BIO

Luiz Fernando Carvalho is a Brazilian filmmaker and television director, known for works with a strong relationship with literature and which represent a renewal for the aesthetics of Brazilian audiovisuals.^[1]

Some critics link Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s achievements to the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement^[2] and iconic directors from the history of cinema: Luchino Visconti and Andrei Tarkovski. ^[3] Visual and language experimentation^[4] is one of the characteristics of his work, as is his investigation of the multiplicity of Brazil’s cultural identity.^[5] Elements of the director’s poetics are: the baroque style^[6][7][8] of overlapping and intersecting narrative genres, the relationship with the instance of Time,^[9] the archetypal symbols of the Earth and reflection on the language of social and family melodrama.^[10]

The filmmaker’s signature works were a success with both critics and audiences. He directed Lavoura Arcaica (2001), based on the novel of the same name by Raduan Nassar, described by critic Jean-Philippe Tessé, in the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, as “a founding promise of renewal, of a palpitation unseen in Brazilian cinema since Glauber Rocha“^[11] and has won more than 50 national and international awards.^[12]

“A moving and desperate work like that of a tropical Pasolini”
LE FIGARO

A student of Architecture and Literature at university, the filmmaker has already filmed novels by great writers such as Raduan Nassar(Lavoura Arcaica), Clarice Lispector(A Paixão segundo G.H. and Correio Feminino), Ariano Suassuna(Romance d’A Pedra do Reino), Milton Hatoum(Dois Irmãos), Machado de Assis(Dom Casmurro), Roland Barthes(Fragmentos de um Discurso Amoroso), Eça de Queirós(Os Maias), José Lins do Rego(Riacho Doce) and Graciliano Ramos(Alexandre e Outros Heróis).

The collaborative process is one of the fundamental pillars of the director’s work. He has developed a method based on the intersection of various techniques, from theatrical procedures, through research into the languages of the body, to working with commedia dell’arte masks and the shamanic rituals of Brazil’s indigenous peoples.

Luiz Fernando Carvalho made his debut as a director and screenwriter at the age of 24 with the short film A Espera, which was awarded the Concha de Oro at the San Sebastián International Film Festival (Spain), Best Short Film at the Gramado Festival and the Special Jury Prize at the Ste Therèse Festival (Canada).

In 2001, he released his first feature film, Lavoura Arcaica, a critical and public success. The film won more than 50 international and national awards: Best Artistic Contribution at the Montreal Film Festival, Special Jury Prize in Biarritz, Best Film Critics and Audience at the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, Special Jury Prize at the Havana Film Festival, among others.

On television, the director has directed projects that have marked history with enormous critical and public acclaim, such as the series Os Maias, Hoje é dia de Maria, Capitu, Suburbia, A Pedra do Reino, Correio Feminino and Afinal, o Que Querem as Mulheres? and the soap operas O Rei do Gado, Renascer, Meu Pedacinho de Chão and Velho Chico, a finalist in the International Emmy Awards. Among the numerous series he has created and/or directed are Hoje é Dia de Maria, Alexandre e Outros Heróis and O Auto da Nossa Senhora da Luz, (finalists in several categories of the International Emmy Awards); Os Homens Querem Paz (finalist in The New York Festivals) and Giovanna e Enrico (selected as Hors Concours at the Banff Festival).

In 2023 he directed the feature film “The Passion According to GH”, based on the novel by Clarice Lispector. In 2023, he completed the feature film The Passion According to G.H., based on Clarice Lispector’s novel. The film was selected for the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023), 25th BAFICI (2024) — where it won both the Grand Prize and Best Performance Award — FILMADRID (2024), where it received two Special Jury Mentions, for both the film and the lead actress, and Terra Di Siena Film Festival where it won the Best Film Award, as well as Maria Fernanda Cândido, as Best Actress.

The work was celebrated by critics after its screenings at the Rio, São Paulo, Rotterdam and Buenos Aires MOSTRA festivals^[24].

Critic Carlos Alberto de Mattos described the film as extraordinary, courageous and refined, it doesn’t shrink from the challenges of the original. Instead, he dives into its scaly and delirious fabric to extract a cinematic pearl.^[2]

“Clarice Lispector’s highly philosophical prose finds a cinematic representation that surpasses all expectations. The film combines the confessional, the experimental and the psychological to achieve an existential horror with echoes of Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Looking Glass (1961) and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion to Sex (1965).”
-Cristina Álvarez López, IFF Rotterdam^[23]

For critic Mónica Delgado / Rotterdam, the he power of monologues is explored by Carvalho through a predominance of the foreground. And so the Brazilian director dialogues with more than ninety years of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.

“The movie ‘The Passion According to G.H.’ is like savoring the conquest of the impossible. It’s debatable whether any artist has ever achieved this. Clarice came close. Carvalho and Candido too.”
-Walter Porto, columnist, Folha de S. Paulo^[3]