Tropical on Demand gives voice to the best new directors from
Argentina,
Mexico, Bolivia and elsewhere
At a time when we’re mostly cooped up inside, looking longingly out of the window at the first blush of spring, it’s fair to say a streaming service called Tropical on Demand pretty much has us at hello. Before you settle in for a marathon of beachy, pina colada-infused escapism, however, readjust your expectations a little. A small but enticing new service, Tropical on Demand is the VOD offshoot of Cinema Tropical, a leading distributor of independent Latin
American cinema in the US – happily made accessible to an international online audience.
Launched at the end of March, it’s one of a surfeit of enterprising “virtual cinemas” set up by arthouse distributors in response to the coronavirus shutdown: while many bigger films have opted to delay until cinemas reopen, others see the advantage of a captive at-home audience rapidly cycling through their viewing options and open to adventurous alternatives. At the glossy end of this market, you have something like Curzon Home Cinema: long prepared for such a crisis, even if they could never have known what that crisis would be, now serving its cinema-starved users with A-list new art films until relative normality resumes.