If the Canary Islands’ audiovisual sector is increasingly pitching itself as both rooted and exportable, a handful of new and recent titles suggest why. Across cultural history, elite sport, climate emergency and intimate observational portraiture, local companies are shaping projects that start from Canarian experience and reach out from there.
At the heritage end stands “Insulae: Chronicle of Our History,” Las Hormigas Negras’ flagship series for Televisión Canaria, now in its second season on Canarias Play. Elsewhere, César Armas’ “Fragile Islands,” from Videoreport Canarias, looks set to push Canarian factual production onto a global climate canvas, moving from the Maldives to the Philippines and Colombia before returning to the islands’ own eroding coasts. David Baute’s “Benigno,” from Tinglado Film, travels in the opposite direction: inward, towards one ageing man.
What these producers share is a conviction that the Canaries’ historical position — as a staging post for conquest, migration and ecological transformation — generates stories with the kind of cross-cultural resonance that buyers in Japan, West Asia and Latin America will recognize.
Elsewhere, Canarian docs reflect a broader market trend. Global streaming services invested nothing in in live sports rights in 2017, but $9.5 billion by 2025, according to Ampere Analysis. A growing investment of such an order requires companion programming to promote it. Non-live sports programming licensing surged from nearly 5,000 hours in second quarter 2022 to 12,000 hours in the last quarter of 2025.
