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”.
Project
Lesser evil
Hot summer in Lisbon. Madalena is a privileged teenager who is in love for the first time, but her corporate type mother Vera wants to take her to Angola, where she has an irrecusable job offer. So, in a rather manipulative move Madalena used her estranged father Rodrigo, whom she hadn’t seen for five years, and provoked a court case by saying she is entitled to stay with him, only to blackmail her mum into changing her mind. As a result, she now has to spend a week with Rodrigo, a childish middle-aged man who lives in a dodgy neighborhood with his sick father João, and who, unbeknownst to her, is actually a sex worker under the cover of a Personal Trainer. By her own means, Madalena is suddenly trapped in this low-class male dominated household, where people act in ways she cannot understand. Through shame, confusion, shock, empathy, and ultimately love, Madalena will come to a deeper understanding of herself and the world, whilst finding the father figure she lacked.
