DOCTOR LEAVES MEDICINE TO MAKE MOVIES.

Byline: Patricia Farrell Aidem Daily News Staff Writer

If this student of life were to make a film about his dramatic career change, the working title might be ``Physician, Reel Thyself.''

A doctor in Lima, Peru's, poverty-stricken northern edge, Javier Fuentes-Leon wants to make movies. Not sterile documentaries or even knock-offs of TV's medical dramas. Fuentes-Leon wants to create films. His specialty is films with what he calls a ``touch of magic realism,'' not your average medical term.

In 1994, Fuentes-Leon, 29, chose a 180-degree career switch. Months after completing a three-year internship and graduating medical school, he applied to California Institute of the Arts' School of Film in Valencia.

The right side of his brain had battled with the left, and the creative side won.

``This is what I want to do now,'' he said in a recent interview. ``When I came out of high school, there were no film schools. At the time - for a guy to go into the arts - it was like `What are you going to do really?' I was 17. I didn't have the maturity to follow the conviction.''

Fuentes-Leon received his master's degree in directing for theater, video and cinema in June from CalArts' School of Theater and the 23-minute film he created for his thesis has won him top honors in his native Peru. Now he's hoping for a visa to continue working in the Los Angeles area before eventually returning to South America as a filmmaker.

Life lessons learned during his brief time in medicine provide the fodder for his creativity, Fuentes-Leon said.

``It's not like I wasted eight years,'' he said.

``I learned not only about medicine, I learned a lot about people. It made me what I am now. They made me know pain - I saw people dying and I helped people come into the world. I know what it's like to be covered in blood. I saw poverty - I saw patients who were so poor, but so thankful they would buy me things - lunch, a pack of cigarettes. I learned some things I never would have learned.''

In the public hospital in Lima, doctors were not so removed from the day-to-day workings of a medical center as they can be this country. They knew their patients intimately, working one-on-one in relatively primitive conditions.

``I had to take my own patients to get X-rays, we didn't have aides,'' he said. ``If we're taking an X-ray of a baby I would hold the baby. Interns would collect money to buy medicine or to pay for tests that were vital for treatment but that poor patients didn't have money for.''

There is imagination in medicine, he said. If equipment is unavailable, you improvise, you create.

Yet he doesn't regret for a moment leaving the respectability of the medical world and reaching for his own piece of Hollywood.

His drama ``Rooms'' was one of eight short films in September to be awarded top honors and $14,500 in Peru's National Competition for Short Films. ``Rooms'' is about a man whose son, who has been missing for years, has returned home. Unknown to the old man, the son had died.

The character of the old man is based loosely on his own grandfather.

``Not the events so much as the details. He smoked a pipe, did crossword puzzles,'' he said.

Fuentes-Leon's dreams are limitless - he wants to direct and to write, comedies, dramas, fantasies.

``I've written to this point mostly drama with a touch of magic realism,'' he said. ``In `Rooms' you don't know they're dead. You don't find that till the end.''

Fuentes-Leon's strides have been enormous steps. He was accepted to CalArts in March 1994, graduated med school that April and headed north in September.

He had never written drama, let alone in English. And he'd never made a film, even with a camcorder.

During his last two years of medical school - working grueling hours on the hospital floor - he took acting classes. He agreed to his family's pleas that he finish his medical studies before taking off on a new career path. But there was never a question he would leave, he said.

``I finished to get my degree, which worked out because I could enter a master's program at CalArts,'' he said.

Days since graduation are spent living in Los Angeles and looking for work as an intern in the film industry. He sends films he's made to film festivals and he pictures his name rolling with the credits before the lights come on.

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Photo

PHOTO (color in SAC only) Javier Fuentes-Leon, a CalArts film school graduate, left Peru to pursue his cinematic dream.

John Lazar/Special to the Daily News