Karen Akerman
History
Partner of the independent production company Pela Madrugada. She worked as editor in over forty films (features and shorts). She was awarded the Grand Brazilian Film Award - Best Editing for Fiction (2015) and Best Documentary Editing (2009); ABC award for Best Editing Fiction (2015); among many others.
She made five short films. Her work has been shown at festivals in Rotterdam, Uppsala, Cine//B, Alcine, Brasilia, Cine PE and awarded at festivals in Tabor, DocLisboa, Rio Film Festival, Short Film, Santa Maria da Feira, Recife window, Cine Scheme New.
As a producer she was responsible for more than twenty short films. She collaborated as Curator, programmer and jury in festivals and shows in Brazil and Portugal.
Editor
Greice, a 21 year old Brazilian girl, studies at Fine Arts university in Lisbon. In the early days of summer, she gets involved with the mysterious guy: Afonso. The couple is accused for a strange accident that occurs at the students welcoming night party. Greice needs to return to Fortaleza, her hometown, to renew his residence permit. Hidden in a hotel, while preventing her mother from discovering the problems in which she was involved and with the help of some friends, Greice tries to find a place of comfort in the world.
Editor
The mythological story of the first woman on Earth, who came before Eve. She is created by God to be Adam’s wife. However, Lilith does not accept a position of inferiority in relation to man, she rebels and goes to the desert. Lilith reappears as Eve’s double, eats the forbidden fruit, takes revenge on Adam, on God, and becomes the first woman to rise up against the ruling patriarchal system.
Editor
In 2019, the leakage of messages exchanged by authorities in Brazil undermines the credibility of Operation Lava Jato. A group of journalists follows the unfolding of the case, in a sequence of crises that puts Brazilian democracy at risk.
Editor
A batch of 110 love letters exchanged by two lovers in the 1950s, discovered in Mato Grosso do Sul, is the starting point for this film.
Editorial Consultant
On the violent border between Brazil and Paraguay, a war is being waged around the expansion of agribusiness. On one side sits lawyer Luana Ruiz, the heiress to contested lands and one of the strongest supporters of president Jair Bolsonaro. Ruiz, like other ruralistas—rural wealthy elites and agribusiness producers who advocate for Indigenous cultural annihilation—has become empowered and her ideas of hate have flourished under Bolsonaro's anti-Indigenous agenda. On the other side sits teacher, Guarani-Kaiowá leader and activist Alenir Ximendes, embodying powerful Indigenous resistance and communal ideals. Having personally suffered losses at the hands of the ruralistas, Ximendes emerges as a powerful force against Ruiz, fighting for the protection of her community, their lands and Indigenous constitutional rights. This film contains sensitive images and dialogue in its portrayal of this urgent struggle for sovereignty.
Editor
Hilda must be responsible of a decision that she took long time ago. Her life is altered by the news that her son is coming to visit her after several years away. She tries to replenish her weathered image by the passage of time. This will stir her reality and her link with the past.
Editor
Justino, a 45-year-old member of the indigenous Desana people, is a security guard at the Manaus harbor. As his daughter prepares to soon depart to Brasília, Justino comes down with a mysterious fever.
Editor
Syrian brothers Adel and Hadi Bakkour take to the streets of Rio de Janeiro fighting for democracy in the country where they chose to live. History repeats itself: before they had to leave Aleppo to protest for freedom. Back he inherited his mother, Lawahez, and his father, Abdo. The family is reunited six years after the separation, in a changing Brazil.
Editor
Aboard a cruise ship out at sea, a young sailor discovers a door mysteriously leading to an apartment in Montevideo. Meanwhile, a group of Asian farmers find an abandoned shed in the valley, attributing it supernatural powers.
Editor
After relocating to Tokyo, a Brazilian writer begins a new novel, provoked by her experiences in Japan and by one of the last scenes she witnessed in Rio de Janeiro: a female swimmer tearing up the horizon with powerful strokes in the wide, open sea. Those two women apparently share no connection, until their lives start to interfere in one another, strangely linked through the sea. Hannah, the writer, plunges into a journey of self-discovery in Japan, while Ana, the swimmer in Rio de Janeiro, oddly has her body transformed into some kind of inner Ocean.
herself
Editor
Josefina, a radical homemaker, committed a crime of passion that led her to self-exile at a coastal town. She tries to find peace in solitude, immersed in the house routine, while coexisting with a past of lovers and Molotov cocktails. Her body suffers the metamorphosis of aging, and she must undergo cataract surgery.
Editor
When a child is forced to become the house's adult because her father is sick and her mother is dead, there's an inversion in the natural order of things. Childhood becomes a saga. And the frustrated parenthood turns into a conviction.
Editor
The impeachment and removal from office of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 was triggered by a corruption scandal involving, among others, her then vice-president Michel Temer. Director Maria Augusta Ramos follows the trial against Rousseff from the point of view of her defence team. This is a courtroom drama that unfolds slowly: the appearances of the various parties gradually turn the proceedings into something akin to theatre. Inside the courtroom, grand emotions are played to full effect whilst, on the other side of the doors, lobbyists and supporters pace the corridors. Meanwhile, outside, in front of Brasília’s modernist government buildings, demonstrators are chanting like a Greek chorus. Only the main character, Rousseff herself, remains professional and aloof.
Director
Cinematographic transcreation of a text censored in 1968.
Director
If I didn’t blossom, if I remained unbloomed, it’s because my roots were poisoned. I know it's false, an induced error, but... this is me.
Editor
The Forensic Psychiatric Hospital is a medium-security level, closed structure, with a rehabilitation component. The service provided includes psychiatric, psychological, medical, therapeutic and social care. The 32 men who inhabit the unit were considered exempt from punishment by the court. They feel time going by. Slowly. The film settles in this individual time.
Director
The Forensic Psychiatric Hospital is a medium-security level, closed structure, with a rehabilitation component. The service provided includes psychiatric, psychological, medical, therapeutic and social care. The 32 men who inhabit the unit were considered exempt from punishment by the court. They feel time going by. Slowly. The film settles in this individual time.
Editor
A portrait of the city of São Paulo through the life of four of its inhabitants: an economist and analyst of the financial market, a metallurgist who works at Volkswagen, a motorcycle courier and a railway worker. Each character calls attention to one aspect of the economy in a period of social tension: the three weeks before the start of the soccer World Cup. The director creates the movie by observing the daily life of the characters, without making interviews or commentaries. Future June aims to reflect on this historical moment and on the ways that the current economic model determines social and human relations.
Editor
Junior, as he’s known, since he’s essentially still a child, seems to be having a tough time getting on in life. He shares cheap lodgings with another fellow and earns money doing strenuous night shifts at a warehouse. It’s no surprise that he lives for football and desperately hangs onto the dream of perhaps every Brazilian kid – to become a famous player. Although he trains hard with his amateur team, he’s not one of the best. He won’t admit to the mounting jealousy he feels as he watches his talented friend doing extremely well on the pitch. What’s more, his prospects don’t look so rosy now that his young girlfriend Carine is pregnant, and he also has to deal with her dominant mother poking her nose in...
Producer
Beside the savage desire to realize the enormities which he brooded on, nothing was sacred.
Screenplay
Beside the savage desire to realize the enormities which he brooded on, nothing was sacred.
Director
Beside the savage desire to realize the enormities which he brooded on, nothing was sacred.
Beside the savage desire to realize the enormities which he brooded on, nothing was sacred.
Editor
Editor
Based on real events, and set in Rio de Janeiro, A Wolf at the Door is the nerve-rattling tale of a kidnapped child and the terror of the parents left behind. When Sylvia discovers her six-year-old daughter has been picked up at school by an unknown woman, police summon her husband, Bernardo, to the station for questioning. From that point on, the film takes increasingly sinister turns as it delves into the events that led to the girl’s kidnapping. With plot twists that will keep the audience on the edge of their seats, A Wolf at the Door is a darkly disturbing journey into the extreme limits of the human capacity for obsession and revenge.
Editor
Love is a cold war. A couple discuss their relationship on a Berlin Park
Editor
Inspired by popular cult, O COVEIRO is part light part darkness, a bedtime story and almost a nightmare. A child is born and his parents die of fright just to see him. André Gil Mata revisits the traditional Portuguese tale, in a fantastic movie where heads bounce, but you hear a song.
Editor
On a Saturday, unhappy with her marriage, Carol gets ready to leave, her husband usually goes to a soccer match and bring his friends back home for lunch. The dish of the day is feijoada.
This film is an adaptation of the short story "Feijoada Completa" by Luis Fernando Verissimo, in turn inspired by the homonymous Chico Buarque' song.
Co-Producer
“There must be a different solution than the one from hell’. Full unadulterated terror (and music). 'The best class always ends with a lesson'. Almost baroque in its ambition and detail, Akerman and Seabra Lopes’ mesmerising short film delves deeply into the hard-wired dread of music lessons. Sewn around Schubert’s steely Opus 1, which is itself based on the no less terrifying legend of Goethe's Erlkönig, their film is a revelation.” International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Editor
“There must be a different solution than the one from hell’. Full unadulterated terror (and music). 'The best class always ends with a lesson'. Almost baroque in its ambition and detail, Akerman and Seabra Lopes’ mesmerising short film delves deeply into the hard-wired dread of music lessons. Sewn around Schubert’s steely Opus 1, which is itself based on the no less terrifying legend of Goethe's Erlkönig, their film is a revelation.” International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Director
“There must be a different solution than the one from hell’. Full unadulterated terror (and music). 'The best class always ends with a lesson'. Almost baroque in its ambition and detail, Akerman and Seabra Lopes’ mesmerising short film delves deeply into the hard-wired dread of music lessons. Sewn around Schubert’s steely Opus 1, which is itself based on the no less terrifying legend of Goethe's Erlkönig, their film is a revelation.” International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Editor
On the triple frontier between Brazil, Colombia and Peru, the twin towns of Letícia and Tabatinga form an urban island surrounded by the Amazon rain-forest. Following the ordinary events and the constant come and go of people along the border, Terras portrays the presence and the influence of the frontier on the lives of its inhabitants.
Editor
In a time of timeless and revolutionary talents, Wilson Simonal shined as nobody before and innovated as only a few could. All of a sudden, everything vanished. This film maps the spectacular trajectory of the ex-Army corporal that ruled as a monarch, and was condemned to ostracism for an offense to which he pleaded not guilty.
Editor
In a lake surrounded by buildings, a man builds a boat.
Editor
Large boats navigate the Amazon River daily, transporting people, animals and goods. This film portrays one of these trips.
Editor
In 1908, Titoe leaves her country, Japan, to try her luck in Brazil. Her intention is just to get rich and return in five years. But life has other plans for her.