Reframing Banana Imagery

Central American Designation of Origin

Session 1. Reframing Banana Imagery. Central American Political Cinema from the 1970s and 1980s

Film and Video

Patricia Howell, Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman), 1982, film. Image Archive of the Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Centre from Costa Rica’s Ministry of Culture and Youth — Patricia Howell, *Dos veces mujer* (Two Times a Woman), 1982, film
Image Archive of the Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Centre from Costa Rica’s Ministry of Culture and Youth

Held on 18, 25 Jun 2026

Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.

Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.

Organised by

Museo Reina Sofía, the Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC) and the Museo Reina Sofía Foundation

Acknowledgements

The Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Centre (CCCA)

Accessible activity
This activity has two spaces reserved for people with reduced mobility

Agenda

jueves 18 jun 2026 a las 19:00

First Session

— With a presentation by Alonso Aguilar, the programme’s curator

jueves 25 jun 2026 a las 19:00

Second Session

— With an introduction and recital of Nicaraguan poetry from the 1970s and 1980s. Selection and reading by Tito Castillo Rivera

PROGRAMME

Ingo Niehaus. Costa Rica Banana Republic
Costa Rica, 1975, DCP, colour and black and white, sound, original version in Spanish, 16’. Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Centre

Ramiro Lacayo-Deshon. Bananeras (Banana Growers)
Nicaragua, 1982, DCP, colour and black and white, sound, original version in Spanish, 13’

Departamento de Cine. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation)
Honduras, 1978, DCP, colour, original version in Spanish, 22’

Patricia Howell. Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman)
Costa Rica, 1982, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Spanish, 42’. Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Centre

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Ingo Niehaus, Costa Rica Banana Republic, 1975, film

Ingo Niehaus, Costa Rica Banana Republic, 1975, película

Cinema Department, Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation), 1978, film

See image gallery

Tráiler Reframing Banana Imagery

Activity within the program...

Reframing Banana Imagery

Central American Political Cinema from the 1970s and 1980s

“Banana republic” is a pejorative term used to describe politically unstable countries that are reliant on an economy with a bedrock of one sole product and dominated by foreign interests and corrupt elites. The concept, which surfaced in the early twentieth century in Central America, refers to the power of US multinationals, such as the United Fruit Company, over governments, natural resources and economic structures from the region. This series, therefore, examines how Central American political cinema from the 1970s and 1980s appropriated this stigma as it reclaimed a unique space in narrations of emancipation and anti-colonisation.

The earliest celluloid recordings of Central America are of “exotic” beauty pageants, odes to the productivity of banana enclaves and the visual propaganda serving dominant military powers. The clichés of the servile day labourer loading up sacks with a smile, the impenetrable otherness of the tropical jungle and the condescendence towards “farmer simplicity” all come from outside images, from the external gaze.

Standing opposite memories fragmented by decades of violence and forgetting, this series sets forth a reencounter with an exceptional time of production in the 1970s and 1980s, when the region’s film-making sought to expand its visual history and became a tool of political and identity-based construction. Along with independent film-makers from inside and outside the region, different organisations, institutions and collectives looked to engage in direct dialogue with the singular nature of their immediate surroundings and with the ardent anti-imperialism sweeping through Central America: the Cinema Department in Honduras; its namesake in Costa Rica; INCINE in Nicaragua; the Experimental Group of University Film-makers in Panama; the Cinematography of Guatemala; and, in El Salvador, the Taller de los Vagos, Cero a la Izquierda and Sistema Radio Venceremos collectives.

The series comprises three programmes which trace an arc running from territorial bases and farming stories to the call to arms and waning insurgency. The first programme lays the groundwork of the spectres of agrarian exploitation and the forms of resistance that emerged from the rural environment. The second rises up to approach the body as a battlefield, where patriarchal and state violence are explored via dissident expressions in the formal and the political. The third programme culminates in an epic saga which crosses borders and registers to embody experiences of the armed struggle and the promise of revolution.

This filmic undertaking seeks to reactivate buried conversations on how these images engendered forms of organisation and collective desire that still resonate in present-day Central America. Rather than an archive-based archaeology, it seeks an active dialogue, where the grammars of the films move through the lyrical, the visceral, the didactic and the insurgent, and always with the intention of reframing official history from the margins.

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