Fernando Meirelles was born in 1955 in São Paulo City, Brazil. He studied architecture at the University of São Paulo where he developed an interest in filmmaking. With a group of friends, he started producing experimental videos and video art which won several awards at Brazilian video festivals. They soon formed a small independent company, Olhar Eletrônico. After working in independent television in the eighties, Meirelles gravitated towards publicity and commercials. In the early nineties, together with Paulo Morelli and Andrea Barata Ribeiro, he opened the O2 Filmes production company which became the biggest production company in Brazil. His first feature, in 1998, was the family film Menino Maluquinho 2: A Aventura. His next feature, Domésticas (2001), exposed the invisible world of five Brazilian maids in São Paulo and their secret dreams and desires. In 1997 after reading the Brazilian best-seller Cidade de Deus/City of God, written by Paulo Lins, he decided to adapt it for film. The film was a tremendous success in Brazil and attracted attention around the world, after screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002. Cidade de Deus/City of God (2003) has won more than fifty awards from film festivals and societies all over the world, as well as four 2004 Oscar nominations, including a Best Director for Fernando Meirelles. Since 2002, Meirelles has split his time between international feature and TV series in Brazil. The Constant Gardener (2005,) had four Academy nominations plus four Golden Globes. Blindness (2008) opened Cannes. 360 (2011) opened the LFF. In the same period, he directed several series for TV Globo and HBO in Brazil. In addition to cinema, Meirelles directed Bizet’s opera, Pearl Fishers, and was one of the directors of the 2016 Olympic opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro. In 2019 Meirelles completed The Two Popes, for Netflix, and started filming a scientific documentary on the soil. Apart from cinema, Meirelles is a farmer of sugar cane, coffee, palm heart, avocado, and mahogany.