Amir Labaki is a Brazilian curator, film critic, filmmaker and playwriter. He is the founder and director of It’s All True - International Documentary Film Festival, the leading and oldest event devoted exclusively to non-ficcional cinema in Latin America.
He was the President of the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo for two terms (1993-1995, 2003-2005). From 2003 to 2012, he was also a member of the board of IDFA –International Documentary Film Festival/Amsterdam.
Labaki has served at juries of more than 30 International and Brazilian film festivals, as Sundance (Latin American jury, USA), IDFA (The Netherlands), Moscow (documentaries), Dok-Leipzig, CPH:DOX, Hot Docs and Montreal (Canada), FID-Marseille (France), Tampere and Helsinki (Finland), Festival dei Popoli (Florence, Italy), Tempo (Sweden), Human Rights Festival-Prague and Jihlava (Czech Republic), Lisbon, Porto and Vila do Conde (Portugal), Valdívia (Chile), Brasília, Gramado, Recife and São Paulo Internacional Film Festival (Brazil).
Since 2002, Labaki writes the weekly column "It‘s All True" on documentaries and cinema at Valor Econômico, the Brazilian leading financial newspaper. He also writes since 1985 at Folha de S. Paulo, the Brazilian leading daily newspaper, for which he worked as editorialist (1985-1987), film critic and Cultural Correspondent in New York (1998-1999). He is the author of 13 books on history and cinema, among them “1961 – The Crisis of the Resignation and The Parlamentarist Solution” (Brasiliense, 1986), "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), "Introduction to Brazilian Documentary" (Francis, 2006), “It’s All Cinema – 15 Years of It’s All True” (Imprensa Oficial, 2010) and “The Truth Of Each One” (Cosac Naify, 2015).
Since 2004, Labaki is the director, writer and host of It’s All True at Canal Brasil, the leading and oldest weekly TV program devoted to Brazilian documentaries today. Fot the same pay channel, he produced, directed and hosted the series “Real Filmmakers” (2015). From 2010 to 2013, he was the international curator and host of the documentary slot "Cultura Documentários" at TV Cultura - São Paulo.
The première of his first play, "Lenya" (2006), about the actress and singer Lotte Lenya, took place in Sesc - SP in 2008, with Mônica Guimarães as Lenya and Regina Galdino as the stage director. In 2014, he co-produced and co-translated the Brazilian première of Ingmar Bergman’s “After the Rehearsal”.
In 2005 Labaki directed for Canal Brasil the documentary "A Thinker as Filmmaker", a portrait of Brazilian film director Eduardo Escorel, one of the masters of the Cinema Novo movement. "27 Scenes about Jorgen Leth" (2009), his first feature documentary, was selected fot CPH-DOX (Denmark), Docudays (Liban), Jihlava (Czech Republic), DocLisboa (Portugal), Habana Film Festival (Cuba), Festival do Rio and São Paulo International Film Festival (Brazil).