João Pedro Rodrigues

João Pedro Rodrigues is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker and artist based in Lisbon, Portugal. He began by studying Biology at Lisbon University to become an ornithologist but soon gave it up for Film Studies and graduated from Lisbon’s University of Theatre and Cinema (ESTC) in 1992. Along with a number of short films, he has written and directed five feature films, including his first, O FANTASMA, which premiered in Official Competition at Venice Film Festival, causing a national ruckus in Italy in 2000, when the Vatican official newspaper asked for the festival director’s dismissal for having selected the film, and his most recent, THE ORNITHOLOGIST, which won the Silver Leopard for Best Director at Locarno Film Festival in 2016. His work explores gender and human desire in all its guises - and disguises - reflecting the multifarious history of film, from classical genres to documentary and experimental film. He has also co-directed several shorts and the feature THE LAST TIME I SAW MACAO (2012) with his lifelong partner and artistic collaborator, João Rui Guerra da Mata, being the short IEC LONG (2014) their most recent joint effort in a body of work they like to call their “Asian films”. His films premiered and won prizes at the world’s foremost film festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Locarno, Toronto and Berlin and are part of several film archive’s and museum’s permanent collections, namely the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Harvard Film Archive, the Portuguese Cinematheque, the Austrian Film Museum and the Swiss Cinematheque. All his films were released on DVD in France in 2014 - Box Set L’Intégrale João Pedro Rodrigues (Epicentre Films) and all his short films were released in Portugal in 2016 – DVD João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata, As Curtas-Metragens (FNAC/ Curtas Vila do Conde). He was the first Portuguese to receive a RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE - HARVARD Fellowship in 2014/ 2015. In 2016, he was honored, together with Guerra da Mata, with a COMPLETE RETROSPECTIVE AND INSTALLATION EXHIBITION AT THE POMPIDOU CENTRE in Paris, part of the Festival d’Automne. Comissioned for the event, he directed WHERE DO YOU STAND NOW, JOÃO PEDRO RODRIGUES?, an autobiographical short and his most recent film to date. The book João Pedro Rodrigues, Le jardin des fauves, conversations avec Antoine Barraud, Post Éditions and Centre Pompidou, was published concurrently. In 2017, he lived in Berlin with Guerra da Mata as a DAAD Fellow, researching and writing their new Asian feature: SAN MA LO 270, MACAU, project that won one of the Crouching Tigers Project Lab Awards at the 1st International Film Festival & Awards - Macao in December 2016. He is preparing a new feature, O SORRISO DE AFONSO/ AFONSO’S SMILE, written together with João Rui Guerra da Mata and Miguel Ángel Fajardo, the documentary ONDE FICA ESTA RUA?/ WHERE IS THIS STREET?, co-directed with Guerra da Mata and the short UM PRÍNCIPE NO QUARTEL/ A PRINCE IN THE BARRACKS.