Biographie
After completing the two films that established his place in Latin American cinema, Juan Carlos faced the question of what to pursue next. In the winter of 2008, while aboard a cargo ship crossing the North Atlantic, he resolved to follow his muse back to his native Bolivia. This decision led to the creation of three deeply personal films over a decade-long journey.
Zona Sur portrays a bourgeois Bolivian family experiencing profound upheaval amid political changes. It premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival and won awards for writing and direction at Sundance 2010. The film went on an impressive tour, screening at 150 film festivals worldwide, including Berlin, London, Guadalajara, Chicago, and Moscow. The Hollywood Reporter praised it as "stylistically innovative... the director has managed to get inside the very fabric of lives as they are unraveling," while Screen Daily noted that its themes "transcend geographical borders" with accessible reflections on generational divides and family challenges.
Next came Land Without Evil (Yvy Maraey), a once-in-a-lifetime journey into the rapidly vanishing South American jungle. This Bolivian-Mexican-Norwegian co-production stars Juan Carlos as a filmmaker who, while traveling with a Guarani Indian, encounters ancient wisdom and questions his own identity in a land where uncontacted indigenous peoples still exist. Part fiction, part performative documentary, and ethnographic film, it weaves a philosophical and poetic narrative. The Hollywood Reporter described it as "a beautiful meditation on origins and identity." The film debuted at Berlinale Native, Mar del Plata, Morelia, and Vancouver, winning awards in Havana, Montreal, Trieste, and Tres Fronteras, and was screened at New York's Museum of Modern Art. It has garnered a significant following on college campuses and captivated academics with its contemporary perspective on ancient themes.
The trilogy concluded in 2018 with Søren, a meditation on love and imagination in modern relationships, inspired by Kierkegaard's writings. Featuring French actor and model Willy Cartier as Søren, it was filmed in the Bolivian Andes and lush jungles below. The film premiered at the prestigious Cineteca Nacional de Mexico in 2019 and stands as the most free-flowing and experimental of the three.
Through swimming the cold waters of Lake Titicaca and the remote shores of Argentina’s South Atlantic Patagonia for My Mar Adentro—a film commissioned by the Argentine Ministry of Culture honoring those fallen in the Falklands War—Juan Carlos recognized it was time to reengage with the industry on a broader scale.
In 2022, he directed Season 8 of El Señor de los Cielos, Hispanic television’s most successful franchise, which has amassed nearly 3 billion views across the Americas. The season aired in the US in January 2023, achieving record-breaking ratings for Telemundo/NBC/Universal, and is scheduled to premiere on Netflix in spring 2023. Additionally, in 2022 he directed six episodes of The Power of Sunflowers for Disney+, currently in post-production.
Juan Carlos's first experience with wide-audience content dates back to his debut film, Jonah and the Pink Whale (1995), a bittersweet romance set against the rise of drug cartels. It was an immediate box office success in Bolivia and Mexico, supported by a generous grant from the Foundation for New Latin American Cinema, selected from over 200 entries. The film won Best First Film at Cartagena and opened doors to the Sundance Institute. American Visa (2002), a romantic thriller about the "Bolivian Dream," starring Kate del Castillo and Academy Award nominee Demián Bichir, also enjoyed solid box office success and remains popular on cable and on-demand platforms. It premiered at Morelia, Havana, and Biarritz and won the Mexican Academy Award (Ariel).
American Visa, Zona Sur, and Land Without Evil were all Bolivia’s submissions for the Oscars. Juan Carlos’s entire film catalogue is represented by Shoreline Entertainment and available for streaming on various platforms in the US and internationally.
Balancing the demands of auteur and commercial cinema and television, Juan Carlos is once again navigating a crossover. During the pandemic, he retreated to his seaside cottage on the coast of Oaxaca, southern Mexico, where he practices open-water swimming. He wrote a novel that serves as the foundation for new film projects he is adapting for the screen. He also taught writing and directing online and worked as a script editor on a project he is now attached to direct. Shadows on the Rock, written by Susan Sultan and Gerald L’Ecuyer, is a loose adaptation of Willa Cather’s novel and is slated to be shot in Canada, the United States, and France. The project is currently in development.
Born in Bolivia and living in Mexico—a country with a vibrant film industry that has nurtured his growth—Juan Carlos studied filmmaking at Columbia College Chicago, part of a generation that includes Janusz Kaminski and Mauro Fiore, collaborators on his early short films. In Los Angeles, he joined The Open Fist Theatre under director Ziad Hamzeh, where acting, directing, and working across all aspects of theatre production profoundly influenced his creative development. He aims to blend these two schools of training to explore what he considers the essence of storytelling: the human heart. Known for his ease with actors and camera staging, and grounded in his national roots and Latin American cultural identity, Juan Carlos intends to return to the place where his long journey of discovery began.
