Biography
Rita M. Pestana was born in 1987, in Lisbon, Portugal. At the age of twelve, she was given her first movie camera and she started shooting scenes of family and Lisbon city life. Soon the process of editing, which she did with VHS cassettes, became second nature to her. In 2006, she applied to Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon) where she graduated in Film with a specialization in Directing and Editing. In the same year she started to work in the portuguese company Amatar Filmes where she edited the short films "Lo Sguardo sulla Cittá" and "Cold Mountain", the last one selected for several national and international festivals. Awarded the InovArt scholarship, in 2011, she moved to Brazil to collaborate with Coletivo Teia. In Brazil, she worked as 1st assistant director for feature films (among them “Os Sonâmbulos”, Tiago Mata Machado; “Elon Doesn't Believe in Death”, Ricardo Alves Jr.) and edited several short and feature films: "Baronesa" (Juliana Antunes, 2017); "Paloma" (Marcelo Gomes, 2022), "Hotel Fortaleza" (Armando Praça, 2021), among others. In 2020, she returned to Portugal where she edited the feature film “Mulheres do meu País” (Raquel Freire, 2020), “Do Bairro” (Diogo Varela Silva, 2021) “Ouro Negro” (Takashi Sagimoto, debuting) and did script supervision TV series and the latest feature film by Luís Filipe Rocha, “O teu rosto será o último”. She won the prize for best editing for the film "Baronesa" at the Rio de Janeiro and São Luiz festivals in Maranhão. In 2018 Rita was selected for the Berlinale Talents, within the Editing Studio, mentored by Susan Korda, Gesa Marten, Molly Malene Stensgaard and Sabine Brose. For more than 2 years, she gave Cinema workshops for young people between 12 and 15 years old, in Rio de Janeiro under the program "Imagens em Movimento". She was a Cinema teacher invited by Freud Cidadão (Belo Horizonte), a psychic care center structured to welcome, treat and guide adolescents and adults in mental distress. She is currently editing, together with Claudia Rita Oliveira, the most recent film by Pedro Pinho and finalizing her first short film, written and directed by herself.
