Biography
Ruy Guerra is a Portuguese-Brazilian film director, screenwriter and actor. Born Ruy Alexandre Guerra Coelho Pereira on 22 August 1931 in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony, he studied at the IDHEC film school in Paris from 1952 and began working as an assistant director on French films in 1958.
He moved to Brazil, where his first feature, Os Cafajestes (1962), was followed by Os Fuzis (1964). The latter placed him among the leading figures of the Cinema Novo movement and won the Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. Guerra has also acted in several films, including the role of Don Pedro de Ursúa in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972).
