Women and cinema in Ecuador: challenges to inclusion from a gender perspective

Abstract

The equal presence of women in art, as creators, is a complex and distant reality for most Latin American countries, and the case of Ecuador is not immune to this circumstance. From this perspective, the present proposal is articulated around the analysis of the feminine presence in the cinema, from two central approaches. On the one hand, the application of cultural policies to promote national production for a little more than a decade, and on the other, the limitations from the sociocultural construction of meaning, crossed by conceptions about gender, which limit the impact of those regulations in the inclusion of women as directors. In this sense, it is established as a premise the fact that the approval and implementation of legal standards from the public institutions do not mean an equitable access of men and women to the spaces of creation and distribution of their work. With this purpose, from the theoretical perspective of gender studies, a descriptive study is proposed that investigates not only the problem, but also the specific context in which it takes place. The analysis includes the cinematographic production from 2006 to 2016, decade that covers from the year of approval of the National Film Development Law, and a sufficient subsequent period to be able to take into account its long-term impact, understanding the creation and incidence of the norm as gradual processes of wide complexity.