JD Fernández Molero in conversation

‘Peruvians sometimes sacrifice and simplify. We turn into a cartoon of ourselves, our culture, because we’re afraid of not being understood.’ - JD Fernández Molero

The premiere of JD Fernández Molero's second fiction feature Punku will take place at Flatpack Festival on 10 May. We are delighted to welcome the filmmaker to present his work in the UK for the first time, and following the premiere he will take part in a conversation with Luis Medina Cordova at the University of Birmingham.

Molero started out as a videoblogger and film pirate. As is clear from Punku and Molero's debut Videophilia (2015), this is a writer-director with a strong interest in cultural identity and dream states, and how both can be mediated and transformed by technology. This session will offer insights into how these works were made, as well as a broader discussion of Latin American cinema in a global context.

JD Molero’s UK visit has been supported by the University of Birmingham and the British Council in partnership with the Independent Cinema Office.

Juan Daniel Fernández Molero is a Peruvian director, producer and editor known for the experimental doc Reminiscences (2010), screened at FIDMarseille and MoMA’s Modern Mondays prestigious avant-garde film program, and the post-internet feature Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes) (2015), which won the Tiger Award for Best Film at the 44th Rotterdam International Film Festival and was Peru’s submission for the 89th Academy Awards. His second feature is the hybrid fiction Punku (2025), which had its world premiere in the Forum section of the 75th Berlinale and won the Grand Prix at the 25th New Horizons IFF and Best Feature Film at the 15th Bucharest Experimental IFF.

Luis Medina Cordova is Lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the global circulation of Latin American culture, exploring how literature, film, and other cultural forms are projected across borders and engage with transnational dynamics and moments of crisis. He is the author of Imagining Ecuador (Boydell & Brewer, 2022), a monograph examining Ecuadorian narrative in the aftermath of the country's 1999 financial collapse and its place within world literature. He is also the PI of Viral Literature: Latin America, a project documenting real-time literary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic across the region.