Militant Third World Film Distribution in the United States, 1970-1980

In the second half of the 1960s, as the anti-Vietnam War movement gathered force, New Left activists also turned to militant filmmaking. After the formation of Newsreel collectives in 1967, New York Newsreel changed its name to Third World Newsreel in 1971 to reflect the influence of the “internal colony discourse,” referring to the oppressed people of color in the U.S. But TWN concentrated on filmmaking and distributing its own films. A proper distribution company formed to early in the 1970s to disseminate the stunning militant films produced in Latin America during those years. The Third World Newsreel Group soon changed its name to Tricontinental Film Center, based in New York and San Francisco, and distributed the films of Jorge Sanjinés, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Humberto Solás and many others as part of a commitment to contest repressive regimes throughout the hemisphere and challenge the blockade of films from Cuba. This explosion of cinematic activism in the U.S. peaked just at the time of the Montréal Conference on New Cinema in 1974. With the wave of political repression sweeping the region in the second half of the decade, and the shrinking of the non-theatrical market in the U.S. linked to technological changes in media production, the activism around the distribution of these films waned.