Elisabete Mendes
Cinema, Photography & Visual Narratives
Elisabete Mendes (1989) is a visual artist with a degree in Cinema, Video and Multimedia Communication from Universidade Lusófona and a Master’s degree in Cinematic Project Development from the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. She has more than 15 years of experience in film and audiovisual media, working across directing, photography, camera operation and video editing. She began her career in advertising agencies, later joined SIC television as a content manager, and subsequently became part of the communication team at TAP Air Portugal, where she remains today.
Founder of the production company Swell Filmes (2009), she has edited several cinematic works awarded at multiple national and international film festivals. As a director, she gained recognition through the documentaries Amar o Mar and Xino – Uma Causa com Fibra, both distinguished with honorable mentions in Portugal and the United States of America. She also served as a jury member for the last three editions of Altitude Film Fest (2024, 2025 and 2026).
A curious traveler, she has journeyed through more than 30 countries in search of waves and stories. The sea stands at the center of both her life and artistic practice — not merely as a setting, but as a symbolic and transformative force. Through the sea and artistic creation, she found resilience and expression, transforming art into a form of survival and healing.
"For me, photography and cinema are exercises in immersion and presence, simultaneously places of refuge and unrest. They are a search for identity, for fragments of life that, once eternalized, become reflections of entire universes. Movement lies at the center of perception. A single instant can become a symbol of desire, escape, or even an inner quest. By freezing movement, I do not interrupt it, I create space for it to be contemplated, felt, and reimagined.
Photography, like cinema, is for me a place of encounter between what I see and what I feel, between reality and its transformed perception. It is this perception, constantly shifting, ever-evolving in depth and scale, that I seek to carry into my images. It is the ambiguity between loving life and the guilt of existing.
I capture images because I believe everyday life is filled with extraordinary moments waiting to be seen. The sea taught me that every instant is irrepeatable, and that life, much like a wave, only truly exists when we recognize it and allow ourselves to be carried through it."
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