Miguel Gonçalves Mendes

Miguel Gonçalves Mendes
File:Miguel sapopt.jpg Miguel in 2011 (from sapo.pt)
Born	(1978-09-02) September 2, 1978 Covilhã, Portugal
Other names	Miguel G. Mendes, Miguel Mendes
Occupation(s)	Film Director, Screenwriter, Film Producer
Years active	2002–present
Website	www.jumpcut.pt

Miguel Gonçalves Mendes (born September 02, 1978) is a Portuguese film director, screenwriter, and film producer. He has directed four feature films and eight short films since 2002, a filmography that took him to renowned film festivals around the globe. In 2010 he directed the 125-minute documentary José and Pilar, a walk through the last years of life of the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, José Saramago and his wife Pilar del Rio, a moving love story of humanistic reaching. The film, co-produced by [[Pedro Almodóvar]'s El Deseo and Fernando Meirelles' O2, gathered very positive reviews and prompted a unique popular movement in Portugal. Recently Miguel announced he will be adapting José Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ with an international screenwriter and a foreign cast and crew.

Early life

Miguel Mendes was born on the 2nd of September 1978 in Covilhã, Portugal. He went to high school in Olhão, Algarve and from there traveled to Lisbon where he attended the first year of Anthropology at the New University of Lisbon. He dropped out and went to the Political and Social Sciences Superior Institute (Lisbon) where he studied International Relations for two years, once again without graduating. At 20 years old he started to connect with arts as performances and means of communication with the audience, enrolling in theater plays as an actor and producer. Finally, in 2001 Miguel applied for Lisbon Film School and four years later came out with a degree in Editing. By this time he had already created his film and theater producing company JumpCut and had directed Autografia, a documentary on the Portuguese poet and painter Mário Cesariny, which screened in Spain, Italy and Saint Tomé.

José and Pilar

Cast: José Saramago, Pilar del Rio, Gael Garcia Bernal, Fernando Meirelles.

José and Pilar is a 125 minute documentary following the last years of the Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, chiefly through his relationship with his resolute wife, Pilar del Río. Highly praised by the critics and the audience, the film seems to have accomplished to show the tenderness, the genuine integrity and the deeply concerned humanity behind such controversial figure and his spouse. It gathers sequences from from Madrid to Helsinki to Rio de Janeiro and covers Jose and Pilar's life in Lanzarote, their trips around the world (presenting José's books, signing autographs, making speeches) and their most simple, transient and quotidian moments, as for during the period José writes his "The Elephant's Journey". The film was produced by Miguel Mendes' JumpCut (Portugal), Fernando Meirelles's O2 and Pedro Almodóvar's El Deseo.

The film visited several film festivals around the world (more than once winning the Audience Award) and had commercial premiere in Portugal, Spain and Brazil. Until the the end of the year, it is expected to premiere in Italy, Mexico and the US.

It recently triggered a unique popular movement in Portugal when the blog Split Screen began a petition asking the Portuguese Institute of Cinema to pick 'José and Pilar as the Portuguese submission for the Academy's Best Foreign Film nominees. In a country where the national cinema is particularly week, we shall account for this gesture as a little history being made.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

«My own favorites among his books include the darkly comic The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and the frightening Blindness.» , Harold Bloom.

Miguel Gonçalves Mendes recently announced his next project as the adaptation of José Saramago's controversial but world wide praised novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - at its release, the book was publicly condemned and criticized by the Portuguese Government of Prime-Minister Cavaco Silva, therefore resulting in Saramago's permanent exile in Lanzarote, Spain but six years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In short, this is the well known story of the life and death of Jesus Christ told from an incredibly audacious angle, the one that rejects religious dogmas, political interests and popular conventionalism and portrays the genuine conflicts and emotions of the human mind and body. It is the life of a boy that became a man, of the family he had to leave behind, of the notions of death, forgiveness, anger, personal and social responsibility, eternity and global communion he had to unveil all by himself.

«This film is about how cruel the mankind can reach, whether it is because of power, money, relationships or some god.», says Miguel. Three years after Fernando Meirelles opened the Cannes Film Festival with Blindness (also a novel by José Saramago), the Portuguese director chose this one because «it is the most cinematic of José Saramago's novels, the one with the adequate structure for film.»

The filmmaker already advanced that he wants big budget, international co-production, international stars and international screenwriting.

Filmography

• TBA | The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
• 2010 | José and Pilar
• 2009 | The Path of Salomão (short)
• 2008 | Zarco (short)
• 2008 | Azinhaga (short)
• 2008 | Monday (short)
• 2007 | Floripes (short)
• 2007 | Dedicated to the one I love (short)
• 2007 | Course of Silence (short)
• 2005 | Floripes or the Death of the Myth
• 2005 | The Battle of the Three Kings
• 2004 | Autografia
• 2002 | D. Nieves (short)

External links

• JumpCut (portuguese, spanish, english)
• IMDB Profile