By Samantha Anne Carrillo
Imagine checking the weather forecast, during a severe drought, to discover there’s a 100 percent chance of rain. Then you step outside to find an endlessly sunny blue sky.
That’s the sort of cognitive dissonance being experienced by local film workers as they read headlines hyping the good news about the New Mexico film industry, as another week or month ticks by without work.
The New Mexico Film Office recently released FY26 data, which shows a slight rebound in both direct spend in the state economy (up $4.7 million) and number of productions (up by 4). But local film workers ¡Viva New Mexico! spoke with, both on and off the record, said this uptick isn’t translating into improvement in their employment status or earnings.
Our review of the data shows the slowdown isn’t unique to New Mexico. The 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes halted productions nationwide, and the streaming boom that inflated content budgets throughout the pandemic cooled fast, taking studios’ appetite for volume with it.
New Mexico’s incentives now compete against more aggressive rebates and cheaper labor elsewhere. Corporate conglomeration did the rest: fewer buyers, more consolidated decision making, and less room for mid-budget work that was once the state’s filmic bread and butter.
An $875 Million Ghost
In FY22, production spending in New Mexico hit its pinnacle at $874.6 million—an increase of nearly 40 percent over FY21’s already record-breaking $626.5 million, with 112 projects filming in the state that year. Everyone got used to saying ~$875 million out loud—it justified the state incentive program and was quoted at legislative sessions. Three years later, FY25 production spend in New Mexico declined to $323 million.
FY25 seems to have been the bottom of an industry-wide contraction that hit film production everywhere. FY26 is better. It’s the first time in four years that production spend and the number of film projects in New Mexico have increased—spending up over $4.7 million and productions up by four projects compared to FY25.
Viewed in context of FY22 numbers—a $4.7 million FY26 bump alongside a $546.7 million 4-year drop—the latest local film economic data reads more as pulse than rebound. It’s a positive sign but remains nowhere near enough to revive a drought-stricken industry.
Aggregate spending figures don’t capture the fact that there’s no steady work for most New Mexico film workers right now, and there hasn’t been for a while. Meanwhile the safety net that was supposed to bridge that gap is running out at the exact moment local film workers need it most.
Where the Safety Net Rips
When an elementary school counselor asked Tyler Gendron what he wanted to be when he grew up, he recalls replying: “I want to work on movies.” “It’s all I ever wanted my whole life,” said Gendron, a 43-year-old key grip who has spent his entire career working in New Mexico’s film industry. “I was on set 25 years ago and, from then until recently, it was a full-time job.”
“As little as five years ago, I would have five or six shows back to back that I would be key gripping. Five days a week for 5 to 10 years, it was back-to-back shows,” said Gendron. “In 2025, I did three movies, and I’ve done zero in 2026. The state of the film industry is that there almost isn’t one here in New Mexico anymore.”
If you’re not in the industry, you may not have heard of a Contributions Against Premium Payments or CAPP account. CAPP is the health account that International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States, its Territories and Canada (IATSE) freelancers build through employer contributions on every signatory job. It’s how below-the-line crew—camera operators, grips, wardrobe, set dressers—buy into health coverage between gigs.
Above-the-line workers get their health coverage elsewhere: actors via the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and directors via the Directors Guild of America (DGA). Above and below the line, the system was built for an industry with steady, if irregular, work. It wasn’t built for a drought that stretches on this long. When work dries up, contributions stop. Balances just sit there, dwindling every time a premium comes due. Once that’s gone, the fallback is COBRA—full-priced premiums for freelancers who lack steady income.
The same is true for retirement accounts, contributed to as paychecks are earned. Gendron ultimately had to cash out his retirement account: “Being in the movie industry for so long, you understand that it’s up and down. So you plan for the downtime with savings—you live off what you need to and save for when there aren’t movies. We ate through all of our savings just with groceries and gas. So after that, I had to contact Local 480, and I actually withdrew my retirement.”
Building Outside the Studios
Some of the most creative, productive thinking happening right now isn’t coming from the industry or the incentive program at all—it’s a regenerative model emerging from a DIY filmmaking scene that never depended on studio-scale budgets to begin with.
Alonso Indacochea, a Peruvian-born filmmaker and technologist who relocated to New Mexico in 2012, co-founded Dust Wave as a film collective that uses a cooperative, mutual aid model to support local artists while creating opportunities for them to practice their craft.
Dust Wave recognizes that, even with a deep talent pool, experience is necessary to grow your skills. “To become a good director, producer, writer, you need reps. You need opportunities. We’ve created our own opportunities.” For Dust Wave, DIY filmmaking hasn’t meant cutting corners or replicating the industry model.
“We run our sets with insurance, with permits, with safety at the forefront, and we feed people well. We share equipment. We share space. We share cast. We share crew. We share information. We crowdfund. We fundraise,” said Indacochea. “Dust Wave is a collaborative operation. The idea is to share and make efficient use of the resources available to us.”
Founded in 2020, the Albuquerque-based collective has already produced more than 30 short films, built a local film community and established a base of operations including a micro-screening room. And all that runs on communal infrastructure rather than traditional studio backing. According to Indacochea, only China and India have economic and structural film industries on a Hollywood scale outside the U.S.
Indacochea comes from a different filmmaking tradition and perspective: “In the U.S., we’ve indoctrinated ourselves to think that filmmaking means industry filmmaking, factory filmmaking, filmmaking for big, big markets, like filmmaking to make a hundred million dollars on whatever. There’s nothing inherent about the art of filmmaking that has a connection to that.”
While a DIY film collective can’t replace the multi-million dollar industry that made full-time film work possible here, Dust Wave has created community and given film workers a vital opportunity to gain knowledge and experience. Indacochea also came up with The Indie 50 project, a proposal that would carve out 1 percent of the state’s annual film tax credit to support smaller projects that are “rooted in New Mexico, made by people who live here, and accountable to the communities they come from.”
Rolling Credits vs. Creating Futures
FY26’s positive numbers are real, and they’re worth citing. After a couple years of relative freefall, the state’s film industry is moving in the right direction. But this uptick won’t refill anyone’s CAPP or retirement account.
The formula to revive New Mexico’s film industry may exist somewhere on the spectrum between Dust Wave’s cooperative model and outside-the-soundstage thinking, like The Indie 50, and state-powered work to counter incentive and labor costs competition and rep our state’s cinematic range and infrastructure.
The rebound is real. It’s also thin. The gap between those two facts is where most of New Mexico’s film workers are living right now.
