João Canijo

Director

“Throughout these years, women actresses always captivated me much more than men players. I could never find a player that moved me so much as an actress…. I like women. I think they are more complex and stronger and more interesting, giving characters. I have not done any movie in which the protagonist was a man.”

Biography

João Canijo (born 1957) is a Portuguese film director. His film Get a Life was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.

Canijo is one of the most prominent Portugese filmmakers and stage directors of his generation. From 1980 to 1985 he worked as an assistant director to Manoel de Oliveira, Wim Wenders, Alain Tanner and Werner Schroeter, among others. In 1988, his first film Three Less Me was selected for the Rotterdam Film Festival. Since then his other films, such as Her Mother’s Daughter (1990), Black Shoes(1998), and Get a Life (2001), have met a significant success with the critics as well as the public in Portugal. —(http://paginas.fe.up.pt/~iatu2006/JoaoCanijo.htm)