Raindance Veterans Launch Casa Leo PR, Betting Latin America's Film Boom Needs a Native Press Voice

London-based Raindance Film Festival has long punched above its weight on the UK indie circuit, but two of its senior operators confirmed on 16 July 2026 that they are stepping away to start something smaller, sharper and explicitly bi-continental. David Martínez, the festival's executive director, and Jacky Orozco, its producer, have launched Casa Leo PR, a boutique publicity and strategy agency built around one premise: the Europe-Latin America festival corridor is a market, and nobody is staffing it properly.

The bet is unfashionable only because few press outfits have written it down. Film talent, sales agents and producer-reps now shuttle regularly between San Sebastián, Biarritz, Ventana Sur and Morelia, but the publicists handling that traffic are almost invariably London- or Los Angeles-based, billing in sterling or dollars and treating regional press as an afterthought. Casa Leo, by contrast, is structured from day one to handle European and Latin American clients in roughly equal measure, with Martínez in Madrid and Orozco in Mexico City.

A split the indie circuit has been waiting for

The PR business in independent cinema has consolidated quietly over the last decade. The dominant London and Los Angeles agencies still take the headline accounts at Cannes, Berlin and Toronto, but their fee structures and time zones make them ill-suited to a film whose festival life spans Biarritz in September, Morelia in October and Guadalajara in March. The result, by Martínez's own description in announcing the agency, was an under-served market that the boutique model can finally address. Casa Leo is positioning itself as the press outfit that lives in both time zones, with bilingual principals and a roster narrow enough to be hands-on.

That positioning matters because festival press is not interchangeable with general entertainment PR. A sales agent launching a Latin American co-production at the European Film Market needs German, French and Spanish-language trade coverage in the same week, with embargo lifts timed for local morning headlines. The traditional London shop typically outsources that work. Casa Leo, by virtue of its principals' geography, can keep it in-house.

What the principals actually bring

Martínez's role at Raindance has put him at the centre of the UK indie circuit's most pragmatic corner, overseeing operations at a festival that has historically championed first-time filmmakers and low-budget genre work. Orozco's producer credits inside Raindance gave her the production-side relationships that boutique PR agencies typically lack. Together, the pairing is unusual: most festival-launch PR shops are founded by either press people or producers, not by both. The agency name, Casa Leo, appears to gesture toward a cross-border identity rather than a single national market.

For European clients, the pitch is that Casa Leo can finally deliver Spanish-language press at a Latin American standard, plus regional European trade coverage at less than the typical London retainer. For Latin American clients, the reverse: an in-road to European trade and programme-selector networks that domestic agencies struggle to crack.

The structural bet underneath the launch

There is a deeper argument beneath the press release, and it is one this publication finds credible. The festival circuit has spent ten years talking about Latin America as the next frontier of independent cinema, but the supporting infrastructure has lagged. Sales agents, publicists, festival strategists and screenwriters' collectives have remained overwhelmingly Anglo or Iberian, with occasional Latin American hires added as auxiliaries. A shop founded explicitly bilingual and bi-continental is an attempt to invert that arrangement from the start rather than retrofitting it.

The risk is equally structural. Boutique film PR is a thin-margin, relationship-driven business, and a two-principal agency spanning two continents needs a steady flow of festival-titled projects to survive the months when the calendar goes quiet. Casa Leo will live or die on whether European producers view a Madrid-based Latin American contact as a competitive advantage, or as a polite filter to a London inbox.

What to watch next

The first proof point arrives with the autumn festival calendar. Biarritz's Nouvelles Images and Spain's San Sebastián run back-to-back in September; Ventana Sur follows in December. If Casa Leo has three or more client titles at those three events, the agency clears its initial test. If it is still leaning on Raindance alumni projects, the question of pipeline becomes uncomfortable.

The longer-term question is whether bigger London and Los Angeles shops respond by opening Latin American desks of their own, or by acquiring boutique entrants. The independent-film publicity market is small enough that three or four moves would reshape it. For now, Martínez and Orozco are betting that the corridor was always there, and only the agency was missing.

Monexus framed this as a market-structure story rather than a personnel move: the launch is newsworthy less for who is leaving Raindance than for what their absence and new venture say about how cross-continental indie-cinema publicity is actually organised.