Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1949, she studied economics and joined a student political group. During the military dictatorship in Brazil she was in hiding and was arrested in 1971, and then tortured and imprisoned for three and a half years. Her first feature film was the docudrama How Nice to See You Alive (1988). She also directed features like Brave New Land (2000), Almost Brothers (2003), Foreign Eye (2005), Another Love Story (2007), A Long Journey (2011), In Three Acts (2015) and Praça Paris (2017), all of them presented at Mostra. In 2011, she was a member of the documentary Jury at the 35th Mostra.