Marcelo
Gomes

Marcelo Gomes was born 1962, in Recife in the North-West of Brazil, where he still lives today. After studying journalism he travelled to Great Britain, where he studied Film at Bristol University with a grant provided by the British Council. Gomes’ first filmic works were videos, for which he received numerous prizes at international festivals. He was also awarded prizes in the categories of Screenplay and Direction for the short films “Maracatu, Maracatus” (1995) and “Clandestina Felicidade” (1998).

Gomes has been involved in intense collaboration with the Brazilian director Karïm Ainouz for several years now. Together with Ainouz, who was a fellowship-holder of the Berlin Artists’ Programme in 2004, Gomes wrote the screenplay for “Madame Satã”, the portrait of the legendary singer from Rio de Janeiro, Joao Francisco dos Santos. “Madame Satã” was premiered in the series Un Certain Regard at the International Film Festival in Cannes in 2002 and was a great success at cinemas worldwide. The film received several prizes at festivals including Chicago, Biarritz, Huelva and São Paulo.

In 2005, Marcelo Gomes was represented in the series Un Certain Regard at Cannes with his first feature film of his own: the filmmaker’s debut film at the Croisette was “Cinema, Aspirinas e Urubus” (2005), a road movie about travel through the North-East of Brazil and simultaneously the story of a friendship between a German deserter and a Brazilian in the year 1945. Subsequently the film (which received production support from the highly-regarded Hubert Bals Fund) won the “Prix de l’Education Nationale”. “Cinema, Aspirinas e Urubus” was shown at over 60 film festivals and received 23 international awards.

Gomes’ most recent project, again as co-director with Karïm Ainouz, is a documentary. In “Sertão de Acrílico Azul Piscina” (Pool-Blue Backlands) the filmmakers take a critical look at the modernisation of an isolated stretch of land in the North-East of Brazil.
In 2004 further collaboration with Karïm Ainouz took place in the context of the 26th Art Biennial in São Paulo, where both artists were represented by a joint video installation.

During his stay in Berlin, Marcelo Gomes aims to work on the screenplay for his second feature film: “The Man of the Crowd”, loosely based on the short story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe. The film is being made in collaboration with the Brazilian short and documentary filmmaker Cao Guimaraes and tells the story of a man who suffers from an extreme loneliness, from which he can only escape in the anonymous mass of the 20-million person metropolis of São Paulo.