Maria Luisa Portela

I’m a Brazilian woman who has been living in France for the past 5 years, I’ve been studying and working in the film industry for the last 10 years. In 2012 I studied production screenwriting and directing at New York Film Academy in the USA. At the same year I started Marketing and Communication studies at UFF, in Brazil having obtained my bachelor later. In parallel I enrolled myself at Escola de Cinema Darcy Ribeiro, attending the screenwriting and directing courses. In 2017 I assisted the filmmaker Ruy Guerra during the development of his last film “In Pieces” which was selected for the 2020 Rotterdam International Film Festival. In 2019 I produced, wrote and directed a short film entitled “Don’t Look Back” which has participated at the Short Film Corner 2021 at Cannes Film Festival. It had its national premiere in the beginning of this year gathering prizes in Brazilian film festivals and it is currently awaiting its international premiere. Moving to Paris was a real life plot twist, this event has definitely made my character developed to a never-coming-back point. I got a Master degree in Cinema and Audiovisual at Paris 1 Sorbonne and another one in Marketing & Global Communications at ISCOM Paris. One of my most defining adventures was in 2019, it was the first time I got in touch with film distribution as an International Marketing Project Manager Assistant for Studiocanal’s catalogue. Defining communication and marketing strategies, working side by side with graphic designers for film posters, as well to video editors for trailers, managing social media campaigns, keeping track of cinema and design trends, coordinating marketing campaigns in an International landscape, supporting our international sales team... Those were some of my daily tasks that I fell in love with. Today, I seek to continue my career in the film distribution field, specially with art house pictures.