Máncora is the second feature film directed by Ricardo de Montreuil, but he thinks of it as his first. His actual first film, 2005’s La Mujer de Mi Hermano (My Brother’s Wife), a sexy potboiler about infidelity made in de Montreuil’s native Peru, is one of the most commercially successful films in Latin American history and garnered one of the largest opening weekend box-office grosses in the United States for a film from Latin America. “My Brother’s Wife was based on a book and I wasn’t allowed to change anything, so I had no say in that story,” de Montreuil said.

But Máncora, which screens in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition, is another thing altogether: Set largely in Máncora, the boho-chic beach town in northern Peru near where de Montreuil grew up and learned to surf, the film is atmospheric, personal, stylish, and deeply felt. It opens during a dreary and hazy Lima dawn, as Santi (Jason Day) is dancing at a club with a beautiful woman. Things aren’t right with Santi from the get-go: he’s having sex with the woman on the counter in the men’s bathroom and can’t seem to get it right (“C’mon, Santi, don’t take so long,” she pleads). His university won’t give him a scholarship; he’s fired from his job as a waiter; and his father, a famous Sixties singer, just catapulted himself off a bridge onto the traffic below.

Like Y Tu Mamá Tambièn, which it will inevitably be compared to, Máncora is about what happens when you decide to leave the place you know to enter “a place where most rules don’t apply,” as de Montreuil described the film’s setting. To help him deal with the grief of his father’s suicide, Santi’s stepsister Ximena (Elsa Pataky) and her cocky husband Inigo (Enrique Murciano) arrive and convince him to head off to idyllic Máncora with them. Ximena is a little too beautiful and warm, and Santi a little too lost, for the prospect of romance not to erupt.

Describing the plot of Máncora to that degree doesn’t give anything away—the chemistry between Santi and Ximena is evident from the first moment they are onscreen together. In fact, for de Montreuil, making Máncora was an entirely natural, intuitive production. There were five writers at different stages of the script’s evolution and de Montreuil let them brainstorm ideas and essentially acted as the story’s editor. “It was a super organic experience,” he said. “I was amazed at how the script grew.”

De Montreuil, who is 33, is the creative director at the NBC Universal channel Mun2, and before that was the senior art director at MTV Networks Latin America, which allowed him to oversee the design and content of MTV’s channels throughout Latin America. As the clips of his promos and music videos attest, de Montreuil has used his stints in television to produce witty, imaginative work. But Máncora is all his own. “The Brother’s Wife was bought by studios and they released it,” de Montreuil said. “I really wanted to have the director’s experience of going to festivals and having a film family.”