Photo credit: Marcelo Pontes
Brazilian-American documentary director, editor, and producer Flavia Fontes died Sunday of cancer at age 60. She had been making documentaries for over twenty years, and her work as an editor and director had been broadcast on HBO, PBS, BBC, Discovery Channel, Berlin Film Festival, MoMA and the Sundance Film Festival.
Born on February 8, 1961 in Belo Horizonte, Fontes moved to New York City to attend Hunter College and New York University. In 1995 she directed, produced and edited her first documentary Living with Chimpanzees: Portrait of a Family, a film about a couple who adopts two chimpanzees and how they function as a family, which was the winner of the Communicator Award for Excellence in Documentary. The film was screened at the Museum of Modern Art, and was broadcasted on Nippon Television in Japan, on the Discovery channel in Canada, and in over twenty countries throughout the world.
In 1999, she directed the fiction short film My Father, The Clown, a drama about a street performer who is lost in his fantasies about love. The film received an honorable mention at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival and was screened at the Dance on Film Series at Lincoln Center.
Two years later Fontes directed, produced, and edited Forbidden Wedding / Casamento Proibido (2001), a documentary about a paraplegic man in Brazil prohibited by the Catholic Church from getting married because he is sexually impotent. The film premiered at the 2001 Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival and screened in over twenty film festivals in the United States, Europe and South America, and it was also broadcasted on Sundance Channel in 2005.
Forbidden Wedding received an award of excellence at the Biennial BRASA Film Festival in Brazil, an Honorable Mention at the Philadelphia International Film Festival, and Best Documentary Award at Projections International Film Festival in Toronto. Fontes received the Someone to Watch Award from CineWomen, 2004. Other directing credits include the short film Ana, Where Are You? (2014) and Talking Sticks (2016, co-directed with Marcelo Pontes).
Fontes edited numerous films including White Horse, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and broadcast on HBO and screened at Cinema du Réel in Paris, and Terror at Home: Domestic Violence in America, which was broadcast at Lifetime Television, both films were directed by Academy Award winning director Maryann DeLeo. Other editing credits include Mothers and Daughters: Mirrors that Bind (2002) Forgetting Aphrodite (2004), Making Waves (2011), To Be a Miss (2016), and We Breathe Again (2017).
She also served as associate-producer of the award-winning film Chico Mendes: Voice of the Amazon (1989), which aired on TBS and TNT, and went on to win several awards, including the Outstanding Achievement Award (National Educational Association), and she also taught film post-production and editing at The New School University for over a decade.
Fontes was working on two documentary projects as producer, director, and editor: Who’s Afraid of Lynne Stewart? about the first Lawyer in the United States accused of supporting international terrorism after September 11th, and Our President: Rafael Correa on the controversial former Ecuadorean president.
