Climene Almeida, edt.
Climene was born in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in Bolivia's tropical lowlands. The daughter of a Bolivian mother and a Brazilian father, she was raised from an early age with an education grounded in the value of hard work, shaped by Andean culture and generations of migrants, and marked by a syncretism of Catholic, Andean, and Umbanda traditions. She earned a degree in Social Communication and found her first storytelling path in investigative and literary journalism. Facts became sensory scenes. Today, the discipline of observation, empathy for character, and the responsibility of understanding a story before telling it still echo through her editing.
At Diario Mayor El Deber, one of Bolivia's largest newspapers, she reported from the field and wrote socially driven stories ("High Season for Human Bone Trafficking," "549 Children Live Inside Palmasola Prison," "The Law Isn't Equal for Juvenile Offenders," "Investigating Forged Public Documents at the Santa Cruz Palace of Justice"), as well as biographical interviews ("Paola Berbetty, Away from the Von Borries Fate," "Erika Viveros: Autism Is a Blessing") and pieces for the culture desk and for Para Ellas, a women's magazine. In 2012, she was certified to cover social conflicts through a war correspondent training program at the Satinadores de Selva 2 Regiment, Cnl. Francisco Manchego.
Over the following decade, Climene broadened her work in journalism and communications, moving through radio, television, and press relations. In 2016, she moved to Brazil and specialized in International Journalism at PUC-SP. Between 2020 and 2022, she worked in social media and linguistic-cultural localization for technology multinationals across Latin America, including Thomson Reuters, Facebook, VTEX, and Mercado Pago. These experiences taught her to work across different registers and languages to build narratives capable to connect stories and characters to a wide range of audiences. And, like an alchemy of forms, editing found its way into her life.
Since 2022, she has worked as an editing duo with Rafael Nantes. She has served as editor and assistant editor on scripted projects, on series including Dissident Archangel (Globoplay) and Verônika with a K (Globoplay), and features including In the Line of Fire (Star+, Globoplay) and Widowers (an independent feature); as well as video content such as Temptation Island Brazil (Prime Video, social media), and documentaries including Reconstructing Pelé's Lost Goal (Google Gemini) and Ilê Funfun: A Homenage to the Centenary of Rubem Valentim (Almeida & Dale).
Climene sees editing as both a sensitive and a technical practice, drawing on Walter Murch and Karen Pearlman as references for thinking through emotion, rhythm, and perception, and on Carl Jung as a starting point for reading the symbolic dimension of characters and their journeys. For her, editing is like journalism was for Kapuściński: a craft that, above all, demands being a good person.
EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS | FENAVID Festival, Santa Cruz 100x100 | 2009 - 2010 | 100-hour production marathon
THE PARTY | Short, 6', 2009 | Santa Cruz 100x100 | NUR University |
Directed and co-written: Climene Almeida
THERE IS SOMETHING I WANT TO DECIDE, BUT... | Short, 6', 2010 |Santa Cruz 100x100 | NUR University | Directed, Co-written, Co-photography: Climene Almeida