Alonso Ruizpalacios Calls for 'Trojan Horses' as Bogotá's BAM Opens Behind a Football Bump

When the opening-day masterclass at the Bogotá Audiovisual Market (BAM) finally got under way on 8 July 2026, the room had thinned. The previous hour had belonged to a very different sort of drama: Colombia's FIFA World Cup clash with Switzerland, which had gone to penalties and left the audience visibly deflated as the football overran the cinema schedule. By the time Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacros took the stage, the lecture hall carried the particular melancholy of a crowd that had lost the wrong match.

Ruizpalacios is no stranger to silver screens and stadium-size stages. 'The Kitchen,' his English-language debut, premiered to a divided press at the Berlinale in early 2026 and has since been positioned as one of the more ambitious Latin American crossover films of the year. The BAM appearance was billed as a director's masterclass, but the Mexican's remarks slid quickly into a political argument about what Latin American filmmakers should be smuggling past their own committees, funders and festival juries.

A Trojan horse, by other means

Ruizpalacros told the BAM audience that the region needs 'more Trojan horses,' Variety's coverage of the masterclass reported. The phrasing — equal parts allegory and recruitment pitch — was the director's way of saying that Latin American cinema has become too legible to the institutional readers who decide which projects get made. Films with recognisable markers of grievance, inequality and state violence travel easily through the festival economy; those same markers, he implied, have begun to predict which stories get approved and which get politely returned. The Trojan horse he wants built is a film whose outer surface is commercially familiar — genre, star, marketable premise — while the interior carries something the gatekeepers did not bargain for.

It is a familiar argument within independent Latin American film circles, where the conversation about co-production, soft funding from European broadcasters, and selective Netflix pickups has run hot for at least a decade. What gave the BAM version its edge was the venue: a market, not a festival, where producers and sales agents do most of the actual work of deciding which Latin American films make it into circulation. Ruizpalacios's target was not the audience but the procurement officers in the room.

An industry that reads itself closely

The Bogotá Audiovisual Market has, since its launch in 2015, positioned itself as the regional counterweight to Spain's San Sebastián and Brazil's RioContentMarket. Colombia's Production Law (Law 1556 of 2012 and its successors) and a recently expanded cash rebate have made the country a credible production hub for foreign shoots and the home base of a new generation of Colombian showrunners working on platforms including Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon. The market reflects that gravity — its industry attendance and its slate of project showcases now overlap materially with festival circuits that used to treat Latin America as a stopover rather than a base.

A director telling that audience it should hide its intentions is not a small statement. The Colombian audiovisual sector has just spent several years negotiating audiovisual content quotas, advertising restrictions and tax-incentive reforms that depend, for their political legitimacy, on producing work that the state can defend as both culturally valuable and commercially viable. Ruizpalacros's call for stealth work sits in productive tension with that project. It is also a line that any Latin American director currently packaging a project for partial public financing must speak to carefully, because the script that gets through the committee is rarely the script that ends up on screen.

The political register of 'The Kitchen'

'The Kitchen' itself gives Ruizpalacros some standing in this argument. The film, set in a London housing estate and shot largely in the UK, follows two characters whose lives intersect in and around a community kitchen. Its politics are not the politics of obvious indigenous or state-violence material; they are the politics of migration, labour and the rationing of public space, made legible through genre and character rather than through the iconography of grievance. Critics at the Berlinale press conference and in subsequent coverage noted that the film functions as a deliberate exercise in crossing over without diluting — a working Trojan horse, in the terms the director set out at BAM.

That positioning is also why his BAM remarks were heard as more than a provocation. 'The Kitchen' is in active distribution conversations with both European and Latin American buyers; its critical reception, mixed at the premiere, has firmed up as word-of-mouth has built. If the film lands commercially, the masterclass retroactively becomes a manifesto. If it does not, the masterclass becomes an early statement of intent from a director with the credits to back it.

What stays contested

Two things remain unsettled. First, the BAM masterclass transcript, as reported by Variety, records the Trojan-horse line but not the lengthier remarks around it; what Ruizpalacros said about Colombian-specific financing structures, or about his own past projects — 'Museo' (2018), 'Güeros' (2014) and the episodes he has directed for television — has to be inferred from his known body of work. Second, the late crowd did not, on the available reporting, push back in print. The friction between his argument and the procurement economy of markets like BAM is, by construction, harder to surface when the audience has drifted off to console itself about a football result.

The market continues until the end of the week. Ruizpalacros's call for Trojan horses will be tested, as such calls always are in the audiovisual sector, not in the lecture hall but in the financing memos drafted between now and the next fiscal year.

This publication's coverage of BAM leans on Variety's dispatch from the masterclass, with background on Colombian audiovisual policy drawn from the market's own programme materials; the political register of Ruizpalacros's remarks is treated as a director's argument, not as an industry consensus.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogot%C3%A1_Audiovisual_Market