The Invisible Hero
El Héroe Invisible (2026)
Project in Production
While shooting a film in Pucallpa, a marginalized town in the Peruvian Amazon, a Peruvian filmmaker hears about Jorge Sanjinéz Lenz. Jorge is about to turn 100 years old and people say he fought in WWII. Curious, the filmmaker decides to meet him. The incredible story of Jorge takes us to 1942 when Jorge learned that the Belgian government-in-exile was accepting foreign volunteers to fight in Europe. He enlisted voluntarily and joined the Belgian forces –the Piron Brigade– after training in Canada and the UK. Risking his life against Nazism, Jorge believed his life would take a turn. But when the war ended, the countries he had helped free—Belgium, France, and England—refused to grant him residency. Forced to return to Peru in 1946, Jorge disappeared from official memory; his life torn between a Europe that expelled him and a homeland that never inscribed him into its history. Until he meets Santi.
The filmmaker, himself a migrant in contemporary Europe, starts following fragments of Jorge’s life and begins to confront his own condition of displacement: what it means to belong, to be visible, and to be allowed to remain.
The Invisible Hero unfolds as a dialogue across time—between a forgotten soldier of the past and a migrant of the present—tracing the tension between contribution and recognition, presence and invisibility, belonging and rejection.
Directed by Santi Zegarra
Produced by Karoline Pelikan
Editing: Karoline Pelikan
Art and Design: Elva Arrieta
Production Consultant: María Eugenia Lombardi
A co-production of Sunkku Producciones and Pelikan Pictures.
Grants & Participation
2021 – DocSur / Ventana Sur, Argentina