About · Panama, since 2010
A film studio that learned to direct the tool.
We are not an AI lab that decided to make videos. We are a production house with sixteen years of craft that decided to learn the tool before the tool started deciding for us.
How we got here
Sixteen years producing for people who do not forgive an error.
We started in 2010 making documentaries and institutional pieces. Over the years came multilateral bodies, international foundations and banks — clients where a misstated fact or a badly chosen image has real consequences.
That kind of work teaches something you do not learn making commercials: responsibility for what gets said belongs to whoever directs, not to whatever tool was used.
When generative AI arrived, most of the market took it as a shortcut. We took it for what it is: one more tool in an edit suite that had been running for a decade and a half.
Where we stand on AI
We are not trying to fool anyone. We use artificial intelligence and we say so.
Read the full policyWho runs it
Turning ideas into stories that inspire, connect and drive action.
He started on the other side of the desk: copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather. He founded Criteria Films in Panama City in 2010 and has run it since. More than twenty years later he is still doing what he did on his first day in an agency: finding the story a brand needs to tell, and deciding how it gets told, before a single frame exists.
He also founded and curated TEDxPanamaCity, where the work was deciding which ideas earned the stage. It is the same judgment he applies at the studio: the hard part was never producing, it was deciding what is worth producing.
That craft was formed with clients where the margin for error is zero — UNICEF, the IDB, Banco General, Davivienda — and with the Bertelsmann Foundation, a relationship now past a decade: the German American Partnership Program animations, The Trust Project’s 8 Trust Indicators, and the Leadership in Action series with the Aspen Ministers Forum.
When generative AI arrived he did not delegate it: he sat down and learned it. Today the studio uses it in real production, and the decision about what gets generated, in what order and why, is still human.
Organizations we have produced for
They have a unique ability to transform an idea or a written word into visual masterpieces that educate and engage audiences across cultural and geographic boundaries. Perhaps the greatest indicator of the quality of their work is the fact that we have been working together for more than a decade.
Bertelsmann Foundation · Washington, DCOriginal wording, as published on criteriafilms.com
Our laboratory
Every technique is tested on our own series before it reaches a client.
Istmo and Pombo are produced on a client budget and to a client standard. Whatever does not hold up there never gets proposed to you.
Inside Criteria Labs
Let’s talk about what your brand needs to say.
Forty-five minutes. We go through your channels and show you, with real pieces, what can be produced this month.
Book a strategy session