Tania Cypriano
New York, New York
9173310107
Documentary Feature | 2019
BORN TO BE is now playing in virtual cinemas across the country. These virtual cinemas let you watch the film from home while directly supporting local independent movie theaters closed due to COVID-19. You can watch on your computer, mobile or tablet device, Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire.
Visit FILM FORUM to watch the film. Or KINO MARQUEE to select the theater you want to support and follow the prompts to pre-order or watch the film.
Soon after New York state passed a 2015 law that health insurance should cover transgender-related care and services, director Tania Cypriano and producer Michelle Hayashi began bringing their cameras behind the scenes at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, where this remarkable documentary captures the emotional and physical journey of surgical transitioning. Lending equal narrative weight to the experiences of the center’s groundbreaking surgeon Dr. Jess Ting and those of his diverse group of patients, Born to Be perfectly balances compassionate personal storytelling and fly-on-the-wall vérité. It’s a film of astonishing access - most importantly into the lives, joys and fears of the people at its center.
Recipient of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and the New York Foundation for the Arts - the inaugural “Made in NY” Women’s Film, TV & Theatre Fund.
Documentary Series | Producer | Director | 2012 - 2016
Web-series about global traveling through the eyes of a teenager, available on its own website and YouTube channel, with support from the National Geographic Traveler. Booker Travels is an original web video series about global travel through the eyes of a teenager that explores a wealth of topics such as history, music, food, and natural landscape. Surfing and skateboarding – two of Booker’s passions – are also used throughout our episodes as a vehicle for interaction with local cultures and languages. Teenage travelers are the new explorers of the world we live in, the re-discoverers of our planet and now, the guides to our travels.
Places we visit: Barcelona, the Brazilian Amazon, the American Southwest, Nicaragua, Montauk, New York City, Morocco, Barbados, Puerto Rico, San Francisco, Sri Lanka, North Carolina and Maine.
Selected Awards:
Matador Network - 25 Vloggers to Follow, 2016
Flipkey Award - Top 10 Travel Blog, 2015
The Cultureist - 18 Best Blogs and Websites, 2013
“Traveler Of The Year” - National Geographic Traveler 2012
Documentary Feature | Associate Producer | 2014
Breastmilk is an exploration of women and breastfeeding. Directed by Dana Ben-Ari and Executive Produced by Abby Epstein and Ricki Lake.
Documentary Short | Producer | Director | 2013
A video tribute to Charlayne Hunter Gault for the commencement ceremonies at American University of Nigeria.
Documentary Series | Producer Director | 2012
A series of short videos about the use and management of fire by small farmers in the Brazilian Amazon basin. Commissioned by Lancaster University (England) and Embrater (Brazil)
Documentary Feature | Director | 2007
“Life in the U.S. is good, but it’s bad. Life in Brazil is bad, but it’s good.”
Who are the many immigrants of today? What are they seeking when building their new lives? How do they see the new land and its people and where do they go to understand both? Do they belong here or there? And do they have to make that decision?
Grandma Has a Video Camera is a 1-hour documentary about the use of home video by a family of Brazilian immigrants, which portrays their lives in the United States for over twenty years. From enchantment to disillusionment, from idealization to conformity, first-hand images and voices depict how newly arriving immigrants see their new world, and struggle to establish their final home.
A first trip to see snow, a tour to the supersized supermarket or a video letter showing the latest motorcycle offers an intimate portrayal of the uncensored, the honest, and the amazed. What has emerged from 20 years of videotaping is an incredible portrayal of people overcoming barriers: their desires, their loneliness, and their fears, to make a dream come true.
Festival Premiere
Latinbeat 2007
Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, New York NY
Broadcast Premiere
Truly California series
Channel 9, KQED, Northern California
“…an insightful chronicle of a family’s cross-cultural disillusionment, told through the moving images that a Brazilian filmmaker and her avó photographed during their many years in America.” Village Voice
“… This is not exactly the kind of immigrant story Americans are used to seeing, and it broadens our horizons considerably.” Greencine
Documentary Feature | Line Producer | 2004
Once a week, a diner in a working-class town is converted into a makeshift nightclub. Here, Cuban immigrants from New York and New Jersey gather to dance the rumba until the wee hours. In addition to explaining the rumba's roots in Cuban culture, this documentary explores the daily lives of these recreational dancers, a group that includes a cook, a mechanic and other hardworking laborers. But the film's main focus is Sundays, when the evening is devoted to the rumba.
Director: Heddy Honigmann.
Broadcast: Dutch Television
Documentary Feature | Director | 2003
Video 105 mins, Brazil 2003.
Available in Portuguese only
Saúde e Fé (Health and Faith) is a feature documentary about a remarkable program in Brazil in which doctors and traditional Afro-Brazilian religious healers work together.
In remote or urban areas of Brazil, traditional temples are part of everyday life of neighborhoods, and its populations. Afro-Brazilian religions such as Vodun, Tambor de Mina, and Camdomblé provide spiritual and physical strength to followers and those who seek help. The very poor use the religious rituals of cleansing, baths, and spiritual possession – alongside the national medical system.
But, if the patients were open-minded to all cures, doctors and traditional practitioners were not. Traditionally, these two groups viewed one another with suspicion and contempt. Hospitals and terreiros (temples) were completely separate worlds.
Then, in March of 2002, an innovative program called Ato Ire was born. Ato Ire encourages doctors and traditional Afro-Brazilian religious healers to work together to treat health problems of a desperately poor but very religious people.
We learn of the work of some of the most important players in the fight for healthcare rights among peoples of African, indigenous, and cabloclo (African and indigenous) descent in Brazil. High priests and priestesses as well as doctors and health educators work together to connect traditional healing treatments to modern medicine, and vice-versa.
Saúde e Fé was funded by the Ford Foundation in Brazil and used for screenings throughout Brazil by the Ató Irê Project and Centro de Cultura Negra do Maranhão.
Documentary Feature | Cinematographer | Editor | 2002
The Amazon rain forest has never been more at risk. Every year, another 17,000 km disappears to make way for cattle ranches or falls prey to loggers' saws. But it's not just the environment that suffers when the forests are cleared.
Director: Trilby MacDonald.
Broadcast: ARTE
Documentary Feature | Producer | 1999
Feature documentary by Sharon Greytak, features a cross-cultural world tour as the filmmaker reveals the aspirations and realities of people living with physical disability.
Documentary Feature | Director | 1997
Video 58 mins, Brazil/USA 1997.
Available in English, Portuguese and French
This is the affirming story of how Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion, has become a source of strength and power for a group of AIDS sufferers. Shot in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Bahia, it shows the rituals of Candomblé and the celebration of Carnival. It features the personal struggles and words of wisdom from those whose faith have brought endurance and pride. Rather than denying the sexuality of the population, Odô-Yá!, an innovative education program, advocates the use of condoms so that sexuality need not be repressed.
This lyrical documentary puts the epidemic in a cultural context, showing how a religion helps its followers cope with the illness, contrasting it with myopic government campaigns.
WINNER Best Documentary, New York AIDS Film Festival
WINNER Public Award for Best Film Made by a Woman of Color, New York African Diaspora Film Festival
WINNER Orilaxé Prize for Social Change : Best Documentary, Grupo Cultural Afro Reagge- Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
WINNER Best Documentary, Pan-African Film Festival, California
WINNER Best Documentary, South Bronx Film Festival, New York
WINNER Bronze Apple Award, National Educational Media Network, California
WINNER Special Jury Prize, Festival Panafricain Du Cinema de Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
Video Interview | Producer | Editor | 1997
Video interview with Woody Allen in response to getting a Lifetime Achievement Award. Commissioned by the Jerusalem Cinemateque for the Opening Night of the Jerusalem Film Festival.
Documentary Short | Director | 1991
16mm, Color and B&W, 8 min. USA
No Mirror is a film-performance of a contest between 25 women, who are putting on make-up without using a mirror. The special guests in the film are artists Curtis Mitchell and Hunter Reynolds. Reynolds appears in his drag character: Patina Du Prey. In Reynold’s performance, Patina du Prey stays so absorbed in the ritual of putting on the make-up, that the “expected” really happens! “NO MIRROR” is shot all at one location. The soundtrack is a montage of male crowds cheering in different places (ball games, wresting, horse tracks, amusement park games, etc.)
Documentary Short | Director | 1990
Video 7 mins, Brazil/USA. Available in English and Portuguese
Ex-voto is the task or object that results from the promise made by the devotee. The devotee requests the divine intervention, and promises to carry out a duty if the grace is granted. In Latin America, ex-votos have always been expressed in works or mediums of art, such as paintings, sculptures or photographs, which consequently are delivered to shrines.
Ex-voto, the video, is an offering to Our Lady Aparecida – the National Patron Saint of Brazil, in gratitude for saving the artist from an accident with fire when she was 10 years old. It explores the medium as an object of offering by using the same expression of a dialogue with the divine. As a devotee, the artist had to execute all the production levels of the video as a craft.
Selected screenings: American Film Institute National Video Festival, Artists Space (NY), European Media Arts Festival (Germany), VIII Festival de Cine Latino Americano (Trieste/Venice/Rome), Festival de Cinema de Gramado (Brazil), Festival Internacional de Video Del Cono Sur (program touring to Brazil, Argentina, Uruguai, Paraguai, and Chile), Impact Festival of Experimental Art in Utrecht (Netherlands), The Kitchen (NY), PS 122 (NY), Magdeburg Int’l. Film/Video Festival (Germany), The Majestic Theater/BAM (NY), Aaron Davis Hall (NY), Movimiento Nacional Video: VII Encuentro Nacional de Video (Cuba),
Museum of Image and Sound in Brazil, Museum of Modern Art in New York, International House (PA), Public Theater (NY), Queens Museum of Art, Robert Flaherty Seminar, San Francisco Cinemateque, Women in the Director’s Chair, WOW Women on World Film and Video Festival
Broadcast: NO TV
Documentary Short | Co-producer | Director | 1990
Video 12 mins, USA.
Tattoo and Symphony features tattoo aficionados at a Tattoo Convention in Philadelphia. To the symphonic overload of Beethoven’s Symphony, the convention’s denizens proudly show their skins. Tattoo and Symphony was made to travel internationally with tattoo conventions, and features famous tattoo artists and lovers like Bernie, Jonathan Shaw, Klaus Raeth and Roy Boy.
Invitational screenings include the Festival International Du Nouveau Cinema Et De La Video Montreal- Canada, Tattoo Festival in Coney Island, Tattoo Convention and Festival in New Orleans.
Documentary Short | Director | 1989
16mm Color. 18 mins. Brazil/Spain/USA. Available in Portuguese and English.
Viva Eu! is a documentary that celebrates the life of Brazilian artist Wilton Braga, one of the first persons in Brazil to be diagnosed with AIDS. We witness the flesh and soul of a man with remarkable strength and resolve in the face of a life-threatening illness; to find life and faith in the face of adversity.
Shot in three different countries, the film travels from Wilton’s “Wonder Room” in Barcelona to his previous addresses in New York City and São Paulo. Inspired by Braga’s final sculptures and surroundings, every scene in the film uses materials and images from his art. The soundtrack includes original music by Brazilian singer and performer Eduardo Dusek.
WINNER Best Documentary
Joseph Papp’s Festival Latino in New York
WINNER Best 16mm Film
XVII Festival do Cinema Brasileiro de Gramado
WINNER Best Editing
XVII Festival do Cinema Brasileiro de Gramado
Honorable Mention
The National Latino Film and Video Festival of Cine Mestizaje
Alpha Cine Service Award
San Francisco Art Institute Int’l. Film and Video Festival
Selected screenings: Berlin International Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Dia Center for the Arts, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, World Conference on AIDS (Berlin), Grazer Kunstverein (Austria), International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, 11th Festival of New Latin America Film in Havana, New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival
Collections: The Gallery Association of the New York State and The Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo
