Hi, I'm Inês!
Here is my life through my lens
I am Inês, I am Portuguese but I grew up in South California – that’s why I communicate in Portuguese and in English, it just comes out that way! At the age of 5, my family and I left our entire life behind in California and returned to Portugal. Perhaps that’s why I developed an early obsession with creating memories, to make sure I didn’t forget certain people and situations: I would review hours and hours of tapes of our ordinary life, write the names of my school friends on the back of photographs, all because When I grew up I might forget.
My curiosity about the camera and starting to take pictures at family events came naturally, but it was never something I considered professionally until university (I always wanted to be a biologist!), where I ended up taking a course in ‘sound and image’, without professional prospects. There, I reconnected with the hours I spent watching my tapes as a child , and realized that, through video, I could capture even more details than in photography – I realized, clear as water, the potential to create vivid and sincere memories of the moment.
Down the Memory Lane
I filmed everything around me: dinners with friends, trips, sunsets. At the end of the last year of college, I made a video, for me and my friends, with a summary of my year – the Memory Lane, a tradition I kept for 6 years. At the same time, I started to develop video and photography work as a freelancer, while still trying to figure out how to organize my life. In 2010, I received my first proposal, to make a wedding video for a friend, just as I did my year-end videos.
It was an easy challenge, filming as it came naturally to me – and people identified with it, recommended my work, and that’s how, suddenly, I had a business around video, where I could explore the explosion of emotions and beauty of the moments I was hired to record.
In the third year of my business, a phenomenon emerged. People watching my wedding videos, as if watching a series, telling me how they cried and lived all the emotions of these people they didn't even know.
Capturing the Universal Beauty of Life
My business challenged me to stay creative, on top of all the demands of running a business, learning as I went, with my own mistakes and lessons, dealing with my limits, strategically aligning my plans and so much more.
Today, Inês Machado Film is the personification of the relentless defense of what is most precious to us – our ability to create and to connect. Through stories on film, I share and rescue faith in humanity – what we all seek is to be taken back to our moments of ultimate happiness, love, and connection. These, yes, are the memories we want to take for life.
