Rafael Nantes, edt.
Rafael wanted to be a comic-book artist. He did not know what post-production was. The son of a typist who worked for São Paulo newspapers, he briefly lived in Fortaleza, Ceará, before growing up in São Paulo with his mother and sister. He attended public schools throughout his education. In the 1990s, he was immersed in comics, television, school, and football, drawing his own stories, designing T-shirts, working as a hospital office boy, and playing drums.
He discovered cinema at the University of São Paulo, where he studied Audiovisual with a specialization in Film Editing from 2007 to 2014. During those years, he also helped create film programs as an intern at CINUSP Paulo Emílio and later worked as a film programmer for São Paulo’s public library system. It was a period of deep immersion in film history, even before he made his first professional cut: his first paid post-production job came in 2012, as an assistant editor on the TV series Viajandona (Multishow).
His references span both essayistic and narrative cinema, from Yasujirō Ozu, Harun Farocki, and Chantal Akerman to Sally Menke, John Cassavetes, and Walter Murch, as well as his professors Vânia Debs and Idê Lacreta, who gave him his first foundations in film editing at university.
His first major auteur project was The Young Baumanns (2019), a experimental feature film directed by Bruna Carvalho Almeida, created through a collective process and co-edited with Luís Felipe Labaki. The film screened at the Brasília Film Festival, received an official selection at IndieLisboa, opened the Primeiro Plano Film Festival in Juiz de Fora, and won Best Editing at the 2019 Vale do Ivinhema Film Festival.
He went on to build his experience through series such as Filmmakers (Primebox Brazil), On the Path of Transformation (Canal Off), and An Extra Episode, or Not: Behind the Scenes of All the Same (Disney+), as well as working as a story editor on The Cut Brazil (HBO Max) and My recipe (Band), and as an editing tutor at EBAC. Today, his editing and assistant-editing credits include large-scale productions such as Dissident Archangel (Globoplay), Verônika with a K (Globoplay), In the Line of Fire (Star+, Globoplay), Time Switch (Star+), and City of God - The Fight Rages On (HBO Max).
He currently works in partnership with Climene Almeida, editing stories for audiences around the world with awareness and purpose. Inside his head, many other minds were already at work; for him, that is what true creation is.
