Born in Porto Alegre, Guilherme Soares Zanella is a Brazilian filmmaker who graduated in Audiovisual Studies from the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos in São Leopoldo, specializing in Screenplay. Among other works, he has written the documentary feature film and 6-episode series Cidades Fantasmas (Ghost Cities) —winner of the best feature or medium-length documentary award at the 2017 It’s All True-International Documentary Film Festival in Brazil— and the fiction series Desconectados (Disconnected) (2012) and Banalidade do Mal (Banality of Evil), scheduled to debut in 2020. Guilherme is currently working on The Rough Life of the Heavenly Animals, which will be directed by Beatriz Seigner. The script was selected for the 2016 New Stories Lab of the SESC SP/SENAC in São Paulo, was a finalist in the 2017 FRAPA Feature Film Contest in Brazil, and was selected for the 2019 FEST-New Directors/New Films Pitching Forum in Portugal.

The Rough Life of the Heavenly Animals — 11-year-old Hugo travels with his mother, Rafaella, to a small and lonely coastal town that is slowly being swallowed by sand dunes, where Hugo hopes to meet his father for the first time and get his permission to travel to Europe with the school’s musical ensemble.