This article deals with modern Latin American cinema based on the articulation of the short film and the documentary as fundamental agents in the settlement of this phenomenon in the region. For this we have chosen three countries ?Mexico, Brazil and Cuba? that have experienced dissimilar realities in terms of the conformation of an industrial cinematographic tradition, deployment we explore in a first section. Then, in the second section we corroborate the role of the short documentary in the three cinemas contemplated through the development of the short film throughout history to lead to the expressive and semantic renewal of the fifties and sixties. Short film has become an effective means for transition or entry into modernity. In a third section, we examine the potentialities of the short film in conjunction with the characteristics of documentary film and perform a comparative textual analysis of three representative examples of those three countries, in order to trace common aesthetic patterns and note the significant marks of modern cinema.