Brazilian director, editor, and documentary producer Flávia Fontes passed away from cancer on Sunday, April 17, at the age of 60. She had been producing documentaries for over 20 years, with her work as an editor and director broadcast by HBO, PBS, BBC, Discovery Channel, Berlin International Film Festival, MoMA, and Sundance Film Festival.
Nascida no dia 8 de fevereiro de 1961, em Belo Horizonte, Flávia se mudou para a cidade de Nova York para cursar o Hunter College e a 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, winner of the Communicator Award for Excellence in Documentary. The film was screened at the Museum of Modern Art and broadcast on Nippon Television in Japan, Discovery Channel in Canada, and in over 20 countries worldwide.
In 1999, she directed the short fiction film My Father, The Clown, a drama about a street artist who gets lost in fantasies of 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, Flávia directed, produced, and edited Forbidden Wedding / Casamento Proibido (2001), a documentary about a paraplegic man in Brazil who was prohibited by the Catholic Church from marrying due to sexual impotence. The film premiered at the 2001 Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival and was screened at over 20 film festivals in the United States, Europe, and South America, and was also broadcast on Sundance Channel in 2005.
Forbidden Wedding won an excellence award at the Bienal BRASA Film Festival in Brazil, an Honorable Mention at the Philadelphia International Film Festival, and the Best Documentary award at the Projections International Film Festival in Toronto. She received the Someone to Watch award from CineWomen in 2004. Other directing credits include the short film Ana, Where Are You? (2014) and Talking Sticks (2016, co-directed with Marcelo Pontes).
The director also edited several films, including White Horse, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and was broadcast by HBO and screened at Cinema du Réel in Paris, and Terror at Home: Domestic Violence in America, which was broadcast by Lifetime Television, both films directed by Oscar-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 on the award-winning film Chico Mendes: A Voz da Amazônia (1989), which aired on TBS and TNT, and won several awards, including the Outstanding Achievement Award (National Educational Association), and also taught post-production and film 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 11, and Our President: Rafael Correa about the controversial former Ecuadorian president.
VIVIANE FAVER
Journalist
vfaver@gmail.com