Sebastião Salgado
Writer-director
Portugal
Sebastião Salgado is a Portuguese writer / director. He graduated in Law and worked as a lawyer for four years before he decided to quit his job and move to New York to study screenwriting. After returning to Lisbon he started earning his living from writing for television. But cinema is his passion, so in 2016 he enrolled in an MFA program at the Lisbon Film and Theater School and started directing his own short films, which have been awarded in several festivals worldwide. In 2019 he co-wrote the feature “Ballad of a Hustler”, directed by Heitor Dhalia, and in 2020 he earned a grant from the Portuguese National Film Fund to direct his first feature film – “Lesser Evil”. In 2023, he directed a 6-episodes tv series – “Fateful Dawn”.
Project
Lesser Evil
Rodrigo is an irresponsible, immature 45-year- old prostitute fueled on cocaine and viagra, fast food and protein shakes. He lives only for himself, alone in a two-bedroom apartment that seems off-limits to other human beings, and works when his clients will – men and women looking for fantasy, atonement or relief. Between massages and sex, he enjoys giving orgasms for money. It gives him pleasure, completing a cycle of selfishness. lately his addiction has been taking over — he is more anxious, irritable, his charms fading, his body underperforming — and risks losing permission to cruise the sauna where he conducts business. It all begins to change when he takes in his romantic, broken-hearted son and his sick, musician father, two people suddenly relying on him for emotional shelter. Can Rodrigo become a real father and a real son himself, while on a path to self-destruction?
