Mario Acha

Biography

Peruvian filmmaker, visual artist, museographer, researcher, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. He studied architecture at the National University of Engineering (Lima) and film at INSAS (Brussels). He created a long series of installations, including “Mimuy” (1965), the first installation he made in Lima, in collaboration with Malatesta and Montero; “Initiation to Cinematography” (1970); “Easter Island” (1990); “I Read, I Imagine, and I Participate” (Mexico, 2006); “Cracks” (2016); “Encounter with Juan Acha” (2016); and “Intolerance” (2017), among others. In the 1970s, he became interested in the pre-Hispanic cultures of Latin America and developed a series of short films on the subject. In the 1980s, he worked on a UNESCO project and developed documentaries about the historic centers of Quito, Cusco, Lima, Potosí, Ouro Preto, Old Havana, San Francisco de Lima, and Easter Island. He also made documentaries about the preservation of Latin American cultural heritage. In the 1990s, he directed social documentaries about vulnerable street children for UNICEF. He is one of the founders of the Contemporary Peruvian Photography Platform and has produced valuable documentaries on cultural policies and interviews with Peruvian artists. One of his documentaries focuses on the poetic work of Pablo Guevara. Acha operates on the principle that every documentary reflects a socially responsible perspective that seeks the human meaning of things and the co-expressiveness of image and sound. He resides in Mexico.