joão pedro prado

a Brazilian filmmaker living in Berlin, João is currently working toward a M.A. degree in Directing at Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, for which he received a scholarship of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. He previously graduated in Philosophy and Film Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and studied Audiovisual Media at the University of São Paulo. Between 2018 and 2021, he was a student researcher at the Cinepoetics project Audiovisual Rhetorics of Affect, which used a software-based approach to investigate emotionalising strategies in film and television.

His short documentary Panama, One-Way about a Corona-denying influencer was screened at several festivals in Europe over the course of 2022 and aired on German national television. His fiction film debut Ash Wednesday, a musical about police brutality in Brazil, premiered at the Perspektive Deutsches Kino section of the Berlinale 2023. More recently, he’s finished work on two internationally co-produced shorts: Color of Attachment with Iran and Dead Period with the United States. João is currently finishing Spaltung, a documentary feature on German nuclear energy discourse in co-production with ZDF Das Kleine Fernsehspiel.

As a theatre director, João staged in 2021 the play What happened after Nora left her husband… by Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek, a feminist, anti-capitalist sequel to Ibsen's A Doll's House. In 2023 he took part in an exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. His work maps.gaps, an interactive map of a street in São Paulo divided by social inequality, was developed alongside Jacky Lai.

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