Amir Labaki is the founder and director of It’s All True -International Documentary Film Festival (www.itsalltrue.com.br), the leading event devoted exclusively to non-ficcional cinema in South America. Since 2002, he is also a member of the board of IDFA –International Documentary Film Festival/Amsterdam.

Graduated in Cinema Studies at Universidade de São Paulo, Labaki is one of the leading Brazilian film critics and curators. He was the President of the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo for two terms (1993-1995, 2003-2005).

Since 1987 Labaki is a film critic at Folha de S. Paulo, Brazilian leading daily newspaper, for which he worked as Cultural Correspondent in New York in 1998-1999. He also writes a weekly column on documentaries and cinema at Valor Econômico, the Brazilian leading financial newspaper.

He is the author of eleven books on History and Cinema, among them: “Solanas on Solanas” (Iluminuras, 1993), “The Urgent Cinema Of Santiago Alvarez”(Iluminuras, 1994), “The Films from Brazil” (Publifolha, 1998), “It’s All True – Reflections on the Documentary Culture” (Francis, 2005) and “Introduction to Brazilian Documentary” (Francis, 2006).

Since 2004, Labaki is the director, writer and host of It’s All True at Canal Brasil, the unique weekly TV program devoted to Brazilian documentaries today. For the same channel, he directed in 2005 the documentary “A Thinker as Filmmaker”, a portrait of Brazilian film director Eduardo Escorel, one of the masters of the Cinema Novo movement. In 1992, Labaki wrote the script for the documentary “New Cinema from São Paulo –Photographers”.

Labaki had served in more than 20 international festival juries as Berlin, Cannes and Habana (Fipresci), Sundance (Latin América competition), Amsterdam, Florence, Hot Docs/Toronto, Leipzig, Lisbon, Marseille, Nordisk Panorama (Helsinki), Oberhausen, Oporto, One World/Prague, Tampere and Tempo/Stockholm.

The première of his first play,“Lotte”, about the actress and singer Lotte Lenya, will happen in his hometown, São Paulo, Brazil, in 2008.

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