Gianmarco Donaggio (b.1991) is an award winning film director, cinematographer, and artist. He is researching within the indeterminate space between artistic research and cinema, and he is known for his experimental and atmospheric films, which screened in several prestigious international film festivals and museums, including; the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Portugal, the Pesaro International film festival of New Cinema, the Asolo Art Film Festival, and the Athens Digital Arts Festival.
Attentive observer of the role of the image in society and interested in the evolution of the cinematographic form, after several years of professional practice as cinematographer, he continued his research in philosophy of the image and visual culture. Driven by the necessity to walk the forest of motion pictures intuitively and critically, within the assemblage of unique optical and recording devices, his works invite the audience to challenge, deviate, and transgress the fundamental assumptions culturally and historically allocated to cinematic expression.
Cinematography & Camera/Light department
As cinematographer Gianmarco worked on celluloid film (8/16/35mm) and digital (Red, Arri, Sony), across 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.
His 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 authors including 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 is active as cinematographer, starting off with tv-series and feature plate units, as for instance participating in the VFX units of Seizure (2019) and The Crossing (2020). He also shot intro sequences for Tv2 (NO), music videos, short documentaries, and experimental films.
Directing
Gianmarco career as a film-author begins in 2018, when he wrote/directed/shot his first short films, including Nå (2018) and Ice cream for you (2020), supported by the Norwegian cultural fund. In 2020/21 he produced four short films: Q di Q, Milano di Carta, Manifestarsi, and The Sleepwalker. In this series of short films he investigates the subjects from a peculiar perspective. 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.