Miguel Gaudêncio

Born in 1971, in Mozambique, Miguel Gaudencio [1] directed more than two-hundred music videos in Portugal before reaching the age of 30. His sharp, snappy directorial style earned him many awards: "Try Again", for example, won the SOL TV Music Video award for the best music video of the year 2000. By 2001 advertising agencies were lining up to utlilise Miguel's talent and he began shooting commercials for leading multi-national clients such as Macdonalds, Coca-Cola and Mercedes. By 2003 Miguel was working right across Europe; he has now directed commercials for a stable agency's across the continent and beyond, including Poland, Germany, Russia, Croatia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania and North of Africa (Maroco and Tunisia).

In 2004 Miguel directed his first short-feature, "The Hole" [2], a 30-minute film that was the standout work in a ten-part Christmas-story special aired on Portuguese television. As his commercial work continued to go from strength to strength, Miguel directed his second 30-minute feature, a taught psycho-sexual thriller, "Same Room Same Time", in 2006.

In 2008 Miguel directed his first full-length feature film, "Second Life". With an international all-star celebrity cast (Piotr Adamczyk, Liliana Santos, Claudia Vieira) the film was the biggest production budget in Portuguese cinema history, an eight week shoot on location in Portugal and Italy. The film received rave reviews [3] and is the most commercially successful Portuguese film in the first six months of 2009 [4].

In 2010 Miguel directed the first ever Polish feature documentary, "Desire for Beauty", on the issues of beauty and self-perception. It follows the winding journeys of four people who turn to plastic surgery as the last resort in their search for perfection. Aside from the obvious dilemmas, Desire for Beauty addresses numerous hidden questions, and reveals things that neither the makers nor the heroes of the film really expected. The making of the film attracted a number of renowned members of Polish social scene (Piotr Najsztub, Zbigniew Lew-Starowicz, Maria Czubaszek) and found solid support in the professional opinions of the country's top experts in various fields - from psychology to the fashion industry. The film stars Agata Kulesza and is set to be released later in 2011.

Miguel is already working on a third feature film. "The Warsaw Mermaid" is a drama, written by Evan Maloney, which examines the lives of wealthy expatriate professionals working in the Polish capital.

Persondata
Name	Gaudencio, Miguel
Alternative names
Short description	music video director
Date of birth	1971-00-00
Place of birth	Mozambique
Date of death
Place of death