One of Argentina's first cinematographers, French-born Henri Corbicier, took Uruguayan film in a new direction when he produced The Peace of 1904, a documentary about Uruguay's recent political conflict and its resolution.

Socially aware, the film is reminiscent of Great Expectations and was made despite the repressive atmosphere that prevailed in Uruguay during President Gabriel Terra's règime.

Beset by censorship, Argentine film imports, and global instability, local filmmaking remained limited to documentaries, newsreels and lighthearted comedies and musicals.

Miguel Ángel Melino's ode to the Uruguayan independence saga, The Arrival of the Thirty-Three Easterners (1952) earned him plaudits and a long-term contract with the National Party for campaign film productions.

Mario Handler's Carlos: Portrait of a Montevideo Panhandler represented a local form of cinéma vérité that drew on Uruguayan film makers' tradition as documentarians.

In 1980, the DINARP opted to give director Eduardo Darino practically free rein over the production of Gurí, a gaucho tale based on Serafín García's homonymous novel.

Local video producers such as CEMA and Imágenes ushered in the new era with politically controversial titles such as Guillermo Casanova's The Dead, and Carlos Ameglio and Diego Arsuaga's The Last Vermicelli.

Other video production houses, such as Grupo Hacedor touched on social problems, as in the violent Fast Life (1992) and traditional screen filmmakers also made their presence felt.

But continuing difficulties led Beatriz Flores Silva to make The Almost-True Story of Pepita the Gunslinger, a drama based on a 1988 incident involving a middle-class lady in dire straits and her audacious assault on a number of Montevideo banks.

Despite these, setbacks, the year 1997 ended on a positive note for local film with Alvaro Buela's deceptively simple A Way to Dance and Diego Arsuaga's film-noir, Otario.

Uruguayan directors pursued increasingly varied subject matter from 1998, including Leonardo Ricagni's surreal The Chevrolet and Esteban Schroeder's mystery, The Vineyard.

Luis Nieto took an Ibsen-esque turn with The Memory of Blas Quadra (2000), and Pablo Rodríguez lived down his previous disappointment with Damned Cocaine (2001).

Brummell Pommerenck portrayed existential loneliness in Call for the Postman (2001), Luis Nieto returned to deal with a former extremist back from exile in The Southern Star (2002) and Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella gave an empathetic portrayal of youth in 25 Watts (2002); their dark comedy, Whisky (2003) earned the Un Certain Regard Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Likewise, local filmmakers used the same bucolic setting to make two Uruguay/Argentina co-productions: Diego Arsuaga's unyielding The Last Train (2002) and Guillermo Casanova's sentimental Seawards Journey (2003).