a strong arthouse and Latin American focus, and SANFIC in Santiago, which runs a dedicated industry section (SANFIC Industria) where co-production conversations happen. Chilean projects also circulate through Ventana Sur in Buenos Aires and the international festival circuit.
Why this corridor
Chile is unusually co-production-ready, for a structural reason: its headline incentive is built around partnering with a local producer, which is exactly what a treaty co-production is. A Canadian producer who brings a Chilean partner into a project is not working around the rebate — they are doing the thing the rebate rewards. With the IFI budget recently doubled and the broader environment stable and favourable, the financing logic here is clear and the policy direction supportive.
There is a detail Canadian producers will recognize immediately. Chile pays its richest rebate — 40% rather than 30% — for productions that shoot entirely outside metropolitan Santiago. Ontario does the same thing in reverse: the Ontario Film and Television Tax Credit adds a ten-point regional bonus, lifting the rate on Ontario labour from 35% to 45%, for productions shot outside the Greater Toronto Area. Both systems reward decentralization, so a Canada-Chile co-production that shoots regionally on both ends can optimize both incentives at once — a structuring insight that turns two separate regional policies into a single coherent plan.
Documentary is an especially natural fit, given Chile's extraordinary non-fiction tradition and the modest budgets at which a first co-production can be built. Rubedo is looking for Chilean producers and researchers with international experience, and for Canadian producers drawn to a corridor where the incentive design and the treaty point in the same direction.
Where to start
If you're a researcher, student, or filmmaker interested in this corridor, here's where to begin.
Start here
CORFO (corfo.cl) administers the IFI Audiovisual rebate, and the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage oversees the Fondo Audiovisual and treaty co-production on the Chilean side; Telefilm Canada administers the treaty on the Canadian side. Because the IFI program runs on periodic calls, confirm the current window and terms with CORFO before planning around it.
Industry events
FICValdivia is the country's most prestigious festival and the best room for understanding Chilean auteur and documentary cinema; SANFIC in Santiago runs SANFIC Industria, a dedicated co-production and project-market section. Both are accessible entry points for meeting Chilean producers, and Ventana Sur in Buenos Aires is the regional market where Chilean projects also circulate.
A real Canadian-side connection
Chile is the rare corridor in this region with a coherent, identity-strong community in Canada. After the 1973 coup, Canada took in a significant wave of Chilean political exiles — a community that settled heavily in Montreal and has kept its national identity unusually intact across the decades. That community connects with real specificity to Chilean cinema's central preoccupation: memory, dictatorship, and the work of remembering. For a Canadian documentary producer, it is both a cultural resource and a natural starting point. More broadly, AluCine in Toronto and VLAFF in Vancouver remain accessible points of contact with Latin American filmmaking from within Canada.
Cultural signal
Una mujer fantástica (Sebastián Lelio, 2017) — winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — is the clearest demonstration of how far contemporary Chilean cinema travels while remaining rooted in its own social reality. Paired with the country's documentary tradition, it is the kind of serious, internationally resonant work this corridor is built to support.If you're a Chilean filmmaker, producer, or documentary professional interested in developing this corridor — or a Canadian producer curious about what a first Canada-Chile structure could look like — we'd like to hear from you.
contact@rubedo.ca