Dozens of films, television shows and music videos have been filmed and produced in America.

In the past 10 years though, Ecuador has come a long way in creating the necessary infrastructure to produce a major production such as a feature film from Hollywood to smaller productions from independents.

On this page, we list the most noted movies either totally produced in Ecuador or with a significant amount of locations in Ecuador from the last 10 years.

1. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

Directed by Peter Weir

Three-time Academy Award® directing nominee Peter Weir and Oscar® winner Russell Crowe join forces to create an epic, emotional adventure: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Based on author Patrick O’Brian’s series of Aubrey/Maturin novels, the movie is set during the Napoleonic Wars. Crowe is Captain “Lucky” Jack Aubrey, renowned as a fighting captain in the British Navy, and Paul Bettany is – doctor Stephen Maturin. Their ship, the H.M.S. Surprise, is suddenly attacked by a superior enemy. With the Surprise badly damaged and much of his crew injured, Aubrey is torn between duty and friendship as he pursues a high-stakes chase across two oceans, to intercept and capture his foe – a mission that can make his reputation – or destroy Lucky Jack and his crew.

In the course of the characters’ epic journey, the movie travels the world – from the coast of Brazil to the storm-tossed waters of Cape Horn, south through ice and snow, to the far side of the world, to the remote shores of The Galapagos Islands (becoming the first feature film ever to film there).

2. Maria Full of Grace (2003)

Directed by Joshua Marston

What constitutes a life of grace? Is it moral piety or exercising goodwill? Or does it spring from acting from one’s heart and desires? Joshua Marston’s auspicious debut feature, Maria Full of Grace, addresses these questions with inspired honesty and clarity.

Spirited and rebellious Maria Alvarez lives with three generations of her family in a cramped concrete house in a rural town north of Bogotá. She works alongside her neighbors at a hazardous, mind-numbing job stripping thorns from flowers on a rose plantation. Because Maria’s paycheck supports the family, she is stuck. But her passion to break out of her limited world drives her to push at its boundaries. When she meets Franklin, a stylish young man, he piques her interest with talk of a cool job that involves travel. However, when Franklin says the word “mule,” Maria realizes immediately what he means: swallowing dozens of thumb-sized rubber pellets full of heroin and transporting them to the United States.

3. Cara o Cruz (2003)

Directed by Camilo Luzuriaga

After twenty-five years of total separation from her family, Virginia returns to Quito, her birthplace, to be reunited with her widowed father and her fraternal twin sister, Manuela, who lives in the old paternal home with her husband and two sons.

Virginia visits her father, who is vegetating in a home for the aged. The impossibility of making contact with him unleashes in her the wild abandon typical of the long series of troubled love affairs that have been a part of her life in New York.

Manuela finds herself suddenly overwhelmed by the frenetic emotional life of her sister and becomes the confidante of her flings. Manuela is no total innocent herself, since though she tries to hide it from her prying sister, she is carrying on a secret platonic affair with a man who writes her passionate erotic-existential letters.

Manuela’s marriage founders because of sexual apathy and the constant suspicions Virginia kindles in Manuela regarding her husband’s fidelity. Lorenzo abandons the home. The twins’ father dies. At his funeral, Virginia rails against her dead father for his unlovingness and the distance he imposed on her when he uprooted her and sent her abroad at the age of eight.

4. Dancer Upstairs, The (2002)

Directed by John Malkovich

Investigator Augustin Rejas is attempting to find the mysterious Ezequiel, the leader of a revolution being fermented largely by the indigenous people of an unnamed Latin American nation, a scene that Rejas left behind to pursue worldly ambitions. But now he is a man caught in a war and his choice to become policeman wears on him. So when he meets and is drawn to the teacher of his daughter’s ballet class, Yolanda, it’s a solace to the emptiness of his marriage and his frustration in the search for Ezequiel.

5. Titán en el ring, Un (2002)

Directed by Viviana Cordero

Life is peaceful in this small village in the Andean Mountains of Ecuador. The villagers look forward to the wrestling matches held at the village tent coliseum every Saturday. A young priest, Father David, arrives in town and is greeted with skepticism by the adults but the children are drawn to him, including Martin who dreams of becoming a masked wrestling champion. But a wrestler named Argonaut dominates the ring. The village favorite, La Bestia Loca, challenges him and the night of the fight brings the village to its edge; the shocking conclusion will change everyone forever.

6. Proof of Life (2000)

Directed by Taylor Hackford

While constructing a dam in Tecala, a country located in the Andes, American chief engineer Peter Bowman (David Morse) is captured by anti-government forces during a raid on the capital city. When the rebels learn his identity they demand $3 million for his safe return. Peter’s Houston-based employer, however, is on the verge of bankruptcy and has cancelled the kidnapping insurance policy and they cannot provide the money for his ransom.

Abandoned by the company, Peter’s wife, Alice (Meg Ryan), must deal with it on her own. She retains the services of professional hostage negotiator Terry Thorne (Russell Crowe), an Australian-born SAS veteran who over the past nine years has handled numerous high profile kidnappings, using every means at his disposal.

After an encouraging start, the negotiations deteriorate into a lengthy haggling session. During these discussions, Peter is moved from one remote guerilla camp high in the Andes down to another camp in the Amazonian jungle, suffering the most hellish physical and mental hardships. By rediscovering his love for Alice, and focusing on that positive image, he sustains his will to survive.

Meanwhile, the emotional stress of the kidnapping has taken its toll on Alice, magnifying the uneasiness that existed in their marriage before the abduction. Further complicating matters is Alice’s guilty realization of a growing fondness for Terry, her protector and her husband’s potential savior. Terry intuitively reciprocates and becomes frustrated and conflicted by his decidedly unprofessional feelings for her.

When they reach a breakdown in the negotiations for her husband’s freedom, Terry devises a daring yet desperate plan with the help of a fellow negotiator Dino (David Caruso) and a trio of highly trained mercenaries, to mount a bold rescue operation.

7. Galapagos – IMAX (1999)

Directed by David Clark (III), Al Giddings

Descend 3,000 feet to an area of the ocean floor never before seen by humankind. The mission: collect rare and unusual species for study at the Smithsonian and elsewhere–all part of a real-life exploration that will discover what is believed to be more than a dozen new species of marine life.

Shot on the famed archipelago and in its surrounding waters, Galapagos follows marine biologist Dr. Carole Baldwin as she makes her initial venture into that world first chronicled for science 160 years earlier by Charles Darwin. The tools for Baldwin’s team are far different from anything Darwin used, yet one thing is unchanged. The Galapagos Islands remain a stunningly abundant laboratory for exploration.

8. Ratas, ratones, rateros (1999)

Directed by Sebastian Cordero

Salvador, a young and naive petty thief, is shaken by the arrival of his cousin Angel, an ex-con in search of easy money and a hideout. Salvador gets wrapped in his cousin’s twisted dealings in an attempt to escape from his suffocating family. Instead, he ends up dragging virtually everyone he knows into his web of crime. By destroying the few things that made sense in his life, Salvador seals his fate and relegates himself to an existence defined by corruption. In the first film to be made in Ecuador in the last five years, RATA, RATONES, RATEROS tells the all-to-true story of innocence lost to rampant delinquency in Latin-America.

9. Entre Marx y una mujer desnuda (1995)

Directed by Camilo Luzuriaga

The center of the film is “the Author”, as the character is known in the movie, because what the audience sees is the result of his effort in writing a book about himself, his friends, his platonic love for Rosana, and their activism in a left wing party during the sixties in Ecuador.

The Author is surrounded by a series of different and sometimes absurd characters, and it never becomes fully transparent whether his characters are “real” or whether the author has merely invented them. Galo Gálvez, for example, the charismatic Party activist who maintains a passionate relationship with Margaramaría, lives confined to a wheelchair. But luckily there is always Falcon, his faithful friend and servant, who has carried him on his back since his childhood whenever it has been necessary.

The film interweaves realist sequences with sensuous dream sequences and bizarre episodes, until the Author is overwhelmed by his intense and emotional surroundings and has to admit, during a confidential chat with Karl Marx, that he is slightly confused and unable to tell “fact from fiction”.

In the end, he surely won’t remain the only one to have this experience, because for Director Camilo Luzuriaga confusion, and not certainty, was the main characteristic of those years when Ecuadorian intellectuals believed that revolution was around the corner.

10. Clear and Present Danger (1994)

Directed by Phillip Noyce

Harrison Ford returns as intrepid CIA agent Jack Ryan. When his mentor, Admiral Greer (Jones), becomes gravely ill, Ryan is appointed acting CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence. His first assignment: investigate the murder of one of the President’s friends, a prominent U.S. businessman with secret ties to Colombian drug cartels. Unbeknownst to Ryan, the CIA has already dispatched a deadly field operative (Dafoe) to lead a paramilitary force against the Colombian drug lords. Caught in the crossfire, Ryan takes matters into his own hands, risking his career and life for the only cause he still believes in — the truth.