Sitges looks south: a Spanish genre festival plants a flag in Latin America

At the Costa Rica Media Market on 15 July 2026, Monica Garcia, director general of Spain's Sitges Film Festival, sat down with Pab, the chief executive of genre-specialist production and distribution company Morbido, to announce a Latin American offshoot of WomanInFan, the festival's long-running initiative for women working in genre cinema (Variety, 17 July 2026). The launch formalises a relationship Sitges has been building with the region for several editions, and signals that the festival, best known as Europe's flagship fantasy and horror event, now wants a structural presence in Spanish-language genre production rather than a one-off sidebar.

The move is small in budget terms and large in signalling. Sitges is using Costa Rica, not Mexico City or Buenos Aires, as its first Latin American anchor. The geography matters: Central America has been under-served by the major genre platforms that have proliferated in the Spanish-speaking world, and the country's relative stability has made San José a recurring site for market-style gatherings. By partnering with Morbido, which has spent a decade building a catalogue of Mexican and Latin American genre titles, Sitges is also choosing a counterparty with the regional distribution muscle to translate a workshop into finished films.

A festival exporting a format

WomanInFan (sometimes rendered in English as "Woman in Fan") is the Sitges-side umbrella for women working across fantasy, horror and science fiction, covering directors, screenwriters, producers and below-the-line crews. The Costa Rica launch is its first formal extension outside Spain. The pitch to the Latin American market is straightforward: the bottleneck for regional genre production is not ideas but pipeline, and a foreign festival brand can shorten that pipeline by attaching a European platform to projects at script stage.

Garcia's framing in the Variety interview was deliberately patient. Asked about the next generation of regional auteurs, she answered with a name, not a category: "We're waiting for the next Issa Lopez" (Variety, 17 July 2026). Lopez, the Mexican director behind Tigers Are Not Afraid and the 2017 revival of the Belzebuth franchise, has become the shorthand for a regional filmmaker who can carry a Spanish-language genre project into global distribution. Naming her publicly is a way of saying Sitges is hunting for the same exportable profile, not just curating a regional showcase.

The counter-current: who is the audience

The harder question, and the one the Latin American genre circuit has been arguing about for at least five years, is whether the primary audience is local or global. Brazilian and Mexican genre successes, from the Mariana Enriquez-adjacent horror boom out of Buenos Aires to a wave of Mexican folk-horror, have largely travelled by being re-positioned for North American and European genre audiences first. A workshop format that ties regional talent to a Spanish festival risks re-importing the same pipeline logic: develop locally, premiere at Sitges, sell to the same handful of European and US buyers.

That counter-read has its own evidence. Morbido, for its part, has spent years trying to crack the inverse problem, building local theatrical and streaming audiences for Spanish-language horror in Mexico City and other Mexican metropolitan areas before going to market. The pairing with Sitges, then, can be read two ways: as a sophisticated bet on local-audience-first production with a European platform bolted on for prestige, or as another iteration of the export-first model under a more inclusive banner. The Variety interview does not resolve the tension, and the festival has not yet published project-level terms for the Latin American WomanInFan cohort.

What Costa Rica buys Sitges

San José is a deliberate choice, and not only because Costa Rica is Spanish-speaking and politically stable. Central America, and Costa Rica in particular, has become a recurring host for film markets and co-production forums that want to position themselves as neutral ground between Mexico and the Southern Cone, and between the Latin American market and the Spanish-language US diaspora. By staging the launch at CRMM rather than at a Mexican or Argentine market, Sitges signals that it is courting a wider regional producer base, including the Central American and Caribbean filmmakers who are routinely under-represented in the major genre festivals.

There is also a brand logic. Sitges, a town of roughly 30,000 people on the Catalan coast that fills its hotels for ten days each October, lives or dies on its international brand. A Latin American offshoot of one of its marquee programmes is the kind of move a heritage festival makes when its domestic audience has matured: extend the format, keep the talent pipeline open, and collect premieres from a wider geography.

What to watch next

Three dates will tell readers whether this is a real institutional move or a market-cycle headline. First, whether the Latin American WomanInFan cohort is announced with named projects and financiers before Sitges' 2026 edition in October, or whether the Costa Rica session yields only an open call. Second, whether Morbido or another regional partner commits a first-look deal to the cohort, the way Mexican, Brazilian and Argentine producers typically anchor festival pipelines. Third, and most concretely, whether a film developed under the new banner premieres at Sitges 2027 or at a regional event first. A local premiere would be the strongest evidence that the Latin American side of the programme is being built to travel outward, not inward.

The question Garcia left hanging in the Variety interview, about the next regional filmmaker with a global profile, is also the question the initiative will be measured against. Latin American genre cinema has the audience; the work of the next eighteen months is whether it now has the institutional plumbing to match.

Desk note: Monexus treated the Costa Rica launch as an industry-infrastructure story rather than a celebrity-festival dispatch. The framing assumes Sitges' move is best read as pipeline politics, in the same family as European festivals extending into Africa and Southeast Asia, rather than as a one-off market appearance.