Carlos Conceição

Carlos Conceição was born on Aug 05, 1979 in Angola. Carlos Conceição's big-screen debut came with Two Drifters directed by João Pedro Rodrigues in 2005.

Carlos Conceição was born in Angola amidst the partisan war and the conflicts between the Soviet Union and South Africa. Following a childhood fueled by spy films and italo disco, he moved to Portugal at 12 years of age, where he discovered Sonic Youth and Tennessee Williams. He went back to Angola from 1997 to 2002, where he specialized in English Literature of the Romanticism, writing a monograph on Frankenstein and a dissertation on Edgar Allan Poe. He then enrolled in the Lisbon Film School, from where he left in 2006 with a degree in film directing. In the first years of his career, Carlos created video art, installations, and music videos for bands like Pop Dell'Arte and Mundo Cão, and was a regular presence in art shows in several European cities. His first short fiction film "The Flesh" (2010) put him on the map as a talent to watch, but it was the short films "Goodnight Cinderella" (2014) and "Bad Bunny" (2017) that established his name as an important voice in new European cinema. After his run at the Cannes Film Festival, his short film work has been shown in retrospectives at various places, including the Cinémathèque Française, the Amiens Film Festival, the Vila do Conde Short Film Festival, or SiciliaQueer in Palermo. A compilation of the short films was released on DVD in France. Carlos Conceição's first feature film, "Serpentarius", premiered at the Berlin festival in 2019, presenting a more experimental and hybrid style than the shorts had let him anticipate. The sci-fi film was widely praised and circulated for several months through film festivals, receiving numerous awards. During the Covid 19 pandemic, Carlos managed to premiere a medium-length horror film, "Name Above Title" (2020) which surprisingly became a hit at genre festivals and a favorite among horror fans, winning the prestigious silver Méliès in Strasbourg, competing in Sitges for the gold Méliès, and receiving the best film award at the Seville Film Festival. 2022 was the year of the premiere of Carlos Conceição's second feature film, "Tommy Guns", this time at the great Locarno Film Festival.