Around that time, I began picking up my parents' Hi8 camera and taking photographs from time to time, keeping memories of our life in Japan so we could one day share them with my grandmothers back in Portugal. What began as a child's attempt to bridge distance through images became, without me knowing it, a way of understanding and connecting with the world.

Since then, cinema has taken me across cultures, countries, and very different worlds. I have worked in fiction and documentary, but somehow I keep returning to the same questions: Who are we? What do we carry with us? Where do we belong? What connects us despite everything that separates us?

I write, direct, and photograph. They are different ways of looking at the world, but cinema is where they all come together.