The Small Details Within the Bigger Picture

In my experience, it’s often the quiet and humble who have a story that surpasses your expectations. Nuno Figueiredo is just that.

While we sat on the porch overlooking his agricultural land to the west of Lagos, his wife cooked us a delicious meal inside, and Nuno slowly and methodically described to me what can only be expressed as a life less ordinary. As an experienced cinematographer, he was naturally skilled at storytelling.

Brought up in Porto Santo, an island that is just 11 by 6 km and some 65 km from Madeira, Porto Santo is often referred to as the ‘Golden Island’ for its stunning 9 km beach. With around 5,000 inhabitants presently, you can only imagine the sense of freedom his family felt some 46 years ago when his parents left Lisboa to live there. Full of fresh air, beautiful beaches and unspoilt countryside, the island presented the opportunity for an ideal childhood. Away from city distractions, Nuno was able to explore his artistic side. He still returns to Porto Santo regularly to visit his mother, and the island remains a magical place in his heart.

Nuno explains that his uncle, Rodrigo Figueiredo, was the reason he became interested in photography. Rodrigo was a photojournalist for Diário de Notícias, a well-known daily newspaper in Portugal. He would visit now and again from Lisbon, bringing with him an air of excitement and an artistic soul which his nephews found contagious.

With his rebellious nature and defiance of the authoritarian rule during the Salazar dictatorial regime, Rodrigo printed one of his controversial photographs of police beating up civilians during this politically tumultuous time. The editor of Díario had not given permission and Rodrigo was subsequently fired, and the edition pulled from circulation. This incident drove his uncle to drink, and he never returned to photojournalism. But, on his island visits, Rodrigo taught Nuno’s brother, who is five years older, all about photography.

Eventually, his brother ran the photography lab for the secondary school he attended in his teens, while Nuno often had his Nikon film camera around his neck, waiting to capture what he describes as the “small details within the bigger picture”.

When Nuno was 15, he had a lucky break when he was introduced to the RTP Madeira team (Portugal´s public broadcasting organisation). After chatting a little with them one day, an idea came up that would change the course of his life. To save the RTP Madeira crew constantly flying back and forth to Porto Santo, they would employ Nuno to film and take pictures, send the footage off to Madeira by air, and pay for his efforts. So, they flew him to Madeira for a two-day intensive course.

His assignments included regularly visiting and filming or photographing the island football matches. He was also sent scripts to give to interviewees, which he would film, and then send the tape back to Madeira, where they would include it in the news footage for RTP.

At 18, Nuno moved to Lisbon to study geological engineering at university, but he never finished the course. He enjoyed the city life Lisbon had to offer in the late 90s, so he stayed in the city working in a computer store. However, after Expo 98, a school called Restart opened in the newly developed area, offering a one-year course in camera and lighting for cinema and TV. He signed up!

As luck would have it, on the first day, he met another student, Bruno Grilo, now a well-known Portuguese director of photography. Bruno and Nuno bonded at the get-go and were so talented that they were often taken away by film directors, who were also their tutors, to do little assignments while on the course. This gave them confidence and industry experience. Bruno, being the more social and feistier one, secured a job with RTP in a TV show called PICA and when he introduced his friend to the team, Nuno was also hired. His freelancing cinematography days had begun!

Along with shooting Portuguese music videos, Nuno became involved in major documentary series for RTP and SIC from then on. His first major series, a five-year assignment, was filmed in a format similar to the Jamie Oliver cooking shows and featured a Portuguese chef, Henrique Sá Pessoa, who is now a two-star Michelin chef.

More exciting assignments were to follow. Nuno went with Henrique to Honningsvåg in Norway to document the lives of cod fishermen near the Arctic. He recalls that his make-up artist’s face ‘burnt’ from the cold, going black from the wind chill while they were at a trout farm in the fjords in an open boat. The crew were warned that if they fell in, even though they had orange protective suits, they’d die within 10 minutes.

In 2012, he directed a film with an Italian friend, Andrea Ragusa, called Benfica-Torino, which he tells me had the highest audience figures ever at the Portuguese Italian Film Festival (festadocinemaitaliano.com). This documentary portrayed the tragic true story of an Italian football team that travelled to play a friendly match against Benfica in 1949. Tragically, on the way back home to Italy, the plane carrying the entire team crashed a few kilometres from Turin airport. None of them survived.

In 2016, he started filming a Portuguese version of Top Gear, called Volante, with SIC, and later GTI for TV1, another Portuguese TV channel. Here, he had the opportunity to film in Transylvania, where the second-highest tarmacked road in the country meanders around the mountain and is a road to reckon with. The ‘death’ bends make it an ideal place to showcase the engineering of ridiculously fast cars like Lamborghini and BMW, which were filming there at the same time.

From July 2018, Nuno worked on the natural documentary series Á Descoberta com. During this time, Nuno travelled to Thailand, Colombia, the Azores and Madeira, and he has many amazing stories to share.

In Colombia, the crew filmed in the Choco region called Utria, in a national park where whales go to give birth to their calves. Unfortunately, nature doesn’t perform for documentaries, and the crew didn’t experience any whales giving birth. Instead, they had an ‘Avatar’ moment when they were all in solo canoes paddling through the mangroves in the pitch black, when suddenly beneath them, the water burst into a magical explosion of green phosphorescence.

After the high of that experience, they visited the Jagua community, part of the Embera tribe, to record a tribal purification ritual! That night, the crew were all awakened by what they could only describe as the sound of someone being tortured to death. The terrifying noise echoed all around them in the early hours of the morning. They didn’t dare to move. After a long and sleepless night, they were reassured by the chief of the tribe during breakfast the next morning. He explained that it was an exorcism and that it was perfectly normal!

Another stand-out moment was at Baixa do Ambrósio, which attracts dozens of manta rays just off an Island called Santa Maria in the Azores archipelago. They were filming an underwater mountain that resonates with an electric field that attracts the mantas as they migrate. While his colleague dived deep to film underwater, Nuno was snorkelling on the surface when one manta stopped to stare at him for what felt like a lifetime. This experience remains in his memory, as he was too mesmerised to react or take any photos.

While filming in the North of Thailand, the team documented the story of a lady called Lek who was rescuing mainly older elephants from being exploited in the tourist trade. Nuno described it as heartwarming to see the elephants almost cuddling her when she went into the park to greet them as if they knew that she was their saviour. Nuno’s stories were endless, but I hope I have captured their essence in this article.

In 2019, Nuno felt it was time to step away from his adventures and spend time with his Italian wife and two young boys, so he left the documentary team. But, I see a twinkle in Nuno’s eye, and he shares that he is thinking of ideas for the next project. Even though I am surrounded by the air of a settled family man, I can feel, under this humble and calm-natured individual, that feisty burning desire that his uncle helped conjure up all those years ago.

Nuno’s life less ordinary, is undoubtedly still unfolding.

Watch his space to keep abreast of his future work: @pankadas