Carlos Conceição

Carlos Conceição is a Portuguese-Angolan filmmaker. He specialized in English Literature of the Romanticism and authored monographs about Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe, J. G. Ballard and J. M. Coetzee. He then enrolled at the Lisbon Film School, where he graduated in filmmaking in 2006. In the early years of his career, Carlos created video art, installations and music videos for bands such as Pop Dell'Arte. His first short fiction film "The Flesh" (2010) put him on the map as a talent to watch out for, but it was the short films "Goodnight Cinderella" (2014) and "Bad Bunny" (2017) that established his name as an important new voice in European cinema. After his run at the Cannes Film Festival, his short films have been shown in retrospectives at various venues, including the Cinémathèque Française, the Amiens Film Festival, the Vila do Conde Short Film Festival or SiciliaQueer in Palermo. A compilation of his short fiction was released on DVD in France in 2015 and another in the US in 2023. Carlos Conceição's first feature film, "Serpentarius", premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019, presenting a more experimental and hybrid style than the short films had anticipated. The sci-fi film was widely praised and circulated around film festivals for several months, receiving numerous awards. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Carlos premiered a medium-length horror film, "Name Above Title" (2020), which became a surprise 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 taking the award for best film at the Seville Film Festival. 2022 saw the release of Carlos Conceição's second feature film, "Tommy Guns", at the Locarno Film Festival, where it was awarded the Europa Cinemas Label for Best European Film. It is distributed in the US by Kino Lorber.