Film Director and Art Director

A storyteller with a surreal twist

Mónica Santos is a multifaceted author with two Sophia awards from the Portuguese Film Academy and a nomination for the Césars from the French Academy to her name.

With a unique artistic vision, she creates universes that reinvent reality, giving them a poetic and surreal flavour that unsettles our perception.

After completing her master’s degree at the Royal College of Art on a Gulbenkian scholarship, she worked with renown Portuguese filmmakers such as Manoel de Oliveira and José Fonseca e Costa, as well as in various genres: cinema, advertising, documentary and television fiction.

The short films “Amélia & Duarte” and “Entre Sombras” combine the technique of animation with real images, and have won national and international awards, and were chosen to represent Portuguese cinema on the tour of the world cinema academies “Les Nuits en Or”.

His most recent films, “The Pink Jacket”, based on a PIDE inspector, and “Palma”, a surreal story about bereavement, are touring festivals all over the world and have already garnered several nominations and awards.