joão pedro prado

a Brazilian filmmaker based in Berlin, João holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Directing from Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, supported by a scholarship from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. He previously graduated in Philosophy and Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and attended courses in Audiovisual Media at the University of São Paulo. From 2018 to 2021, João was a student researcher with the Cinepoetics project Audiovisual Rhetorics of Affect, which explored emotionalising strategies in film through software-based analysis.

His short documentary Panama, One-Way about a Corona-denying influencer screened at multiple European festivals in 2022 and was broadcast on German national television. His fiction debut Ash Wednesday, a musical addressing police brutality in Brazil, premiered in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino section of the Berlinale 2023. His short film Dead Period, co-produced with the United States, was shortlisted for the German Short Film Award 2024.

João’s graduation film Fission, a feature-length documentary on Germany’s nuclear phase-out, co-produced with ZDF’s emerging talent program Das Kleine Fernsehspiel, is set to be released in 2025. He is currently writing To Dream of Catfish, his feature debut supported by a script development grant from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.

In 2021, João directed the play What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband…, a feminist, anti-capitalist sequel to Ibsen's A Doll's House by Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek. He participated in an exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 2023 with maps.gaps, an interactive video installation created with Jacky Lai that visualizes social inequality along a street in São Paulo divided by class disparities.

“Everything has a story. Philosophy tells stories with concepts. Cinema tells stories with blocks of movement/duration.” – Gilles Deleuze.