José Cardoso
Directing
Biography
José Cardoso, Seydú’s father, filmmaker, illustrator, and graphic designer, has developed fiction films, stop motion animation, and documentaries, constantly questioning what reality is, revolving around surrealism, consciousness, and anti-colonialism. With his feature-length documentary “Iwianch, el diablo venado” (94 min. 2021), which tells the story of the disappearance of a young Amazonian indigenous man kidnapped by the devil, he won the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival. His subsequent work, “What the Soil Remembers” (29 min., 2023), documentary examining the trauma of a community uprooted during the South African apartheid regime, won the Ammodo Tiger Award for best short film at the Rotterdam Film Festival. And his latest documentary, “Flores” (29 min., 2024), in which he links his intimate and family life during the COVID-19 pandemic with an ethnocide in the Amazon that is justified by the war in Ukraine, won the International Short Film Competition at the Sheffield DocFest 2024. His works have been presented at the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival, the New Latin American Film Festival in Havana, Oberhausen, VIFF Vancouver, among others. All his works have been created collectively at the Jiráfica story factory in collaboration with colleagues whom José considers his family.
Known For
Filmmaker José Cardoso’s deeply personal Flowers is an exercise in sense-making, led by both his conscious and unconscious mind. Navigating the barrage of online news images produced each day, he transforms these into an unexpected web of connections that link an Amazonian community threatened with the destruction of their land to an extreme right-wing Brazilian President who justifies the exploitation of the Amazon by the rising price of resources precipitated by the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh teaches us to make our enemy the object of our compassion, and the filmmaker’s three-year-old son marvels at the frogs and flowers growing in the garden.
Flowers
A well-known filmmaker follows a famous mountain climber to Nepal, documenting the journey. Conversations about their lives lead to philosophical reflections, as the mountain challenges their motives. As days go by, the higher altitude and the depletion of oxygen will raise their debate to interior and transcendental territories, putting at stake their trajectories and their egos when facing the mountain and its millenary depth.
Behind the Mist
A musical illustration of nomadism, change, and human adaptation.
Ancestral Song
In 1960s South Africa, a close-knit community from Die Vlakte was forcibly and violently uprooted to make way for the Stellenbosch University as part of the Apartheid regime’s segregation measures. José Cardoso’s What the Soil Remembers recounts the traumatic effect displacement had on residents by bringing to the foreground a university that is still grappling with its racist legacy. To this day, the Die Vlakte community is fighting for justice and seeking reparations with little to no tangible solutions.
What the Soil Remembers
An enigmatic presence haunts the depths of the Amazon rainforest, where an indigenous Achuar teenager has disappeared. During the search for the young man, his family decides to consult with a Shaman, who, immersed in trance, reveals that the young man was taken by the devil, but that he has intervened by showing him the way back to his home. While waiting for his return, secrets of the rainforest and Amazonian visions of life after death are touched, vanishing the documentary filmmaker’s concepts of reality.
Iwianch, the Devil Deer
At a moment of great lucidity, or delirium maybe, Pancho has a sort of epiphany and affirms that he is being part of a movie.
Guión
Mr. Hummingbird it’s a free spirit trapped in social standards, capitalist system, and the ambivalence of his own mind. The short film tells the story of his courageous attempt to escape.