Filmmaker Leopoldo Nunes, who served as a director of Ancine, Brazil’s national cinema agency, died yesterday at the age of 54 of stomach bleeding. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, he served as president of the Brazilian Association of Documentarians, directed the Brazilian Film Congress, and was a member of the National Film Commission.
Born in 1966 in Santa Fé do Sul, São Paulo, Nunes studied at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV in San Antonio de Los Baños in Cuba, and at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo, where he directed his first short film A idade do lixo / The Age of Garbage.
He also directed the short films O Argonauta Alemão (1994); O Profeta das Cores (1995), winner of the Best Documentary Short at the São Paulo Film Festival; and Erra uma Vez (1997). In 2005 he directed his first and only feature film The Prophet of the Waters / O profeta das águas, a documentary film on Aparecido Galdino Jacintho, the leader of an uprising against the construction of hydroelectric plant, Ilha Solteira, in Paraná during the military dictatorship.
Nunes dedicated a good part of his professional life to the federal support of Brazilian cinema. He served as director of Ancine for one year between 2007 and 2008, and was later appointed Director of Programming and Content at the public television network TV Brasil. He also served as Director of Sponsorships in the Under Secretary of Institutional Communication of the Secretary of the Presidency of the Republic, and as a class representative in the National Film Commission. In December 2012, he was appointed Secretary of Audiovisual of the Ministry of Culture under Dilma Rousseff’s presidency, a position that he held for one year.
