While the Peruvian film industry has not been nearly as prolific as that of some other Latin American countries, such as Mexico or Argentina, some Peruvian movies produced enjoyed regional success. Historically, the cinema of Peru began in Iquitos in 1932 by Antonio Wong Rengifo (with a momentous, initial film billboard from 1900) because the rubber boom and the intense arrival of foreigners with technology to the city, and thus continued an extensive, unique filmography, with a different style to the capital, Lima.
In Lima, the first Peruvian sound film (with synchronized music and some talking sequences) was Alberto Santana's Resaca, which was released in 1934. This was followed by another sound film entitled Cosas de la vida in 1934. The first all-talking picture, Buscando Olvido, was finally released in 1936.
More recently some bestselling novels by Peruvian author and talk show host Jaime Bayly, including No se lo Digas a Nadie and La Mujer de mi Hermano, have been made into movies. In fact, Francisco Jose Lombardi, perhaps the most important Peruvian filmmaker of recent years, has made most of his films from adaptations of important Peruvian novels. Peru also produced the first animated 3-D film in Latin America, Piratas en el Callao. This film is set in the historical port city of Callao, which during colonial times had to defend itself against attacks by Dutch and British privateers seeking to undercut Spain's trade with its colonies. The film was produced by the Peruvian company Alpamayo Entertainment, which made a second 3-D film one year later: Dragones: Destino de Fuego.
In February 2006, the film Madeinusa, produced as a joint venture between Peru and Spain and directed by Claudia Llosa, was set in an imaginary Andean village and describes the stagnating life of Madeinusa performed by Magaly Solier and the traumas of post-civil war Peru.
Llosa, who also took elements from Gabriel García Márquez's magic realism, won an award at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Llosa's second feature, The Milk of Sorrow ("La Teta Asustada"), was nominated for the 82nd Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Picture, the first Peruvian film in the Academy's history to be nominated. The Milk of Sorrow ("La Teta Asustada"), won the Golden Bear award at the 2009 Berlinale.
Famous quotes containing the words cinema and/or peru:
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
“The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard—it is absurd, unreal, dangerous.... The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)