Short Documentary: Maria Eduarda Andrade

Words: Etan Smallman
Photography: Anastasia Taylor-Lind

From the slums of Sao Paulo to the bright lights of London, a commitment to documenting untold stories has reaped rewards for 26-year-old Maria.

Awards can be a bit like buses. You tire away for years, honing your craft, creating masterpieces and yearning for a bit of recognition – and then three come along at once.

At least, that’s what happened to Maria Eduarda Andrade, a London-based Brazilian film-maker, who can add her 4Talent gong to a Royal Television Society Award, and the scholarship to study Screen Documentary at Goldsmiths that brought her to Britain in the first place.

The 26-year-old hails from a town called Recife in North East Brazil. “A city by the sea,” she tells me wistfully: “28 degrees in the winter; nice and warm.” It’s a world away from the setting of the work she describes as her “baby” – her touching directorial debut, Just Like Mom.

By chance, Maria heard of a Brazilian woman, Ana, imprisoned in Britain for trying to smuggle drugs into the country. She visited her in her Lincoln jail, but after the Prison Service refused permission to film, she decided that the only way to tell this desperate woman’s story would be to go to Brazil herself to meet her mother and two daughters.

In the process she would become the bearer of the worst of news, as her family knew nothing of Ana’s plight. The result is a stirring and heart-rending portrayal of three generations of single mothers and their struggle through poverty and destitution.

“It was a difficult situation,” Maria explains. “They come from a very poor background, but the characters were really, really amazing. It has a lot to do with the way I relate to my subjects: I have to be really in love with them.”

It’s clear that a burning sense of what’s fair powers Maria’s work. “What really drives me is injustice,” she confirms. “And of course I’m not happy with poverty; I come from a country with huge social inequality.”

It can’t be a coincidence that the time Maria came face to face with this social inequality – in the poorest parts of Sao Paulo – was also the moment that she decided to pursue her love of film-making.

“Before coming to London I was in Sao Paulo, where we curated film festivals with free entrance in very poor areas,” she recalls. “We made some documentaries to be used in schools, and that’s where I really decided that I wanted to do documentary film.”

It’s the “intense human experience” of documenting real life that is still the draw for Maria: “I want to keep making films that make you laugh and cry about real people,” she concludes simply. “And I think that real life is really more interesting than any fiction you can create.”