Directing

Joana Pimenta

JOANA PIMENTA is a filmmaker from Lisbon, Portugal, currently living and working between the United States and Brazil. Her short film The Figures Carved into the Knife by the Sap of the Banana Trees received the Competition Award at Indielisboa ’14, where it premiered, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and has been screened at the Toronto Internation…

Known For

Once There Was BrasíliaOnce There Was Brasília · 2017
Once There Was Brasília
★ 5.52017
MovieScience FictionDrama
In 1959, disgraced intergalactic agent WA4 receives a mission: to come to the Earth and kill the president Juscelino Kubitschek on the day of Brasília's inauguration. But his ship is lost in time and lands in 2016 in Ceilândia — a Black suburb of Brasilia — on the verge of Dilma Rousseff's impeachment.
Dry Ground BurningDry Ground Burning · 2023
Dry Ground Burning
★ 6.32023
MovieDramaCrime
Just released from prison, Léa returns home to the Brasilia favela of Sol Nascente and joins up with her half-sister Chitara, the fearless leader of an all-female gang that steals and refines oil from underground pipes and sells gasoline to a clandestine network of motorcyclists. Living in constant opposition to Jair Bolsonaro’s fiercely authoritarian and militarized government, Chitara’s women claim the streets for themselves as a declaration of radical political resistance on behalf of ex-cons and the oppressed.
SomniloquiesSomniloquies · 2017
Somniloquies
★ 7.62017
MovieDocumentary
Works with sound recordings of Dion McGregor, who became famous for talking in his sleep.
Dreaming In The DarkDreaming In The Dark · 2018
Dreaming In The Dark
2018
Movie
For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?
An Aviation FieldAn Aviation Field · 2016
An Aviation Field
★ 7.52016
Movie
Moving and mysterious, Joana Pimenta’s An Aviation Field juxtaposes the natural and the manmade as it links the great utopian modernist project of Brasilia to the volcanic crater in Fogo, Cape Verde, and offers speculative futures for a troubling past.

Filmography

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