Photo by Dolores Orange

Mariana Machado is a Brazilian filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, and photographer. Since 2017, she has developed a filmmaking practice that moves between fiction and documentary, exploring porous boundaries between reality and imagination, dreams and wakefulness, while investigating the relationships between territory, memory, and decoloniality. She holds an MA in Film Directing from LUCA School of Arts, Belgium, and a BA in Social Communication from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil.
 

Her films have been screened internationally and have received awards at film festivals and cultural institutions. Among them are Ângelo (28 min, 2020), winner of the Audience Award for Second Best Film at its premiere at Mostra Ecofalante de Cinema and selected for eighteen film festivals;

I’ll Take Just What’s Needed (3 min, 2019), recipient of the Audiovisual Artist Award from Itaú Cultural; and the fiction film Everything You Want (25 min, 2024), which has been screened at more than twenty-five film festivals around the world. With this film, Mariana was one of five filmmakers selected in Europe to participate in the Next Generation, Please!, a programme organised by the Belgian cultural centre BOZAR in Brussels.

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In 2026, she released her first feature-length film, MAXITA (62 min, 2026), co-directed with anthropologist Ana Maria Machado. The film premiered in the Brazilian Feature Film Competition at Olhar de Cinema (Curitiba International Film Festival), one of the most important film festivals in Brazil, and is currently in distribution.