Short Profile: Kleber Mendonça

Kleber Mendonça Filho, who lives in Recife, Brazil, has worked for years as a film journalist in his home town. He programmes films for Recife’s favourite film house and write reviews for the newspaper Jornal do Commercio, for a variety of magazines throughout Brazil and for his own website .
In the mid-1990s, he started making films himself. His first three short films at the character of a horror film and were produced on a low budget in Pernambuco. His last two films turn their back on the horror genre and prove that he isn’t only a talented and also a very versatile film maker.
With his third film, the children’s horror story Green Vinyl (Vinil Verde), he first achieved international success and became known as a film maker.
In his widely praised fourth short film, Eletrodoméstica, the only one he was able to make with the normal budget, Mendonça denounces the consumer behaviour of the middle classes in Recife. His eye for detail and his imagination, that were so clearly visible in his earlier horror films, also don’t desert him here.
His latest film Friday Night Saturday Morning (Noite de Sexta Manhã de Sábado ) has another style and mood. It’s a romance (low-budget), shot in black & white with a digital camera. Mendonça has already announced that in his next film, that he is already shooting, he will investigate a different genre. It will be a ‘sci-fi fake-doc about the bizarre climate changes in tropical Recife, when suddenly gets called without an exclamation.’
His original very personally tinted and experimental films showed traces of various avant-garde movements, such as Surrealism and Impressionism, with the associative and contrasting montage of the Russians. Striking in the work of Mendonça is that he is his own editor and sound designer for his films, has a sharp eye for details, creates tension with close-ups and makes a sublime use of sound, with a precise sound mix and very special attention for silences.
Mendonça manages to fascinate the viewer and create an intense mood with only limited means at his disposal. ‘I make my films on whatever format I can use. My films are about people, love and fear.’