Santiago Pozo and the audience hiding in plain sight

Santiago Pozo’s first arrangement with the movie business required no lawyer. His father put cinema posters in the family shop in Madrid. In return, the neighborhood theater supplied two tickets a week. The shop got its window back eventually. The cinema got an advertisement. Pozo got an idea about what he wanted to do with his life.

There is something pleasingly economical about the exchange. Before he learned about release plans and production finance, he saw a film find its public through the place where people bought their bread. A poster interrupted an ordinary errand. A door opened somewhere else. Years later, the customers, budgets and pictures would change, but the problem of getting people through that door would occupy much of his career.

Pozo founded Arenas Group in 1988 and became known for marketing films to Latino audiences in the United States. He also produced, wrote and directed. The apparent detour into selling other people’s movies grew from a filmmaker’s practical concern: a finished picture still has to meet someone willing to watch it.

Two tickets, paid for in posters

Born in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, in Spain’s La Rioja region, in 1957, Pozo grew up with Hollywood on the screen. His father’s shop made regular moviegoing possible. The childhood ambition was straightforward: make pictures of his own. The means were rather less sophisticated than anything he had been watching.

He began experimenting with an eight-millimeter camera. Before he understood that film could be cut, he created reverse shots by stopping the camera, turning around and starting again. Editing, in this early system, involved moving the equipment. It was an energetic solution to a problem whose usual answer he had yet to discover.

That small technical misunderstanding belongs to the useful part of an education: wanting something enough to try before knowing how it works. Pozo would eventually learn both sides of the business, the making and the selling. His concern with distribution came from wanting films to arrive somewhere beyond the filmmaker’s own satisfaction.

E.T. finds another audience

Pozo moved to the United States in 1983. The opening chapter included cleaning buildings and learning English. A Fulbright scholarship and the University of Southern California’s Peter Stark Program gave him a route into the industry he had come to join. He earned his MFA in 1986.

The school later became a place to which he contributed experience as well as received it. In 2006, he joined the founding membership of its Cinema-Television Alumni Development Council, a group intended to help the school and assist students entering professional life. Its proposed work included a job board and career seminars: practical bridges between wanting a career and beginning one.

His own bridge had been an internship at Universal. In 1985, he pushed for a Spanish-language campaign for the rerelease of E.T. The experiment included screenings at the Orpheum in downtown Los Angeles. A familiar film could reach people differently when the invitation, and the presentation, addressed them in Spanish.

At Universal, Pozo worked in minority marketing. The following year brought a Latino campaign for An American Tail. The lessons were accumulating around studio releases, where an audience strategy had to survive the practical demands of selling tickets. His childhood enthusiasm now had a marketing department attached.

A phone, a balance, a business

When Pozo left to start Arenas, the resources he remembered were compact: “$6,000 in the bank, a phone, and me.” A change in management had left him feeling increasingly bureaucratic. Running his own company offered a way to return some agency to his working life, with the considerable inconvenience of being responsible for everything.

Arenas’ debut campaign was Robert Redford’s The Milagro Beanfield War. Over the years, its work included Like Water for Chocolate, My Family and Selena. The last of those received a multimillion-dollar campaign in Spanish-language media. An audience that a studio might once have treated as an afterthought was becoming an explicit part of a release budget.

There was range in the work. Arenas marketed family entertainment, action pictures, dramas and television. Shrek and Apocalypto do not offer much evidence that Latino viewers wanted one narrow kind of film. They suggest why a marketer needs to understand a public without mistaking it for a single taste.

“$6,000 in the bank, a phone, and me.”

Santiago Pozo, recalling the start of Arenas

Campaign work also requires staying interested after the first promising result. The business has another release coming, another set of expectations, another audience to address. Pozo’s company stayed with that work for decades. Its history crossed from theatrical releases into television and streaming, following the changing places where entertainment met its viewers.

Arenas worked on campaigns for Ugly Betty, When They See Us and Free Guy. By the public announcement of its acquisition, the company’s record encompassed more than 600 film and television campaigns. The number belongs to the agency’s accumulated work, a long run of separate assignments rather than a single inspired afternoon.

A studio ambition with Spanish at its center

Alongside the marketing business ran a production ambition. In 2001, Arenas Group, Universal Pictures and the Spanish investment firm Marco Polo Investments established Arenas Entertainment. Pozo became CEO of a venture designed to acquire, produce, finance and distribute films for Hispanic audiences. The plan connected the ability to find viewers with the ability to put different stories before them.

It was an expansion in responsibility. A marketing agency can help a completed film reach a public. A production and distribution venture takes on earlier questions, including which projects proceed and how they will be supported. Pozo wanted a platform for Latino writers, directors and actors, a place where their work could be developed and seen.

Empire, starring John Leguizamo and Peter Sarsgaard, became an early release in 2002. Imagining Argentina, with Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson, followed in 2003. Pozo was involved in the latter as a producer. The film’s subject, set against Argentina’s dictatorship, also reflected his interest in stories drawn from Hispanic experience.

Discussing that production, he spoke about wanting to tell stories connected to his culture and identity. These ambitions were expressed through specific projects and collaborators. The work moved between countries and involved people with different kinds of leverage: performers, filmmakers, financiers and distributors. Getting a story made meant assembling enough of them around it.

The ticket buyer and the decision maker

Commercial recognition did not satisfy all of Pozo’s concerns about Hollywood. In a January 2017 essay, he argued that the industry’s attention to diversity still left Latino talent with too few opportunities. He wrote about the distance between a community’s importance as an audience and its access to work, visibility and authority inside the business.

His argument reached into departments as well as casting. A company might create a multicultural unit while giving it little power to open doors. For Pozo, the question included who could make consequential decisions. The marketing specialist was examining the institution behind the marketing brief.

He wrote as an insider, identifying himself as an Academy member since 1993. His criticism allowed room for action by that institution, including more inclusive presenters and writing rooms. The essay mixed frustration with a belief that commercial self-interest might eventually help persuade an industry reluctant to change.

In 2018, he joined the National Hispanic Media Coalition’s public campaign over Latino exclusion in film. “The Hollywood business model is broken,” he said. He called for Latino and Latina executives in positions of real power. The demand extended from who appeared on the screen to who could decide what would appear there.

That makes his career more complicated, and more interesting, than a story about discovering a profitable market. He helped studios address Latino customers, then pressed the industry to consider what those customers’ communities should be able to contribute. Spending power and creative opportunity remained separate matters requiring separate work.

More time behind the camera

When d2h Partners’ acquisition of Arenas Group was announced in December 2020, Pozo said he wanted more time for “writing, making films, and helping other creators.” The announcement said he would step down as CEO while continuing to participate in creative and strategic planning. After decades of running the business, he was making room for the work he had long wanted it to support.

His later activity gives that intention a concrete form. On We the Hispanos, he shares an executive production credit with Cristina Moñívar. Directed by José Luis López-Linares, the documentary examines Hispanic heritage in the United States. It opened in Spanish cinemas on April 17, 2026.

That April, Pozo was also listed on a Madrid panel about the distribution, promotion and patronage of Hispanic cinema in the United States. The subject could have fitted several earlier chapters of his life. Films still needed routes to an audience. Cultural ambitions still needed someone willing to attend to their practical arrangements.

The poster in his father’s shop offers an apt place to leave him. A picture has been made. Someone has to put the invitation where people will see it. Someone has to make the trip worthwhile. Pozo has spent much of his life working on that exchange, with the memory of two free tickets somewhere near its beginning.