Maria Diane Ventura

Filmmaker Maria Diane Ventura has vacillated beautifully between marginalia and center- page in her artistic output. She has served as creator and collaborator, orchestrator and singular player. She has watched and learned and done, and is on a creative crescendo that is far from over. From lending a producer's hand on award winning, internationally acclaimed music videos and albums, to executive-producing a string of sold-out arena shows featuring Asian rock artists, Diane has now broken into the world of film, a craft of which she was both formal student and long-time renegade disciple. All starry roads point to her mind-bending short from 2012, TheRapist, which was cited as among the Best Short Films at the International Film Festival Manhattan in New York. It has since debuted over Singapore-based indie-film portal Viddsee, where it was the featured film in December 2013, and where, more recently, it was shortlisted as among the Best Short Films in Asia. Her first feature-length work, Awaken, an exploration of dream states and altered consciousness, bagged her the Best Director for Global Feature award at the Manhattan Festival last 2015 as well as Best Narrative Feature at the World Cinema Festival in Brazil in 2016. Deine Farbe (Your Color) a sociopolitical drama which she considers her official directorial debut, has wrapped shooting in Germany and Spain in 2018 and concluded Post Production in Berlin and LA in 2019. "I dream of making films in places whose cultures differ from my own. Ultimately, I want to prove that despite our fundamental differences, emotional experiences are universal. I want my work to be a testament to my objective that barriers are illusory and unity is attainable if we approach every idea and disparity with tolerance and acceptance," The young director shared.