Bogota filming for Mark Wahlberg in Mile 22

Production was based in Colombia for a couple of weeks, with the producers working through Bogota-based service company Dynamo to organise the shoot over the course of just a few months.

Mile 22 is actually set in a fictional south-east Asian country, but authorities in Bogota became satisfied that their city would nonetheless be easily identifiable on-screen.

“In November last year, Dynamo presented the project to the Bogota Film Commission and then we co-ordinated several meetings with different district entities in order to prepare the city for the shoot in January and February, including the permits for shooting in public spaces,” says Angelica Clavijo Ortiz of the Bogota Film Commission, in comments to KFTV.

“Because this was the first big action movie filmed in Bogota, it represented a challenge for the entire city, but everybody was willing to help,” says Ortiz. “We think that probably the biggest challenge was co-ordinating the traffic and city mobility.”

Colombia got an international profile boost as a South American location filming option on launching its first cash rebate in 2012, which is worth up to 40% of qualifying local expenditure.

Earlier this year the support programme was capped at the equivalent of around $1.2m per project.

Mile 22 is the biggest international feature to have shot in the country. However, Colombia has also attracted movies like survival story Jungle, with Daniel Radcliffe, period adventure film The Lost City of Z and US horror movie The Belko Experiment, written by high-profile American director James Gunn.

The country has had further international success with the Netflix drug drama Narcos, which was also serviced by Dynamo.

As revealed by KFTV earlier this year, the Colombian government is hopeful that recently negotiated peace with paramilitary organisation the Farc will draw a permanent line under years of instability and violence in Colombia, and could help improve international perceptions of the country.

See KFTV's production guide for more on filming in Colombia.