Armando Robles Godoy (1924-), one of the most prestigious Peruvian Filmmaker of all times, was born in New York. His films began to attract the attention of Peruvian Cinema from the 1960s on. From the very beginning of his film career, he tried to carry out his projects and made films that generated a line of continuity within Peruvian cinema, able to grant it a recognizable style, and, at the same time, that assimilated the best of foreign influences.
Before becoming a filmmaker, he was a film buff and worked as a film critic for La Prensa newspaper from 1962 to 1963. Then his relationship with cinema extended to the creation of his own (short) films. He founded along side Augusto Geu Riverala the academy of Filmmaking in 1968 and conducted the Film Workshop.
The Film Workshop created by Robles remained as the most important institution dedicated to Film teaching in Peru. It functioned as a workshop that used collective methods of access to film techniques of photography, editing, and sound. Together with Augusto Geu Rivera, he directed this workshop for more than 20 years until his retirement in 1987.
Robles´s first feature, Ganarás el Pan, released in 1965, became an event in the depressed milieu of the Peruvian cinema of the time, characterized by commercial coproductions with Mexico. His following feature film En la selva no hoy estrellas (1967) evidenced that was possible to made interesting productions that were also financially feasible, at a moment when there was not a permanent film production in Peru. Both above mentioned films evidenced the birth and consolidation of an original personality and a work that announced an enduring artistic inspiration.
In the 1970´s decade he directed La muralla verde (1970), a film that evidenced his will to make increasingly artistic films (in the way of author cinema), that, from this moment on, frequently quoted masters like Godard, Resnais, Antonioni, Fellini and Orson Welles. Three years later, thanks to the benefit of the Film Law, he could release his fourth feature, Espejismo (1973), which was even more metaphorical than his previous films. In this film, Robles filmed using the telelens, which created an unreal almost abstract image.
The director had to wait more than a decade to release another fiction feature film, Sonata soledad (1987), which would be only exhibited in artistic circuits. The filmmaker himself appeared in the film amid an unreal space that seemed to represent a mental reality.
According to Eduardo Bedoya in his book 100 años de cine en el Perú: una historia crítica, “Robles was the first Peruvian filmmaker from the 1960s who realized that filmmaking was not only a matter of technical skill, but of a continuous knowledge of a living and changeable language that hungrily assimilates artistic findings of classic or contemporary filmmakers from the past and the present.