Hey, I’m Lelo. I’m a Brazilian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor, born in the countryside of São Paulo and now based in Turin, Italy.

My training runs through a postgraduate program in Film and Multimedia Creation, theatre at Teatro Escola Macunaíma and, in 2022, acting at Identity School of Acting in London, on a partial scholarship sponsored by Netflix.

I started my career as a production assistant in commercials, working at O2 Filmes, Bossa Nova Films, and Sentimental Filme. I then worked as a freelance writer for independent culture websites and as a freelance videomaker producing corporate videos. In 2014, I was among the winning screenwriters of the screenplay contest promoted by FRAPA, the biggest scriptwriting festival in Latin America, with the short film screenplay Kidney.

From 2015 to 2022, I created live music videos for the website Monkeybuzz, shooting with Brazilian musicians. Also for Monkeybuzz, I developed the documentary HALA – We Are Here, covering the tour made by the American band HALA in Brazil. It was produced in partnership with the music label Balaclava and released by Red Bull Music Brazil.

Around the same period, I produced the stage play Weirdos with the theatre collective Zarpar, a free adaptation of Tim Burton’s poem book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories. I also joined the Experimental Film Department at MIS (Museum of Image and Sound, São Paulo) as assistant director. In 2021, I directed two music videos for the project Píncaro, by musician Roger Valença. The following year, one of my screenplays was a semi-finalist at FRAPA and part of the script development group promoted by Marieta cultural center (São Paulo).

In 2023, I created Tropical Alien, a bilingual platform to curate Brazilian cinema, publish reviews and interview filmmakers, covering features and shorts of various genres in both English and Portuguese. I still direct and curate it today.

I’m currently working on a handful of fiction projects: Banana Pudding, a short film in post-production where I act as lead and direct; But You Can Call Me Billy, a documentary/fiction hybrid in production; Malocchio, a dark fantasy short set in Turin, in financing with Momentum Studio; and Socorro e a Lápide, a feature in development. I’ve also been selected for the writers’ room during the development of an animated series created by Sam Byrne, as part of the Prime Time Lab at The Animation Workshop, in Denmark.