The films of Latin American female screenwriters, Lucrecia Martel (Argentina), Anna Muylaert (Brazil) and Claudia Llosa (Peru), have achieved international prominence in recent years. In this article we create new insights into the ways in which these screenwriters have developed scripts for films that have made a mark on the world stage. To this end we will investigate how this acclaim has been enabled by their screenwriting decisions which focus on the creation of women-centred films, as well as their use of the family story as a means of exploring contemporary social and political themes, to tell universal stories that highlight the global in the local. In doing so we canvas the personal, industrial and social factors which have impacted Martel, Muylaert and Llosa’s screenwriting careers which have been instrumental in the script development of the films: La Ciénaga (The Swamp) (Martel 2001); Que Horas Ela Volta? (The Second Mother) (Muylaert 2015); and La Teta Asustada (The Milk of Sorrow) (Llosa 2009). The research for this article is based on personal and media interviews with the writers, as well as contemporary information available only in Spanish and Portuguese, as translated from the original Spanish and Portuguese by Clarissa Miranda.