Filmmaker Award

Josué Méndez is, with total justice, the Peruvian filmmaker of the moment. He enjoys the critics’ favor, the recognition of the public and the several awards he receives in whichever international festival where his films are screened.

Josué Méndez never imagined, not even during his most delirious child play, that he would become a film director. And a talented one, besides being a frequent participant in important international festivals, in which he has received several awards. Although, of course, it’s difficult to imagine such a bright future so far in advance. However, little Josué – who grew as an only child after he lost a sister at a very early age victim to cancer – acquired, without even thinking about it, an uncontrolled passion for the Seventh Art. To see and to enjoy an unimaginable quantity of films became one of his main activities. “I always found myself with plenty of time – remembers Josué- I would watch films since I was very young and, for some reason, I had a good visual memory, which allowed me to learn the names of the directors and of the films’ actors and actresses”.

The beginning

Up to that moment, cinema hadn’t trespassed the limits of a regular hobby. Until the time when Josué was admitted to the workshop of Armando Robles Godoy, a well-known Peruvian movie director. “And it was there – Josué indicates- when I realized the magnitude of cinema. I realized that cinema had to be studied, that it was a job, a carrier. And besides, a way of telling stories and say what you think about the world. That captivated me and I decided to study it as a career”. The calendar was marking the year 1994 and Josué decided to take off and he arrived in the United States to study cinema at the prestigious Yale University.

“I studied cinema without any practical objective. It was the only thing I could imagine studying. I didn’t see myself as a doctor, engineer, lawyer…” At Yale, he not only studied cinema: he also enrolled in Latin American studies. “This choice was not very practical either and supposedly it was not going to be of great benefit, however, I liked the idea of learning more about Latin American history. There are so many things that unite us to all the countries. Here, they don’t teach you this, but instead they teach you the things that separate us from the other countries”, points out Josué, who graduated in 1998 and returned to Peru

Back home

Again settled in Lima, Josué must face the pressure (maybe involuntary), posed by family and friends, summarized in the unavoidable question: “What are you going to do?” Then I decided to move to Arequipa.

I didn’t want to stay in Lima, because in Lima, everybody was asking me what I was going to do. Josué spent six months in Arequipa working, among other things, for a TV channel. It is there, on the outskirts of the Misti, where he makes his first short film, which has deserved certain recognition. And it is because, although he had forged a couple of short films (Only good friends, in 1997, and Dreams and Other Adagios, in 1998), with Parelisa, his film carrier started to take off. It is a short film also filmed in 16 mm, but in the opinion of Josué himself, it was the first he made as a professional. Parelisa not only departed to different festivals receiving praises along its way: it also obtained, in the Huesca International Film Festival, Spain, the coveted award “House of America” to the best first-time film director.....(*)

(*) the complete article could be found in Orgullo del Perú Magazine issue Nº 30.