Joaquim was born in 1964 at Sabugal, a small village in the north of Portugal. When he was sixteen he moved to Lisbon to live alone. He spent his time at the cinematheque and graduated at the Portuguese National Film School.
As he wanted to make films, Joaquim established Rosa Filmes, an independent film company. His first film, Corte de Cabelo (Haircut), was the portrait of the wedding day of a girl and a boy from the first generation of portuguese living integrated in the European Union. It was presented at the official competition of the 48th Locarno Film Festival in 1995, and would win four international awards in the festival circuit. The film had a commercial release in Portugal and France, and was received both by the audience and the critics as a breakthrough, being today considered the work which captured the portuguese youth of the nineties.
By that time, Joaquim opened the way for his friends to make their first features in Rosa Filmes, like João Pedro Rodrigues… read more
Joaquim was born in 1964 at Sabugal, a small village in the north of Portugal. When he was sixteen he moved to Lisbon to live alone. He spent his time at the cinematheque and graduated at the Portuguese National Film School.
As he wanted to make films, Joaquim established Rosa Filmes, an independent film company. His first film, Corte de Cabelo (Haircut), was the portrait of the wedding day of a girl and a boy from the first generation of portuguese living integrated in the European Union. It was presented at the official competition of the 48th Locarno Film Festival in 1995, and would win four international awards in the festival circuit. The film had a commercial release in Portugal and France, and was received both by the audience and the critics as a breakthrough, being today considered the work which captured the portuguese youth of the nineties.
By that time, Joaquim opened the way for his friends to make their first features in Rosa Filmes, like João Pedro Rodrigues and Manuela Viegas, and continues doing it today with a new generation of portuguese directors.
One day Joaquim was invited to show Corte de Cabelo at Sarajevo. It was the end of the war. He started filming there in a kind of awe, as destruction returned to Europe once again, under the passive eyes of the other countries. But he couldn’t finnish the film. So he returned to Bosnia when he realized his film was not about the war, but about it’s consequences, how the displaced persons and divided families were affected in their lives, not only in their sense of space and community, but also in their sense of future.
What happened in Bosnia made him see the destruction that was happening through economic acceleration in his own country, mainly in the rural areas, where people also fled and left vast regions totally empty. He started making a film in the land of his childhood, about a mother and his son, who run away, trying desperately to reach Lisbon. Both films, Diários da Bósnia (Bosnia Diaries) and Mulher-Polícia (The Policewoman) were made simultaneously, influencing each other.
In 2003 Mulher-Polícia was in the official selection of the 53rd Berlin Film Festival (Panorama) and received awards in festivals in Italy, Spain and Cuba. Bosnia Diaries had it’s première in 2005 at the 10th Pusan International Film Festival, as the festival was interested in the film as a symbol of the consequences of cold war which still hangs over the divided Korea.
On Deste Lado da Ressureição (This Side of Resurrection) a contemporary portuguese family is divided in it’s foundation, as Portugal is collapsing as a society. And the children of that family, in their solitude and desperation, while hurting each other, are in fact trying to connect, not knowing that there’s not only the way of history, but also the way of grace. —rosafilmes.pt
