bio

André Balbuena is a film director, screenwriter, and editor from Lima, Peru. He holds a degree in Communications from the University of Lima and is the creator of Bus, the most anticipated Peruvian short film of 2025, whose trailer surpassed 4 million organic views on TikTok. His work explores everyday life with beauty, rawness, and truth.

He made his directorial debut with the musical short film Una primera cita (A First Date) in 2019, which won Best Sound at a local film festival and was screened at three other national festivals. During his university years, he also directed Una buena abogada (A Good Lawyer) in 2018, a short film adapted from a micro-theater play, which was selected for a national film festival and has now surpassed 160,000 views on YouTube.

Before pursuing Communications, André studied Systems Engineering, a background that gave him the confidence to explore the worlds of post-production, artificial intelligence, and video games. This experience also sparked his interest in the intersection between cinema and interactive media.

He has also served as a youth pastor and camera operator in two evangelical churches in Lima. These experiences shaped his leadership skills and inspired his ongoing commitment to portraying evangelical characters authentically, an underrepresented group in Peruvian media.

In 2017, he received the Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program scholarship from the Government of Canada, which allowed him to study for a semester at the University of Ottawa, where he took courses in World Cinemas.

He has worked on several major Peruvian film productions, including Locos de Amor 3, Medias Hermanas, the Netflix original film Without Saying Goodbye, and the series La Reina del Sur 3. As a video editor, he has collaborated with prominent Peruvian artists and Latin Grammy winners such as Tony Succar and Gian Marco. He was also part of Tondero, Peru’s most successful entertainment company, contributing to both the marketing and commercial areas as well as production and project development.

He is currently developing his first feature film, Partida Guardada, a coming-of-age drama that explores how our past decisions shape us through the metaphor of saved games in a video game.