Playing a Wide Field in the Editing Path: Fernanda Cardoso
It’s futile to deny who you are at your core. Editor Fernanda Cardoso is proof of that. She is an artist. When a car accident ended her promising career as a professional violinist, she channeled her creativity into composing music and music editing which led to becoming one of Brazil’s premier film editors. In just a few short years she has built an impressive list of credits in feature films, international television series, documentary films, online/streaming productions, advertising, and even the first global campaign of Facebook made also for the Brazilian market. Collaborating with Oscar winning directors like Asif Kapadia and numerous Lion Awards from Cannes confirms her critical renown in the industry but her constant pursuit of furthering the vocation of editing itself has been the most determining factor in her success. From Netflix to the silver screen, Google to Ford, it seems that there’s a bit of Cardoso’s influence all over the world.
Fernanda is careful to point out that she had something of a false start to her early editing career. She remarks, “I started by editing TV and branding content. It didn’t hold my interest and I thought maybe I’d made a bad decision but then I started editing hard subject documentaries and it was amazing! It was very difficult at times, tears rolling down my face from editing the harsh realities. A couple of years later I started editing advertisements and worked into feature films after that. For me, being able to vacillate between these different types of productions feeds every part of me; creatively, financially, emotionally. I find that I’m a more fulfilled professional and individual by taking part in a variety of styles.”
Her adventurous ethos is a major factor in the types of offers that come to this editor. Directors contact her for projects that fall well out of the status quo. Coma is a prime example of this. This crime/drama miniseries is the tale of a man who wakes up in a coma and attempts to figure out how he arrived in this state. This experimental project received awards from the London International Awards-UK and others. Remarkably, Cardoso was given only a script and tasked with creating the visual content of the film from the Getty Images library. Working with a researcher for sixteen hours per day without any breaks, Fernanda’s commitment to the project was the most vital factor to its creation and praise by critics.
Brazilian aerospace conglomerate Embraer is the third largest producer of civil aircraft in the world. When they wanted to tell their story in a short film, Directors Barbara Sassen and Nate Rabelo filmed it and then placed it in the responsible hands of Cardoso to edit. “Embraer 50 Years Journey of Wonder” rivals the most beautiful and enchanting feature films in pace and aesthetics, though it lasts but mere minutes. It’s immediately apparent when watching this short film (https://www.landia.com/project/50-years/buenos-aires/) that the same talent behind today’s most respected TV and film productions are also involved in short form films like this. Equally as inspirational but with a great touch of minimalism is the Google Arts and Culture and Museu do Futebol film which Fernanda edited this year. Released prior to the FIFA Women’s World Cup, the entirety of the minute and a half film takes place in a starkly white room with chairs and marble floors. This empty room contains only one inhabitant; Lea Campos, the first female football referee who was arrested fifteen times during the football ban that was imposed on women in countries like Germany, France, England, and Brazil. While the surroundings in this video are mundane, the emotion Cardoso has produced is hypnotizing and subtly infuriating.
Presently, Fernanda finds herself unearthing something of a time capsule. In 1974, Brazilian singer Elis Regina and Tom Jobim (the most famous of all Brazilian composers) met in Los Angeles to record the album “Elis e Tom.” Elis e Tom — Só Tinha de Ser Com Você is the upcoming documentary film which chronicles this legendary recording collaboration. Cardoso is editing the promo for this film, directed by Roberto Oliveira, which features two hours of original and unreleased material from the sessions.
Admirers of Cardoso’s work are everywhere…because her work is also everywhere. Facebook director Luisa Kratchet puts it best in professing, “Fernanda is dedicated, and extremely professional but more than that, she understands film in a way that encompasses the whole craft of audiovisual storytelling. She sees the story from a cinematic perspective and tells it through its core emotions. She can disentangle and put back together a film in its most powerful, effective, and captivating way. The way she combines her experience in advertising and fiction makes her a key partner for any director faced with a more complex, deep, funny, or emotional piece of film: whatever its final format may be.”
