Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes

Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes was a major Brasilian film historian and critic, the founder and director of the Cinemateca Brasileira, and an important figure of the FIAF community in the post-war period. In 1940, after several years spent in France, where he had got acquainted with Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque française, Sales Gomes founded the Film Club of Sao Paulo with a few others. This would a few years later turn into the Filmoteca de Sao Paulo, then the Filmoteca do Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo, until the institution finally gained its independence in 1956 as the Cinemateca Brasileira.

In 1948, the Filmoteca was admitted as a FIAF member during the FIAF Congress in Copenhagen, which Sales Gomes attended the as the Filmoteca's representative in Europe (he would become its director upon his return to Brazil in 1954). He was an almost continuous member of the FIAF Executive Committee from 1948 to 1964 (often serving as Treasurer or Vice-President), and was the spokesperson for South American archives throughout that period. In the early 1960s, his relationship with FIAF became more complicated, as his faithful friendship with Langlois, who had left FIAF in 1960, and the serious difficulties of the Cinemateca in that decade, made him distance himself with the Federation. The Cinemateca Brasileira would not reconnect with FIAF until 1979 - two years after his premature death of a heart attack at the age of 62.