Biography
Born 1967 in Lima, Peru. He studied film at the German Film & TV Academy Berlin (dffb). He attended master script classes with Jesús Díaz and was a student of Hungarian director Béla Tarr. He attended photography for film seminars by Michael Ballhaus and Walter Lassaly, and editing practices with R.W. Fassbinder's former collaborator, Juliane Lorenz. Since 1992 he has worked as an editor, writer and producer of film and television. After living for 20 years in Germany he returned to Peru in 2004, where he founded the production company Vía Expresa Cine y Video. His first short, The Aftertaste of Death / El Resabio de la Muerte (1992), was successfully presented at the festival in Huesca, Spain. Subsequently, the short Verónica (1994), which he photographed and co-directed with Mario Burbano, was shown at the International Film Festival of Mumbai (India). He won the First Prize at the Cinema Jove Festival of Valencia, Spain with the experimental video The Breath of Stones / El Aliento de las Piedras (1996). His short film Portrait of a Lover as a Tired Man / Retrato de un amante cansado (1997) won the First Prize in the Student Film Festival in Potsdam (Germany) and received Honorable Mention in the International Berlin Film Festival. His first full-length feature, Y si te vi, no me acuerdo / Panamericana (2001), was presented at the Festival del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano in Havana (Cuba), Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, Chicago Latino Film Festival, among others. In 2003 he received the Audience Award at the Festival Cero Latitud (Quito, Ecuador). The film could only be released commercially in Peru in 2009. In 2003 he participated in The 72 Hour Film Project and filmed in Rome a feature film titled A Day in Life in just 3 days. In 2011, the congregation of Dominican nuns of the Monastery of Santa Catalina, Arequipa, hired him to make a biopic based on the life of Blessed Ana de los Ángeles Monteagudo, a nun who lived in the seventeenth century and is an iconic figure in the city's collective memory. The film Ana de los Ángeles was released 2012. In 2012 he directed his third full length film, The Chain / Encadenados funded by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture. The film was released 2014 and and was selected as Best Peruvian Picture at the International Film Festival Ayacucho. In 2015 he edited the Director's Cut version. In 2013-14 he produced and edited the documentary feature La Señal / The Signal, a film about rural education in Peru, directed by Leandro Pinto Le Roux. The film had its premiere at the Lima International Film Festival 2016 and won the Audience Award. Now he is preparing to shoot 2017 the film La Cantera / Heart of Stone, inspired by William Shakespeare's Hamlet, and set in Arequipa's stone quarries. He also develops a project titled Nada Que Declarar / Nothing To Declare, the adaptation of Teresa Ruiz Rosas' same title novel, which addresses the problem of human trafficking worldwide.
