Sun Inside

Screening and Q&A

Jo Serfaty (Rio de Janeiro, 1983) is a director and screenwriter with a master’s degree in film from the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro and a postgraduate degree in screenwriting from the PUC-Rio.

Her work explores political and social issues such as poverty and deprivation in favelas. She has written and directed five shorts in which she deftly blends hybrid languages combining documentary and fiction. Her debut feature, Um Filme de Verão, won Best International Feature Film in the Official Sections at l'Alternativa 2020 and was screened at a number of film festivals in cities worldwide, including Montevideo, Lisbon, Göteborg, Mar del Plata and Madrid.

The inspiration for her film came from Serfaty’s experience of teaching a summer course on film in 2014, in which she asked her students to shoot short personal videos. Set in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro at the end of the school year, Um Filme de Verão is an incisive and vibrant portrait of a group of young people reinventing themselves and striving to overcome their own personal adversities in a society on the edge. Pieced together as a collage of fragments of their lives, it reveals individual universes blooming amid the challenging process of becoming an adult in contemporary Brazil.

After watching the film, we shall have the chance to hear the director describe the creative process—carried out in partnership with the baccalaureate students who feature in it—and ask her about the decisions she took that led to the final film.