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Bio: Born and raised in Barcelona, Spain, Rosa Bosch first started a career in film distribution and production in Los Angeles when she became involved with the LA FilmFest in 1982. She continued in London where, starting in 1987, she served as Deputy Director of Programming at the National Film Theatre (now BFI Southbank) for ten years and as Deputy Director General of the London International Film Festival (LFF) for eight years. In 1998, she co-founded the production and sales company Tequila Gang with Guillermo del Toro, Laura Esquivel, Bertha Navarro and Alejandra Moreno Toscano. During her London years, she managed international distribution for HBO Films and worked with Wim Wenders’ Road Movies production company. She has served many years on the Film Committee of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and since 2018, is part of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). Throughout her career, she has supported and promoted filmmakers, musicians and artists from diverse backgrounds, and since 2018, continues to do as a consultant in international production and sales strategy from her base in Madrid, Spain, where this zoom interview took place.

Anne Crémieux: It is great to finally speak with you about your career as a film producer. Can we begin by asking how you first started in the film industry?

Rosa Bosch: I started by accident, like many people of my generation, because the opportunities for formal education in film were very limited. We did not have access to either cultural studies, cultural administration or festival organization as part of our academic curriculum. I think of myself as a cultural promoter, entrepreneur and administrator. I started in L.A. at what was then called Filmex and became the AFI FilmFest, thanks to my ability to communicate in a number of languages. I did have, I suppose, a considerable knowledge of international cinema. I was an avid cinema-goer in Barcelona where I was born. I had a love for, and knowledge of, cinema but no academic qualifications; it just didn’t exist. Most of the people I looked up to at the time came from other careers. When I started, the director of the Venice Film Festival was a chemistry major!

Anne Crémieux: And what did you study?

Rosa Bosch: I left the university after one year of chemistry, as a matter of fact. I went to language schools and did some summer schools, but otherwise, I am entirely self-taught. I was given an honorary degree from Warwick University when I was in my fifties. Very early in my career, when I was in my twenties, I benefited from mentorship. There were four key people for me, including two very brilliant women who helped me acquire knowledge and experience: Maria Luisa Bemberg and Sheila Whitaker. I continued to worked with them for twenty years. Maria Luisa Bemberg was a very well-known Argentinian filmmaker, who directed her first feature in her fifties and went on to make half a dozen very well-known films throughout the 1990s, including I Don’t Want To Talk About It (1993) with Marcello Mastroiani, and Camila (1985), which was nominated for the Oscars. She was a very prominent pioneer.

Anne Crémieux: Who were the two men?

Rosa Bosch: Manolo (Manuel Pérez Estremera), who also passed away, was a very well-known Spanish festival producer, cultural politician and a specialist of Latin American culture. He directed Spanish television and the Spanish Film Institute, as well as the San Sebastian Film Festival. I learned a lot from him. The fourth person would be Guglielmo Biraghi, who was the director of the Venice Film Festival. Other people helped me but those would be the key four people, to different degrees.  I learned a lot from them.

Anne Crémieux: How did you start working with festivals?

Rosa Bosch: I started as a volunteer in the early 1980s, like most people in American festivals. I was briefly married to an American man. I was living in L.A. and our next-door neighbor was working in a festival. I did lots of jobs: hospitality assistant, transport, and eventually programming. Because I’m Spanish, I had an interest in Latin American culture. I had the opportunity to attend the Havana Film Festival because Americans couldn’t easily go and I had a Spanish passport. This was the beginning of the transition from celluloid to video and the Betamax vs. VHS war—films weren’t circulating as much. The Havana Film Festival was the largest on the continent: you could watch ten films a day that you couldn’t find anywhere else; universities and cinémathèques simply didn’t have 35mm prints of those films. This would have been in 1982-1983, and that’s how I quickly built a thorough knowledge of the history of Latin American cinema.

David Roche: How did you go from working in festivals to production?

Rosa Bosch: When I first went to Havana, I witnessed a change in Latin America cinema, from the political 1970s Third Cinema to the New Wave that yielded Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo Del Toro, Iñárritu, Reygadas, Lucrecia Martel. After that first trip to Cuba, I became a regular of the Havana Film Festival and started curating for the LA Fest. I curated the first Latin American film festival in L.A. with twelve films, and the first Latin American feminist film festival in 1986 or 1987. This was followed by the first women’s film festival in Mexico City. In Havana I had met the director of the London Film festival, where Tim Cole and I would end up working together. And because the director very much had an eye on the New Wave of Latin American filmmakers, she started asking me to curate for the BFI South Bank in London, which is the national cinematheque, with a more academic side to it. The relationship got stronger, and I ended up being Deputy director of the London Film Festival and the Cinemathèque for about twelve years. Among other things, I set up retrospectives of Mexico, Argentina and the first comprehensive retrospective of Latin American women filmmakers from silent cinema to today.

Anne Cremieux: What made you leave London?

Rosa Bosch: Brexit. I didn’t want my last ten years in this profession to be under Brexit. I’m quite a free individual; I can just pack and go. That’s why you can’t put me in a box. I worked three years on the committee of the San Sebastian Film Festival, also curating international cinema. I ran the campaign for Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here [2024] for the Oscars. This year I worked for Apple and Neon. I did some Oscar work for the short film Two People Exchanging Saliva (Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, 2025)  that won the short fiction Oscar.

Anne Cremieux: How did you first get involved withBuena Vista Social Club (Wim Wenders, 1999)?

Rosa Bosch: It came along by sheer coincidence. TheBuena Vista Social Club album, was produced by a London-based company. They asked around for someone who knew Cuba and found me by tam-tam. At the time, I had started working for Wim Wenders’s very active European coproduction company, Road Movies [established in 1976], as they were opening their London office. Apart from the Paris, Texas (1984) connection between composer Ry Cooder and Wim Wenders, the film came out of a series of coincidences.

Anne Crémieux: All this time, when you were curating the London Film Festival and San Sebastian, and you mentioned the first Latin American film retrospective, did you have in mind women filmmakers? Did you feel that cinema was still very much dominated by men, when it came to the filmmakers who got programmed?

Rosa Bosch: As in literature and music, the history of women artists has been less promoted than that of men. It’s not an opinion but a reality.

Anne Crémieux: Did you have to fight to promote women?

Rosa Bosch: I don’t think confrontation works. It was always my goal to bring any kind of filmmaking to the same level of availability, knowledge and critical scrutiny, whether it’s Tarkovsky or Varda, fiction or experimental, men and women, trans, Black, white, Asian. That’s my philosophy.

Anne Crémieux: And you never had to fight for that?

Rosa Bosch: Of course I had to! [laughs]

David Roche: How?

Rosa Bosch: Sheila Whitaker and I were the first women director and deputy director at the London Film Festival. Every woman of our generation—and gay men, or anyone unusual in any way whether you are straight, white, Latin, have an accent—you have to be better; you have to work harder; you have less opportunities. I’ve been privileged; I’ve had a lot of opportunities. I can’t complain. Maybe I’ve made those opportunities happen but the historical imbalance is undeniable. We’ve had to wait six hundred years for Hildegard von Bingen to be accepted as the savant that she was. We would not be where we are if there had not been a very clear imbalance in literature, music and filmmaking—all dominated by white men. For Africans, gays, Asians, the extent of the cultural imbalance is staggering.

Anne Crémieux: Our research project is documenting the imbalance for women, but you’re right to say it should be compared to other minorities.

Rosa Bosch: The word “minorities” is incorrect, though, strictly speaking. And it’s not specific to cinema either. For instance, if you look at the Latin American literature boom—Gabriel Garcia Márquez, magical realism and all that—because it was such a commercial success, no one ever called it minority literature.

David Roche: True.

Anne Crémieux: Do you have anecdotes or stories of when you had to fight for filmmakers that you believed in?

Rosa Bosch: Yes, plenty. But if you’re asking if I ever suffered legal discrimination, no, I haven’t. The gay and lesbian festival in London was a political fight to push through. It was the beginning of the queer movement. At the London Film Festival, Sheila was director and I was deputy director, so we had a certain amount of power as to programming choices. Had I tried to have any old institution host a Maria Luisa Bemberg retrospective, I might have faced rejection because she was an Argentinian woman, but Sheila and I were in the position of power. I’ve been privileged that way. Even in L.A. when I started, people were very open to the New Wave of Latin American cinema. I wouldn’t say that I’ve suffered any kind of extra stress in cinema for being a woman or for being gay than I have in regular life. I haven’t been treated any differently in my professional life as in my daily life.

Anne Crémieux: The #MeToo movement came out of the film industry.

Rosa Bosch: #MeToo might have detonated out of the film world but it quickly expanded to literature, music, politics and every aspect. It probably started in the film world for one simple reason: there was a character who was bigger, more glamorous and prominent than any of the others, and this was Harvey Weinstein. The film industry had a bigger dragon. Eventually, four courageous women said “Enough!” It could have happened in literature or theatre or music.

Anne Crémieux: Do you see any differences from one country to another when it comes to the place of women in the entertainment industry?

Rosa Bosch: Do I see a difference between the countries I travel to and have worked in? Today, not so much.

David Roche: Some people we’ve interviewed have noted differences between places and periods. Some of the British women who worked in art and experimental cinema in the 1970s felt no discrimination.

Rosa Bosch: It’s difficult to try and look at the differences over a period of thirty years. But there’s an easy way to look at it. When I started, in my areas, there were very few women. Now there are a lot more, so that’s the answer, isn’t it? [laughs] So something has improved. I don’t have the figures at my fingertips but it is very clear that there has been improvement in the number of women-directed and women-produced film. Some countries have mini-booms of women directors. So over thirty years, clearly, there’s been a huge improvement. But of the three top film festivals in Europe (Cannes, Berlin and Venice), only Berlin has a woman director. And it’s a first.

Anne Crémieux: So not equality but great improvement.

Rosa Bosch: Certainly not equality but there has been a huge movement in the right direction.

David Roche: Could you tell us a bit more about the films you produced. What was your role?

Rosa Bosch: Production is a team effort, so I see myself as one piece of a team, and my speciality is international financing, strategy, sales, festivals, promotion. I’m not someone who chooses a project or book and spends ten years writing and rewriting with an author. I follow people and teams.

David Roche: Do people come to you specifically?

Rosa Bosch: People that you know come to you; you meet people.

Anne Crémieux: Do you feel you are sought out mostly because of your connections with Latin American cinema and festivals? Do you think sometimes you’re sought out specifically because you’re a woman?

Rosa Bosch: Yes. The bad side—albeit one we can all live with—is that you have people who think that just by being a woman, you’re going to do their project. That is a major downside to being a woman. I’m not saying that it happens a lot but it does now and again.

Anne Crémieux: Are there sometimes projects that come to you that are interesting to you because you’re a woman?

Rosa Bosch: For the last ten years, I’ve been running sales, distribution, Oscar campaigns. I’m a consultant for hire on international affairs. I produced a couple of works with my own company in London: Julien Temple’s  London: The Modern Babylon(2012), quite a lot of video art. But most of what I produced has been with existing companies. I don’t produce individually.

Anne Crémieux: Have you ever refused a project? If so, on what basis?

Rosa Bosch: Quality and viability.

Anne Crémieux: Do you read the scripts? How do you decide?

Rosa Bosch: Yes, you evaluate all the elements in the project. Cultural and financial viability are very important.

Anne Crémieux: Have you ever suggested changes? Do you want artistic input?

Rosa Bosch: No, generally I don’t. I follow the artistic vision of other people. I’m a great appreciator of culture; I’m an enabler for someone else’s artistic vision. A line producer will do the leg work on the set, but I was in charge of financing, distribution and selling, often referred to as “international sales and distribution.”

Anne Crémieux: Can you tell us more about your time with HBO?

Rosa Bosch: I was managing director of HBO Films, based in London, where I was handling their film productions for international distribution, festivals, awards, and so on.

David Roche: Many of the films—Buena Vista Social Club, Calle 54 (Fernando Trueba, 2000)—and El Gran Fellove (Matt Dillon, 2020)—you’ve worked on are connected to Latin American culture and music.

Rosa Bosch: Right. Lots of music. I’ve also produced in Cuba. The only US directors I worked with were during my time at HBO, notably Gus Van Sant with Elephant (2003) which won the Palme d’or, and American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003) and Maria Full of Grace (2004). Iñarritu and Del Toro were the Latin connection.

Anne Crémieux: HBO -at the time -was producing a lot of niche movies that were financially successful.

Rosa Bosch: Yes, this was a short window when HBO was doing theatrical films. There’s always a company occupying that spot. The Weinsteins were doing just that at Miramax at the beginning. At the moment, Neon is occupying this position. I’m now working for Neon for the Oscars. We follow the companies doing this interesting work. You just follow the filmmakers and follow the trend.

Anne Crémieux: Have you seen people try to push for women directors?

Rosa Bosch: They do it all the time. During my time at HBO, most of the executives were women.

David Roche: It seems like you worked a lot on art films and documentaries. Are those different networks?

Rosa Bosch: It’s the same toolbox. I come from a multicultural and multilinguistic background and I’ve been very privileged to have no family attachment: no children, no parents to look after.

David Roche: But there are constants, like music.

Rosa Bosch: I have a huge love of music, classical, Cuban, and I have a personal love for art, and video art in particular. So I don’t see it as different specialties. For me, it’s all the same toolbox.

Anne Crémieux: What does feminism mean for you?

Rosa Bosch: It means seeking equal treatment and opportunities and stopping the repression of women in culture. Women make up half of humanity. Feminism means readdressing a historical imbalance. Of course, being a feminist doesn’t have an “on” or “off” switch. If you are, you are from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed.

Anne Crémieux: Do you know when you became a feminist?

Rosa Bosch: I want to say when I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own [1929] at the age of thirteen.

Anne Crémieux: Are there other texts or people who inspired you?

Rosa Bosch: Of course. Where do we start? Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Emily Dickinson, Hildegarde von Bingen . . . I may be self-taught but I have read a lot of literature.

Anne Crémieux: What about in cinema?

Rosa Bosch: Larissa Schepikto, Agnes Varda, Pasolini (because men can also make feminist films), Pilar Miró, Maria Luisa Bemberg, Sarah Gómez, Matilda Landeta in Mexico. Those are just a few essential ones.

Anne Crémieux: In all your years in London, you must have met Laura Mulvey?

Rosa Bosch: Yes, of course. I worked with Laura at the BFI.

Anne Crémieux: What do you think of the impact of her 1975 article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”?

Rosa Bosch: It’s all part of filmmaking: critics, academics, filmmakers, financiers, cinémathèques – we need them all. Laura is part of a pioneering generation, as is B. Ruby Rich. And there are many other academics that have been crucial to redress the balance. The impact of Laura Mulvey and B. Ruby Rich is fundamental.

Anne Crémieux: And B. Ruby Rich was also huge in terms of all the work she did in and on festivals.

Rosa Bosch: And she’s still around doing it.

Anne Crémieux: Indeed. All her articles also promoted films that would have been less well-known if she hadn’t been doing her part.

Rosa Bosch: Absolutely. Laura is one kind of academic. Ruby was also a journalist and was more engaged in the festival circuit and the Oscars, with which Laura is not involved at all. Ruby is much more engaged with the industry, Laura with academia.

David Roche: Laura Mulvey was involved in experimental cinema as well.

Rosa Bosch: Yes, a long time ago. Cinema is a business of exceptions. When Buena Vista Social Club happened, people would say, “What are you doing going to Cuba with a guy who doesn’t speak Spanish?” But that’s exactly why Wim Wenders made such a magnificent film, because he was an outside spectator. [Bernardo] Bertolucci did the same thing with China in The Last Emperor [1987]. Laura and Ruby are exceptions. If it were easy, the Hollywood studios would have figured out the recipe to produce a guaranteed success by now. [laughs]

Anne Crémieux: What kind of impact do you most care about?

Rosa Bosch: Impact can be many things. When I first came to Spain from London, a friend sent me a little Irish film in Gaelic called The Quiet Girl [2022, based on the novel by Claire Keegan].

David Roche: I love that film.

Rosa Bosch: It was getting rejected everywhere but I was taken by this coming-of-age story. And there was this wonderful woman cinematographer, Kate McCullough, who has since become more established. Although the film was rejected for six months by everyone, it became a success, the first film in Gaelic nominated at the Oscars, winning everywhere. That, for me, is impact. I suppose it was also surprising because it was out of my Latin area of expertise, but the same toolbox applies to a film in Gaelic. So that kind of impact is satisfying. Another example is Alice Rohrwacher’s first film, a young first-time woman filmmaker in Cannes who’s since had such an amazing career. When things work out, there’s great satisfaction, and sometimes you make good friends along the way.

David Roche: Something that comes up a lot when we interview women filmmakers is whether or not they want to be seen as women or artists above all. This is an issue for them as artists. In the promotion of films, and I mean in general, not necessarily in your case, are there times when the people who promote films are going to be opportunistic about it and say, “We’re pushing this film as a woman’s film.” Do people have these discussions sometimes?

Rosa Bosch: This is a very good point you’re raising. It’s a very complex issue because a lot of women directors really don’t want to be defined as women directors. Why should you? You are a feminist, you don’t have to go with a stamp. You’re Black, you’re gay, you have one leg—you don’t have to be put in a ghetto. The fear is the ghetto. I think it’s diminishing. Now inevitably, as our societies try to advance, there are some opportunities which are allocated to women. For instance, in terms of financing in Spain, the Spanish Film Institute has a 30% quota for women directors, which has been partly responsible for a huge boom in women directors in Spain. Not all of their films are going to be good but there are more. So obviously in those circumstances, people do go for the women directors or screenwriters who will help you get the financing. I see this as part of the following process: “Let’s have the space and the opportunities. It doesn’t matter if out of twenty films ten are bad so long as ten are good.

It’s a bit different for LGBTQ+ films because there are distributors specializing in gay films, so for certain very funky, very niche films which are of interest to a gay community but not to a mainstream community, it’s the only way to get distributed and sometimes, to reach mainstream audiences. That’s totally fine. It doesn’t mean the film is better or worse; it just means it’s niche. So if you want to go to a gay distributor, you do highlight that. But that does not really exist for women. Women film festivals are ceasing to have an impact, including Créteil, unfortunately. And in a way, much like gays bars don’t have much meaning anymore, maybe some day there won’t be a need for gay film festivals or women festivals because the whole point is to be in the mainstream.

Anne Cremieux: Is that happening for women?

Rosa Bosch: There is a smaller specialized distribution circuit—Women Make Movies in New York and a few other outlets—which are niche, but I do think going to someone and saying, “This is a women director, take it,” completely defeats the goal. Do you see what I mean? The majority of women filmmakers I like or respect do not want to be put in that box, just like a doctor or a lawyer might not want to use the feminine. Your gender is not relevant to your profession.

Anne Crémieux: Are there any projects that you worked on that are closest to your heart?

Rosa Bosch: That’s a very difficult question to answer because I do very little that I don’t like. Obviously, Cuba is a big love, and quite a lot of memories are attached to Buena Vista Social Club, even if the place has become a sort of Disneyland for tourism . . . Last year I did a flamenco film which I love very much and Venice invited  Silent Rebellion [Marie-Elsa Sgualdo, 2025], my first ever Swiss filmmaker. But I love all my children the same. What varies is the memories or how difficult it was or that people fought in the end, which is not nice. Nothing different from normal life.

Anne Crémieux: Do you have a goal in your career? What are you trying to achieve? Rosa Bosch: The goal is to work with people I like, with films I respect, to make a living and to work with nice people and hopefully work that has a little impact. That is the only goal. The meaning of life is to live it.