Felipe M. Guerra

Felipe M. Guerra (Carlos Barbosa, 1979) is a Brazilian filmmaker, film scholar, and journalist. After two decades of writing, producing, and directing low-budget horror movies, he moved on to making independent documentaries about cinema veterans like Italian filmmakers Luigi Cozzi and Ruggero Deodato and cult American producer Roger Corman.
==Biography==
Born in a small town in Southern Brazil, Felipe started working as a reporter for the city's newspaper at a very young age. In the middle of the 1990s, with the start of a niche cult of independent movies produced with VHS cameras in the country, Guerra decided to carry out his first experiments, gathering his friends to record short films with the camera of one of them.
After reading an article about the filmmaker from Santa Catarina Peter Baiestorf, who also produced shot-on-video films in a small town in the South of Brazil, Guerra began work on his first feature film, a romantic comedy called Patricia Gennice. Since then, he has produced, written, directed, and edited seven other feature films and 10 low-budget shorts.
All these films had a minimal commercial release (sometimes on DVDs recorded and sold by the filmmaker himself), or even a non-existent release, but always with a wide and successful passage through International genre film festivals such as Fantasporto, in Portugal, Macabro, in Mexico, and Sitges Film Festival in Spain.
Felipe M. Guerra's body of work is part of what Brazilian scholar Bernadette Lyra called Cinema de Bordas (or Cinema from the Edges, in literal English):
Bernadette Lyra cites Guerra as one of the most representative names of a third generation of "Bordas' filmmakers," alongside artists like Rodrigo Aragão, "who are passionate about cinema (...) and therefore employ many intertextual references".Pinazza & Bayman 2014, p. 31
As mentioned by the scholar, he used several camera support systems to shoot his films and always invited friends and family as actors, including his grandmother Oldina do Monte – who, aged over 90, starred in the zombie short film Dona Oldina Vai às Compras (aka Mrs. Oldina Goes Shopping) in 2018. But Guerra also made films with cult celebrities such as Brazilian porn star Monica Mattos, who he directed in O Estripador da Rua Augusta (aka The Augusta Street Ripper, 2014), and Spanish actor Antonio Mayans, who stars in Guerra's meta-cinematic short film Bring Me the Head of Antonio Mayans (2017).
In 2009, the digital magazine about Brazilian cinema Zingu published a dossier on Felipe's work, including an interview with the filmmaker plus a critical analysis of his movies released so far. In this publication, film critic Gabriel Carneiro called Guerra "one of the most interesting independent filmmakers in Brazil today".
With almost 30 years of activity in independent cinema, Guerra has interspersed his work as an artist with different activities as a film researcher, judge and curator of genre film festivals, and teacher, giving hundreds of lectures and workshops on cinema. He collaborated as a critic and columnist for Brazilian websites such as Boca do Inferno and his own blog, Filmes para Doidos.
In December 2022, Felipe M. Guerra was honored by the Brazilian film festival Floripa Que Horror, in Santa Catarina, and received the Special Prize for Contribution to the Production of Brazilian Fantastic Cinema for his body of work.
==Career==
In a 2009 article, the Brazilian newspaper O Globo called Guerra "The Brazilian Ed Wood" and summarized his early career: "Very close to becoming a cult filmmaker, gaucho journalist Felipe M. Guerra, from the city of Carlos Barbosa, is a cinephile and started making films in 1995. He spent all his savings to buy a camcorder and, in 1998, after six months of work, finished Patrícia Gennice".
Guerra's first feature was filmed on VHS with a group of friends. Heavily influenced by the works of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Martin Scorsese (Guerra often mentioned that it is a teen version of After Hours, directed by Scorsese), the narrative follows the misadventures of a teenager who arranges a date with the most coveted girl in town and becomes involved in a series of violent and strange episodes while trying to get to her house.
Filming began with a friend's camera, but Guerra decided to use the money he had saved up until then to buy his own camera. Despite the improvised conditions, the movie quickly became a regional cult film. 
Soon after, Guerra decided to embark on the slasher movie revival that had been started with Wes Craven's Scream and produce his most popular film: horror comedy/slasher spoof Entrei em Pânico ao Saber o que Vocês Fizeram a Sexta-feira 13 do Verão Passado (aka I Scream When I Knew What You Did in Friday the 13th of Last Summer, 2001), also shot on video and with friends and family. The kilometric and unusual title, and the fact that it is a low-budget horror film with improvised special effects produced in a small rural town, attracted the attention of Brazilian newspapers and TV, which helped transform the movie into a national media phenomenon. At the time, Guerra sold hundreds of copies of his film on VHS tapes through the mail.
Turned into something of an Internet celebrity, Felipe filmed other low-budget independent productions that were relatively successful in Brazil, such as the short film Mistério na Colônia (aka Mistery in the Countryside, 2003), starring famous Brazilian television host Luciano Huck, which was shown on national TV.
In 2011, he made a sequel to his most famous film, While the first movie was restricted to Brazilian borders and was never released abroad, the sequel – now filmed on digital video – reached a much larger audience thanks to its passage through film festivals, even receiving some favorable reviews in English.
Between 2001 and 2019, the filmmaker devoted himself almost exclusively to the horror genre, even though his short and feature films mixed these elements with humor. In an interview for an Argentine book on independent cinema, Felipe said that he did it for market reasons, as it was easier to distribute his works and be selected for festivals making horror films than comedies or other genres: "When I found out that other crazy filmmakers around the world were investing in shot-on-video horror films, I decided to venture into the genre as well, although I have written scripts for other comedies that I ended up not filming, and even an homage to spaghetti westerns, written and conceived many years before of Tarantino doing Kill Bill and Django Unchained".Moyano & Rodríguez 2015, p. 169.
More recently, Guerra has dedicated himself to making documentaries about the careers of cult filmmakers produced by Fantaspoa – Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantástico de Porto Alegre. Two titles have already been released: one about Italian filmmaker Luigi Cozzi (FantastiCozzi, 2016) and the other on controversial auteur Ruggero Deodato (Deodato Holocaust, de 2019). Right now, Felipe is editing a new documentary about legendary American producer Roger Corman.
==Filmography==
* 1998 - Patricia Gennice
* 2003 - Mistério na Colônia
* 2006 - Canibais & Solidão
* 2010 - Extrema Unção
* 2016 - FantastiCozzi
* 2017 - Bring Me the Head of Antonio Mayans
* 2018 - Dona Oldina Vai às Compras
* 2019 - Deodato Holocaust
Category:1979 births
Category:Brazilian people
Category:Filmmakers
Category:Journalists