Profiles: Juan Andrés Arango | Proimágenes Colombia

The screenwriter and film director Juan Andrés Arango was born in Bogota on September 19, 1976. In the late 1990s, he studied Film and Television at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and was selected by Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, for a two-semester exchange program. There he made two 16mm short films and began writing the screenplay for his medium-length fiction film Eloísa y las nieves, which he directed as his thesis project upon returning to Bogota. The film was honored as an outstanding thesis at the Universidad Nacional and won a honorable mention at the Toma Cinco International Festival.
 
From 2001 to 2002, Arango served as assistant director on the TV series Historias de hombres solo para mujeres. In 2003, he traveled to Spain to pursue a Postgraduate Diploma in Cinematography at the Universidad de Barcelona (ESCAC). In 2004, he lived in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he worked as a director of photography and began to write the screenplay for his first feature film, La Playa D.C. His project for the film won the Feature Film Screenwriting Incentive from the Colombian Film Development Fund (FDC) and the Feature Film Screenwriting Prize from the Ibermedia Program.
 
Arango devoted the following two years to researching and writing his first feature, which in 2008 received the FDC Feature Film Production incentive and in 2010 the Ibermedia Program's Feature Production Prize. La Playa D.C. was filmed in late 2011. In 2012, it received the Post-Production award from the French government's Fond Sud Cinema; the Hubert Bals Fund award at the Rotterdam Film Festival (Netherlands); and the Work in Progress award from the Valdivia Film Festival (Chile). It also began a successful international festival tour, including the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival; Horizontes Latinos at the San Sebastian festival; Biarritz; Busan (South Korea); Vladivostok (Russia); SANFIC, where Arango won Best Director; the Lima Film Festival, where it was selected as Best First Film; and the Rotterdam Film Festival, where it won the Lions Film Award. Also in 2012, Arango began research in Colombia for the screenplay of X500, his next feature film, shot in Colombia, Mexico and Canada.
 
After five years of research and production work, Arango’s debut film La Playa D.C. premiered in Colombian theaters on October 19, 2012. His second feature, X500, premiered on May 4, 2017. Before its Colombian premiere, the film had its world premiere in the Contemporary World Cinema section of the 41st Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in Canada. It has also taken part in the 46th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) (Netherlands); the Horizontes Latinos section of the 64th San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain; the 15th Biarritz Festival of Latin America Film; and the International Contemporary Panorama section of the 38th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana, Cuba. At the fifth edition of the Colombian Film Festival of New York, it received the award for Best Film in Official Competition, and at the fifth Los Cabos International Film Festival in Mexico, it picked up the award for Best Film in the Mexico First competition.
 
Commenting on his films, the director said that “my debut film La Playa D.C., in which young Afro-Colombians dream of a better life in the United States, was already beginning to examine ideas about urban life and the intermingling of cultures. X500 continues my exploration of these issues in a more ambitious and complex way, by exploring the nuances of the issues in three radically different contexts. My creative process is deeply inspired by the locations where I work. While writing the script I lived in Buenaventura, Montreal, and Mexico, to immerse myself in the atmospheres of these places. While I was there, I observed what takes place on their streets and the questions naturally posed by their inhabitants. I spoke with a large number of people, who told me their stories. Based on this material, I wrote the script of the film.”
 
Last updated: May 2017.