Pimentel made his debut at age 14 in
Luís Filipe Rocha's feature film,
Adeus, Pai (1996), which earned him the Best Young Actor Award at the
Moscow International Film Festival and a Golden Globe nomination in 1997. In 2003, he was directed by João Lourenço at the
Teatro Aberto in Bruce Graham's Lesser Demons, working with the same director on
Bertolt Brecht's
Life of Galileo. In 2006, he also participated in Pedro Ribeiro's play
Rolling Stones, directed by António Pires. He received the Portuguese
Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for his performance in
Coisa Ruim (2005), a film by
Tiago Guedes and Frederico Serra. He was named on the European Film Promotion's Shooting Stars list that year, receiving the Studio Hamburg Shooting Stars Award from
Judi Dench and
Cate Blanchett. During 2008 and 2009 he worked as a television director for production companies Plural Entertainment, CBV and Endemol. Among his works as an actor are
Mistérios de Lisboa (2010) by Raul Ruiz,
Linhas de Wellington (2012) by
Valeria Sarmiento,
Bairro (2013), for which he was nominated for the Sophia Award from the Portuguese Film Academy for Best Supporting Actor, and
Os Gatos Não Têm Vertigens (2014) by
António-Pedro Vasconcelos. As a director, he won the Sophia Award for Best Short Fiction Film with
Encontradouro, a film that represented Portugal at Les Nuits en Or, the French Film Academy's Les Nuits en Or festival, and in 2016, also at the invitation of Les Nuits en Or, he made the short film
2 Minutos with
Beatriz Batarda and
Alexandra Lencastre, being credited with directing, screenwriting, editing, and cinematography. == Personal life ==