Rita Piffer
Director and screenwriter
Photo: Mari Bley
Rita Piffer is a creator, screenwriter, and director. She grew up in Concórdia, a small town in western Santa Catarina, earned a degree in Journalism from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, and obtained her MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University (CA, USA), where she also taught for two years. She has developed projects for Brazilian and international audiovisual production companies, including Studio+, Gullane, Raccord, Conspiração Filmes, VideoFilmes, RT Features, and Gaumont.
She is the screenwriter of the fiction feature film “Cyclone”, directed by Flávia Castro (de “Deslembro” and “Diário de Uma Busca”). The film had its world premiere at the 27th Shanghai International Film Festival, its European premiere at the 42nd Munich Film Festival in the Cine Rebels section, and will premiere in Brazil at the 2025 Festival do Rio.
She is the writer-director of the documentary feature “Paradeiros”, winner of the Special Jury Prize in the Novos Rumos section at Festival do Rio 2024. It had its international premiere at the 27th Málaga Film Festival and was selected for the 24th EDOC, Ecuador’s oldest documentary festival, among others.
She wrote all 13 episodes of the documentary series “Retratos Urbanos” (2020) for Canal Futura, directed by Bruno Vergueiro.
She was part of the “Refinaria de Histórias” creation unit, a partnership between Revista Piauí and VideoFilmes, adapting the magazine’s reports on diverse themes into fiction and documentary series under the supervision of Sérgio Machado, with whom she also co-directed the documentary short “Hotel Tropical” (2020) for UOL MovDocs.
Her documentary short films have screened at numerous independent and experimental film festivals around the world. She won the Eileen Maitland Award—dedicated to films that give voice to women—at the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival for “Ausência de Memória” (2017). “Ghost Syndrome” (2013) is part of the permanent collection of the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project for LGBT Moving Image Preservation.
She was selected as an author for the SESC ARGUMENTA lab with the children’s/young-adult project “Os Céus de Teté”, and for NOVAS HISTÓRIAS with the coming-of-age project “O Debut de Teresa”.
Rita also served as curator of the experimental film showcase Dobra from 2016 to 2018; as a screenwriting tutor at AIC in Rio de Janeiro and Instituto Criar in São Paulo; and as a script consultant for Cabíria Lab de Projetos Documentais in 2020.
She currently lives in Rio de Janeiro and is developing her second documentary feature as director, “Sem Filhos”, in partnership with actress Bianca Joy, for which they won RioFilme’s 2024 Development Call. She is also adapting for the screen the novel “No Jardim do Ogro”, by French-Moroccan author Leila Slimani, directed by Carolina Jabor and produced by Conspiração Filmes in partnership with Globo Filmes.