Portraits

Съемочная группа

В ролях

Gianluca Cosentino

Режиссер
03.08.1996

Биография

Gianluca Cosentino is an Italian-Brazilian actor, writer, and director known for his feature film debut Portraits. He graduated the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the USC School of Dramatic Arts, where he was awarded a student grant to direct an original stage adaptation of the Hungarian book The Paul Street Boys. Prior to attending USC, he attended Santa Barbara City College, where he won the Sarah Smith Monologue Competition for performing a text from Spring awakening.

Заявление режиссера

The movie came from exercising creativity within a confined space. The COVID pandemic had just started when the director started developing a script with a small number of actors and a handful of locations. These were the two starting points to the idea. The story was deliberately outlined to have four college-aged characters, and their personalities were shaped in comparison to one another in order to create contrasting and distinctive characters, full of contradictions and three-dimensional. The locations on the script would have be places in which our team could realistically book for free. Lastly, with the combining elements of four characters and very few locations, the genres deemed more appropriate for these circumstances were drama and horror, so the director, as a personal preference chose to develop a drama. Once the director decided on the fundaments of the script, he wrote and rewrote everyday exchanging ideas with producers during pre-production, actors during rehearsals, and the creative departments during shooting. The final result is a direct impact of the collective collaboration within this project. The sensitive topic of depression came to the director’s attention because of the current epidemic hitting University students in the USA. As an exchange student it was hard not to be alarmed by the high number of students committing suicide each year, and as a matter of fact, our cohort of students faced the loss of five classmates to depression in just under a year. Every single cast member has been affected by these losses. Our crew is made of twelve film students who graduated during the COVID-19 pandemic, a cherry on top to this incredible harsh industry. This is everyone’s first feature and our unity was key to bring life to this project. We needed everyone’s discipline in following covid protocols, successfully avoiding any outbreaks, and independently completing this project in a time- effective schedule of ten days of shooting. As we had no investor backing us up, there were no room for errors since our limited budget couldn’t afford to extend rental prices for gear and insurance. But despite any financial restraints, money has never been an obstacle to our professionalism, dedication, and effort to come up with the best possible film within our reach. As we are all college students out of university, our film and its production value reflects that. This is almost a no-budget project shot on locations available to us at no cost, including our own homes, and using personal equipment such as camera and sound system. We’d like to collectively thank you for your attention to this statement and we hope that you enjoy our film!