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 International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, Jihlava, Mar del Plata, Ambulante, Edinburgh, Videoex, Taipei, among other venues. Her video installation work has been recently presented at the Festival Temps d'Images, the Fundacion Botin, Galeria da Boavista, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, and The Pipe Factory, among others. She works and teaches in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University and in the BFA program in Film at Rutgers University, and is a fellow at the Film Study Center and the Sensory Ethnography Lab.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

An Aviation Field poster
7.5

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.

An Aviation Field

2016

An Aviation Field poster
7.5

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.

An Aviation Field

2016

Dry Ground Burning poster
6.2

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.

Dry Ground Burning

2023

Dry Ground Burning poster
6.2

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.

Dry Ground Burning

2023

No artwork available
10.0

The rapid turning of a light draws a circle. In the space bound by its line unravels an archive of postcards sent between the island of Madeira and the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique. The figures carved into the Knife by the Sap of the Banana Trees circulates between a fictional colonial memory, and science-fiction.

The Figures Carved into the Knife By the Sap of the Banana Trees

2014

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

A Quebra do Cego

2024

Dreaming In The Dark poster
NR

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?

Dreaming In The Dark

2018