Ricardo Falcão is a Portuguese anthropologist and documentary filmmaker whose work bridges long-term ethnographic research and formally inventive non-fiction cinema. Trained at ISCTE, where he completed a PhD in African Studies, he has conducted fieldwork in Senegal since 2007, later extending his research to Côte d’Ivoire, Angola, Mozambique and migrant communities in Portugal. His early work on the appropriation of information and communication technologies by Senegalese youth opened into a broader inquiry into gender, moral economies and “crises of values” in contemporary African societies.

Over the last decade, Falcão has worked on several international research projects on sexual and reproductive rights, Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting and gender-based violence, including the EU‑funded MAP‑FGM and the project SEXRWA‑INVIOL, where he combined policy analysis, multi-sited ethnography and critical engagement with human rights agendas. In Portugal, he has collaborated with municipal services and a transcultural clinical psychology team, producing applied research on FGM/C, intergenerational conflict and migrant experiences, which he has described as “ethnographies of projects” at the interface between institutions and everyday life.

In parallel, he has developed a consistent body of documentary films that stem directly from his ethnographic practice. His filmography includes Walo Walo, a research documentary on water, drought and livelihoods in northern Senegal; YOON, co-directed and awarded at international festivals, following the circular journeys of a Senegalese trader driving used cars from Portugal to West Africa; De minha casa não se vê a escola, about young girls’ struggles for education in Angola and Mozambique; and the forthcoming Félix et l’enfant sorcière, which traces an Ivorian refugee’s entanglement with accusations of witchcraft, abuse and injustice in Portugal. Across these works, Falcão explores how mobility, belief, gender and structural violence shape individual trajectories, using the camera as both analytical tool and medium for collaborative storytelling.

More recently, as a project manager and researcher in an NGO working in Lusophone Africa, he has strengthened his engagement with education, gender and development, integrating baseline studies, participatory methods and audiovisual production. His current work continues to weave together anthropological writing, applied research and cinema, seeking forms that do justice to the complexity of African and diasporic lives while critically examining the global agendas that claim to speak in their name.