Bruna Coutinho’s Assault on Fashion Film

By Brodie Lancaster / February 17th, 2012 in Fashion / Brazil / 558 views

When it comes to documenting the goings-on in the South American fashion scene, the person whose perspective we value most is 21-year Brazillian filmmaker Bruna Coutinho.

After beginning on her path as a director with the desire to do something—anything—related to the art, Bruna studied animated cinema at University, before dropping out because “it was expensive, and most of all, they didn’t have any structure at all to teach us.” She moved on to study photography and experimenting with video art, before enrolling in the Prague Film School’s Cinema Direction course. The intensive one-month course in the Czech Republic taught her writing, editing, directing and cinematography, and she returned to Brazil with a seven-minute short film.

“My final project was inspired by silent movies, experimental video-arts, propaganda manipulation, and consumerism,” Bruna recounts to us. “Since then, I never stopped filming everything that came into my mind. It is definitely the most important goal I have in my life: to film.”

Her focus on fashion film-making came by surprise, when she accompanied her sister Camila Valença, a fashion blogger, to São Paulo Fashion Week last June.

My older sister asked me to fly to São Paulo with her, just to make backstage pictures and videos and help her. I basically had to make videos with interviews with fashion designers from Brazil. One day I had the idea to enter the backstage rooms, and make as much footage as I can of the models, and that was my very first contact with models. At the time, they didn’t know I was filming and they were posing to the camera like it was a picture. I was mesmerized with the way they moved to the camera, like a dance, but they weren’t hearing a song. They have a connection with the camera. The camera is familiar to them, not the photographer. Before that, I had only shot young actors, friends, and unknown people from the street.

That video was the first that caught our attention, and since its release we’ve watched interestedly as Bruna continues to explore her skill as a director and the possibilities of fashion as a storytelling device. Most recently, she has explored more of a narrative bent with a piece on grief and style, and is quickly establishing herself as a new fashion film-making talent.

“I love [making fashion films] because I feel free,” she tells us. “Free to make experiments, free to unite visual arts and models. I think about a fashion film as video art almost, meaning that I have to free my thoughts and shoot. That’s it. If this relationship happens at the moment that I’m shooting, the model will feel comfortable, natural, and will interact with the camera beautifully.

“I believe that this genre will only grow up. Great brands believe in fashion films to heighten their collections. It’s nice, creative, and innovates everything that has been done before. With digital technology, everything is possible.”

Bruna, who is predominantly inspired by the work of French New-Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, has most recently completed an experimental new fashion film titled SIX, which will premiere at Portable’s Fashion on Film party, presented by Russian Standard Vodka later this month.

A film about what it means to be female and feminine, SIX features six different women embodying stereotypes through fashion, including an androgynous style which “represents the duality between women and men”. The film marks a big step forward for Bruna, as it is the first time she’s ever taken total control of her models and given them specific directions and characters to guide their performances.

To see the work of Brazil’s newest fashion film-maker, RSVP to the Fashion on Film screening here.