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.
Canarian companies have rolled off that demand, also seen at more traditional TV players. Produced by Wakai, “FC Barcelona: Dreaming, Playing, Winning” has launched globally across ESPN and Disney+. “King Puma” has closed deals with NHK, Caracol Televisión, Asharq News and RTV Slovenia.
A closer look at key doc titles from the Canary Islands:
Insulae: Chronicle of Our History, Las Hormigas Negras/Televisión Canaria
Now in its second season on Canarias Play, a flagship cultural series exploring Canary Islands history through archival materials, expert testimony, and cinematic visual language. The project positions the archipelago — a crossroads between Europe, Africa, and the Americas — as a protagonist of Atlantic history rather than a peripheral footnote. Producer Luis Luque argues the series demonstrates that “local history can also be universal storytelling,” and with Season 2 consolidating its audience, the question turns to whether a project this culturally rooted can find the international broadcaster or streamer willing to bet on that proposition.
“FC Barcelona: Dreaming, Playing, Winning,” Wakai
Director Paula Fernández Crespo, a lead editor on Amazon Prime’s “Simeone: Live Game by Game,” secured exclusive access to FC Barcelona Femení during a defining cycle of dominance, building an intimate portrait that uses elite women’s soccer as a lens for wider questions of equality, visibility and empowerment. The film marked Wakai’s first deal with ESPN and went out globally across ESPN and Disney+, a breakthrough that reframes Wakai’s market positioning considerably. More than a sports doc, Fernández Crespo describes it as the story of “a cultural movement.” The Disney+ platform gives the title genuine long-tail reach.
“King Puma,” Boxmedia International Sales
Director Fernando Ureña and screenwriter Arturo Lezcano González reconstruct the extraordinary career of Hans Henningsen, the Canarian sports marketing visionary who engineered Pelé’s famous bootlace moment at the 1970 Mexico World Cup, a stunt that rewired the relationship between athletic celebrity and commercial branding forever. “He was a magnetic figure, Everybody in the soccer business know him, but he wasn’t famous outside it,” The film frames Henningsen as the central figure in the Adidas-Puma trade war and tracks his influence through Maradona and beyond, until Nike’s arrival reshapes the landscape. Broadcast deals already closed with NHK, Caracol Televisión, Asharq News and RTV Slovenia speak to the film’s ability to travel across radically different cultural markets.
Director César Armas takes his cameras to the Maldives, the Philippines and Colombia to document communities living on the front line of climate-driven coastal collapse — places where the boundary between land and ocean has already ceased to hold. The film moves between the world’s most densely populated artificial island, permanently flood-submerged streets in Bulacan, and bleaching coral reefs in the Indian Ocean, with the Canary Islands’ own coastal erosion providing a closing mirror. Currently in pre-production and without a sales agent, the project carries strong environmental timeliness and a genuinely global geographic canvas that should attract factual commissioners.
Goya-winning director David Baute shoots on Super 8 to follow 87-year-old Benigno, who still lives in the house of his birth, tending inherited seeds and his turtle Totó as illness and blindness close in. The film uses one man’s late life as an elegy for a disappearing Canarian way of being, its rituals, its rootedness, its relationship to the land. Co-written with María Abenia, the film world premieres at the Shanghai Film Festival, with a release scheduled for late 2026 or early 2027. “Through an intimate observational approach, the film explores memory, solitude and our relationship with the places and traditions that shape who we are,” Baute tells Variety.
Directed by Manoj Daswani and sold by Juan Manuel Bethencourt, Daswani’s doc profiles Sergio Rodríguez, the Tenerife-born point guard whose flair, vision and risk-taking helped define Spain’s golden basketball generation. Structured in four chapters, like a game’s quarters, it tracks Rodríguez from Tenerife to Real Madrid, five NBA seasons and national-team glory, mixing his own testimony, archive and voices of teammates, coaches, rivals and family.
John Hopewell contributed to this article.
