Gianmarco Donaggio (b.1991) - cinematographer, artist , and director - is researching in the hybrid space between art and cinema. His works reflect a tension between a critical approach to the cinematic medium and a poetic use of it.
Cinematography & Camera department
Gianmarco won multiple international awards for his cinematography, he is known for his experimental and artistic approach. He worked on film (8/16/35mm) and digital, across many genres in fiction and documentary; he is mostly recognised for his peculiar micro and macro cinematography for which he assembles his own optics, and for his expressive lighting approach.
Gianmarco career behind the camera starts from early age as a documentary/reportage still photographer. In 2014 he graduated with two short films shot on the first Arri Alexa at the Art University in Bournemouth. Right after graduation he started to assist in the camera and light department on international feature films and tv-series including Suburra (2015), The Snowman (2017), Occupied (2017), One Night (2018), As I Fall (2018), Stories from Norway (2018), Neste Sommer (2019), Wisting (2019). He worked with many international production companies including Working Titles (UK) , Cattleya (IT), Nordisk film (DK), Fantefilm (NO), Canal + (FR), Miso film (NO), Feelgood (NO), Motion Blur (NO), 4 1/2 (NO), NRK (NO), Ape & Bjorn (NO), Encore Film (NO), Mer film (NO), Monster (NO), Sant & Usant (NO), Pravda film (NO), Animaskin (NO).
In 2016, Gianmarco started working as a gaffer, mainly on arthouse features or creative documentaries, collaborating on
works by Egil Håskjold Larsen, Knut Åsdam, and Victor Kossakovsky with whom he collaborated as gaffer/grip on Gunda (2020), shortlisted for an Oscar for best documentary and nominated for best cinematography at the American Society of Cinematography.
Since 2019 Gianmarco worked primarily as cinematographer, starting off with tv-series and feature plate units, as for instance Seizure (2019) and the Crossing (2020). He also shot intro sequences for Tv2 (NO), music videos, short documentaries, and experimental films.
Directing
Gianmarco is known for his experimental and atmospheric film pieces.
From 2018 he started producing-filming-directing his films, including Nå (2018) and Ice cream for you (2020), supported by the Norwegian cultural fund.
The short film “Q di Q” (2020) created for a 48 hours challenge by AAFF during the pandemic lockdown in April 2020 has turned out an international success, with 30+ festival selections, 10+ nominations, and 3 awards.
From “Q di Q” onwards Gianmarco has created various short films in which he investigates matter from a peculiar perspective, what he has defined “cinema materico”, after the European informale from the 1950s. Through moving-images, he explores the matter by juxtaposing it amongst different dimensional scales and perspectives. The aim is to analyse the subject as a whole and as an assemblage, in the form of cinematic atmosphere. These films, whether video installation or cinema projection, are deliberately not informative and neither constrained in the frame of narrative storytelling. The attempt is to introduce a different dimension in cinema, an invitation to look at things on a universal scale, in which as an audience we can span from the telescope to the microscope, from the objective to the subjective, from the informal to the formal.
Currently, he is about to release a short creative documentary “The Sleepwalker” which is participating to Vision du Réel film market 2021. The film is in collaboration with the Munch Museum, the Masi Museum, Avinor, and the Munch Hus.
