ABOUT
Gianmarco Donaggio is an award-winning filmmaker and cinematographer, a member of the European Film Academy and Berlinale Talents alumni (2024).
His cinema celebrates motion and materiality, emphasising sensation over information. The motion picture is conceived as a body of performing light, a concept articulated in his academic writings. He is known for pioneering approaches to cinematography and audiovisual performance, including the construction of unique lenses and experimentation with unusual recording and projection techniques.
He has collaborated with Academy Award-shortlisted director Victor Kossakovsky, serving as a director of photography on Holy Wood Dust (2026) created in collaboration with botanist Stefano Mancuso and selected for Venice 2026. He also collaborated as the micro/cinematographer on Trillion (2025), and in the camera/lighting department of Gunda (2020), the internationally acclaimed documentary shortlisted an Oscar and nominated for best cinematography at the American Society of Cinematography (The ASC).
Over the years his projects were awarded and screened in several prestigious international film festivals, contemporary art museums, and events including; the Venice International Film Festival, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon, the National Museum of Soares dos Reis in Porto, the Monastery of Batalha Museum, Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, Biennial of Art of Alentejo (BIALE), Palazzo Fondi in Naples, the Pesaro International film festival of New Cinema, the Asolo Art Film Festival, and the Athens Digital Arts Festival.
Gianmarco holds a Bachelor degree in cinematography/creative documentary at the Arts University of Bournemouth (UK), and a Master degree in Visual Culture at Lund University (Sweden) in the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences.
His works have been supported by companies including Kodak Motion Picture, Freefly System, Resolume, Fujifilm, and Lomography.
He has an extensive experience in high-end film productions (camera/light department mainly), assisting and collaborating in the making of some of the most known Scandinavian features and tv-series, including Occupied (2017), One Night (2018), As I Fall (2018), Stories from Norway (2018), Neste Sommer (2019), Wisting (2019). Internationally he worked with 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).
Gianmarco's films are profoundly experiential, somehow referring to the process of cinema as a standalone art form: moving images, an approach theorised and praised by a few filmmakers in the avant-garde. He proposes a cinema of optical lyricism, approaching the camera as a means to encounter the world of perception instead of attempting to rule its possibilities. Therefore, he employs the capacities of the camera to unlock enchanted cinematic spaces leading to fields of kinetics.