Petra Costa

Petra Costa (born 8 July 1983) is a Brazilian filmmaker and actress whose work intertwines intimate family histories with the tumultuous politics of contemporary Brazil. Raised in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, she is the daughter of left‑wing activists who opposed the military dictatorship and the granddaughter of Gabriel Donato de Andrade, a co‑founder of the construction conglomerate Andrade Gutierrez, a name later linked to the massive corruption scandals that shook the nation in 2015. Her early exposure to political dissent and corporate power shaped a worldview that would later surface in her documentaries. Costa began studying theater at fourteen, later attending the Dramatic Arts School of the University of São Paulo, and earned a summa cum laude degree in Anthropology from Barnard College, Columbia University. She then completed a master’s in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics, focusing on trauma, a theme that recurs throughout her cinematic oeuvre. Influenced by Gillo Pontecorvo, Agnès Varda, Chris Marker and Patricio Guzmán, she blends essayistic narration with personal reflection, creating films that feel both scholarly and deeply emotional. Her debut short Undertow Eyes (2009) won multiple international awards and was screened at MoMA, heralding her arrival on the global stage. The feature documentary Elena (2012) became the most‑watched documentary in Brazil in 2013, earning accolades at Havana, Brasília and DOCSDF, and drawing praise from The New York Times as “a cinematic dream.” Costa’s collaborative project Olmo and the Seagull (2014), co‑directed with Lea Glob, secured the Jury’s Young Director Prize at Locarno and sparked public debate on reproductive rights in Brazil, leading her to launch the “My Body, My Rules” campaign that reached over 13 million viewers. In 2019, The Edge of Democracy premiered at Sundance and received a Peabody Award, an Academy Award nomination, and widespread acclaim for its unprecedented access to presidents Lula, Dilma and Bolsonaro, while also revisiting her own family’s involvement in the country’s political upheavals. Most recently, Costa directed Apocalypse in the Tropics (2024), a Netflix documentary examining the rise of evangelical far‑right politics supporting Jair Bolsonaro, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival and will release worldwide in 2025. Throughout her career, Petra Costa has remained a bold voice, using documentary cinema to confront trauma, memory, and the fragile state of Brazilian democracy.