Leonidas Zegarra(1949-2020)

Leonidas Zegarra was born in the Northern Peruvian highland. His family moved to the coast, to the city known as Trujillo, when he was a child, with his parents and several older siblings. He was an excellent student who was bullied by his classmates. He used to go to the movies with his mother, and this is the way he fell in love with the medium. Encouraged by his grandmother and mother, he studied how to make cartoons when he was 9-year-old. At 12, his grandmother gave him a film camera as a gift. His family moved again, this time to Lima, the Peruvian capital, because his brothers wanted to study engineering. For a brief time he studied engineering too, but very soon he realized that his true passion was filmmaking, an impossible dream in Peru in the 1960's. Anyway, at the time, a university located in Lima opened a 3-year program devoted to directing for film and television. His father didn't approved his vocation at all, disagreed with him, and stated that he wouldn't support such a project from a financial perspective . Due to the fact that one of his brothers shared the ownership of a socks factory with his father in Lima, Leonidas Zegarra had his studies financed because this brother understood what the desires of his heart really were. Before following studies in the university, Leonidas Zegarra had already made several shorts and a couple of feature films. These movies were made for an organization devoted to the practice of philosophical doctrines. Because he was considered too young to take the title of "film director," the leaders of the organization attributed to themselves the making of the movies. Finishing his studies in the Universidad de Lima at the end of the year 1970, Leonidas Zegarra had already made a short that he would transform into a full length feature film that would become his first one, officially. "De nuevo a la vida" ('Alive again') was released in 1973. Due to the extreme influence of the political left, mainly of Marxist tendency, Peru was experiencing social convulsions since decades before. New exhibition rules, new taxes, and plain censorship disrupted the destiny of what was being a box-office hit. The Marxists in the area of film criticism as well as in other cultural areas decided that movies like the one made by Leonidas Zegarra would not be tolerated. After several decades, the same "intellectuals" continued their sabotage, writing all kind of nonsense about his films. Since 2010, scholars and artists who belong to a new generation have developed homages and curatorial activities intended to preserve Mr. Zegarra's artwork. His movies are being analyzed from theoretical perspectives different than the Marxist one, showing how they express a lively Weltanschauung. Also, a Leonidas Zegarra Museum (in Spanish "Casa Museo Leonidas Zegarra") is under development.