Profiles: Juan Pablo Bustamante | Proimágenes Colombia

Juan Pablo Bustamante was born on November 16, 1978 in Cartagena de Indias. The young director/screenwriter’s first feature Lecciones para un beso premiered in Colombian theaters on April 8, 2011. “This male comedy about women was born of my own troubles wooing the woman of my dreams at school. I was never anything more than a “friend” to her... Yes, I know, it’s depressing. But this low point in my academic career led me to fantasize one day about how the courtship might have differed had I been able to consult with a Romantic, a Liar and a Materialist. My schoolboy obsession would have undoubtedly taken a different turn – the one in Lecciones para un Beso'”.
 
He graduated with a Masters in Visual Arts and a minor in Audiovisual Emphasis from the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and participated in screenplay workshops such as Robert Mckee’s, Making a Good Script Better and Linda Seger’s “How to Tell a Gabriel Garcia Marquez Story. When I decided to make a film, I wanted to steer clear of the subject of the violence in my country. I was always interested in making a romantic comedy with a very masculine focus, the way men face courtship and what they think about it. Undoubtedly, men are more aggressive and competitive when it comes to talking about women.”
 
Bustamante worked in television as a screenplay researcher for Juana Uribe’s project in Mexico called Algodón, a new adaptation of the successful TV soap Café con aroma de mujer, and for the past three and a half years has written the Lucano Divina blog in the voice of a Bengal tiger set on revealing human stupidities in order to convince the animal kingdom of man’s insignificance and encourage an animal revolt that would return power to those he calls the “Friends of the Wild”. The blog has more than 23,000 Facebook fans throughout Latin America.
 
While at university, he wrote and directed the short film using modeling clay Alma de guerrero (winner of the Audience Award at the 4^th Itinerant No-Format Exhibit organized by Colombia’s Ministry of Culture); Un reflejo en la sombra and Rojo y blanco. He was also executive co-producer, director and screenwriter for the documentary short Cartagena de Indias: Una historia de cinco elementos, which has sold more than 25,000 copies and won First Prize at the 3^rd New Creators Exhibit during the 43^rd Cartagena International Film Festival. He also worked in the art department on Mike Newell’s Love in the Time of Cholera.
 
Production of his first feature film Lecciones para un beso (2011) spanned a period of five years from the time the idea first came to him. During early stages, the screenplay received help directly from Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who changed the title from “Lessons for a Threesome” to “Lessons to the World” and signed the script thus: "With a warm hug from someone who DID read and admire this work”. "He read the screenplay and made some comments. Obviously, I had a first-class consultant, but I asked him to sign the text or no one would believe me.”