Adélia Sampaio

Biography

Adélia Sampaio is a Brazilian filmmaker, the first black woman to direct a film in Brazil, the 1984 feature Amor Maldito. Sampaio was born in 1944 in Belo Horizonte; her mother was a domestic worker. Sampaio's interest in film was encouraged by her sister Eliana, after watching Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (Eliana later became her producer). In 1969 went to work as a telephone operator at Difilm, a Brazilian distributor linked to Cinema Novo. Sampaio began to organize the company's fil…