The 29th edition of the Festival de Málaga (from 6 to 15 March) will be awarding the Retrospectiva Award, presented in collaboration with the newspaper Malaga Hoy, to the Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi. The festival thus recognises the career of one of the most renowned directors in Latin American cinema, with over one hundred awards to his name.
 
Francisco J. Lombardi was born in Tacna, Peru in 1949. He studied filmmaking at the Santa Fe Film School in Argentina. Upon returning to Lima, he worked as a film critic for the magazine ‘Hablemos de Cine’ and later for the newspaper ‘Correo’. In 1974, he began his career as a filmmaker, shooting short films until 1976, the year he filmed his first feature film, Muerte al amanecer (Death at Dawn), which was selected for several international festivals and received a mention at the Locarno Film Festival and awards in Havana and Cartagena.
 
He gained worldwide recognition with the adaptation of Mario Vargas Llosa's novel La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs), which was selected for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes and won several international awards, including the Silver Shell for Best Director at the San Sebastian Festival (1985).
 
Immediately afterwards, and in co-production with Spain, he embarked on La boca del lobo (The Mouth of the Wolf), a lucid and critical examination of the brutal realities of the counterinsurgency during the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) era, which again made waves at festivals, won numerous international distinctions, and is considered by many to be the best Peruvian film of all time.
 
Since then, Lombardi has directed nineteen feature films, many of them in co-production with Spain and particularly with Gerardo Herrero as producer.
 
Among his most important accolades is having won the Silver Shell for Best Director twice at the San Sebastián Film Festival for his films Bajo la piel (Under the Skin) (1996) and the aforementioned La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs) (1985). In 1990, with Caídos del cielo (Fallen from Heaven), he won the Grand Prix of the Americas at the Montreal World Film Festival in Canada.
 
His films have twice been selected for the Cannes Film Festival. They have also been screened at the Berlin, Toronto, Locarno, BAFICI, Fribourg, Mar del Plata, Havana, Biarritz, Valdivia, and Cartagena film festivals, among many others, and he has received more than one hundred international awards.
 
His work in cinema has been recognised through tributes and retrospectives at various international forums, such as the Fribourg, Guadalajara, Havana, Mar del Plata, Huesca, and Trieste Film Festivals, and the Cinematheques of Santiago, Chile, and Lausanne, Switzerland, among numerous other international events.
 
In 2004, Lombardi won the Irene Diamond Lifetime Achievement Award, presented annually by Human Rights Watch, "for his extraordinary commitment to human rights filmmaking". He has also received the Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit, awarded by the Chilean National Council for Culture and the Arts "for his outstanding contribution to Latin American cinema and culture". In 2014, the Peruvian government awarded him the National Culture Award for his career in Peruvian filmmaking.