Director

José Cardoso

42 years · Cuenca, Ecuador · 8 films

José Cardoso, Seydú’s father, filmmaker, illustrator, and graphic designer, has developed fiction films, stop motion animation, and documentaries, constantly questioning what reality is, revolving around surrealism, consciousness, and anti-colonialism. With his feature-length documentary “Iwianch, el diablo venado” (94 min. 2021), which tells the story of the disappearance of a young Amazonian indigenous man kidnapped by the devil, he won the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival. His subsequent work, “What the Soil Remembers” (29 min., 2023), documentary examining the trauma of a community uprooted during the South African apartheid regime, won the Ammodo Tiger Award for best short film at the Rotterdam Film Festival. And his latest documentary, “Flores” (29 min., 2024), in which he links his intimate and family life during the COVID-19 pandemic with an ethnocide in the Amazon that is justified by the war in Ukraine, won the International Short Film Competition at the Sheffield DocFest 2024. His works have been presented at the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival, the New Latin American Film Festival in Havana, Oberhausen, VIFF Vancouver, among others. All his works have been created collectively at the Jiráfica story factory in collaboration with colleagues whom José considers his family.