Despite challenges to the prevailing hegemonic ideology of the tico espoused by authors through the soft power of literature in the 1970s, it is clear that at the turn of the twenty-first century this dominant rhetoric remained largely unchanged. What has unfolded in this new millennium in Costa Rica is mirrored in countries across the world: the rise of digital technologies and the subsequent globalization of knowledge has mobilized the powers of protest, breaking down physical borders in the digital world. As noted in Chapter 1, these new technologies have brought about the first changes – both official (government legislation) and unofficial (the mobilization of large parts of society) – to tico identity. While literature, of course, is still written in Costa Rica, counterhegemonic productions are no longer the preserve of the written word, and the digital revolution of the twenty-first century has created an unprecedented cinematic boom in Costa Rica. This chapter considers the ways in which this visual and narrative medium has been used to destabilize tiquicidad and the ways in which the centre and the ‘Other’ are presented in this period. Indeed, it will be seen that although national norms still stand, fresh challenges are brought up by national films, with marginalized stories brought to the fore for the audience's consideration. Interestingly, a nuanced approach to discrimination and marginalization – that in some cases focuses on the intersectionality of dual discrimination – replaces the more rigid identity politics that was the stance of the protest authors of the 1970s, and a broader view of society can be seen in twenty-first-century Costa Rican film.

To say Costa Rican cinema has undergone a transformation in the new century is an understatement: in the whole of the twentieth century, nine feature-length, fiction films were made in the country; between the years 2000 and 2016, 36 such productions were released. This increase is staggering. While Hart suggests (2015, 8) this radical change is a global phenomenon, it has certainly affected the cinema of small nations more than the strong cinema industries, such as Hollywood or Bollywood. Primarily, the turn towards digital has meant that filming can be low-cost. For a few hundred dollars, anyone can pick up a high-resolution camera which can be used to make full-length films.