Filipe F. Coutinho

Filipe grew up in a family that would take him to the movies almost every weekend, where he started to develop a taste for the craft behind storytelling. In lieu of his family business, he attended the prestigious Universidade Católica Portuguesa School in the Fall of 2007. Despite three prolific and highly successful years, cinema became his passion, which only deepened on the day he watched Cate Blanchett's tour-de-force performance in 'Elizabeth: The Golden Age'. Inspired by it, Filipe created a blog to satisfy his need to both write and be closer to film. Soon after its inception, his reviews and essays became popular in the community and Filipe embraced a new project: Take Cinema Magazine, an online publication that came to existence to fill the gap in cinema-related press in Portugal. During the college years, Filipe started to broaden his film knowledge and, to that effect, spent six months in Milan studying, among others, film history and film theory. Consequently, his reviews and essays reached the printed press through Magazine HD. At this point, pursuing a career in film became an inevitability. Filipe moved to the U.S. in 2010 and spent the next two years between New York and Los Angeles getting a Masters Degree in Filmmaking. 'Black Mask' would be the culmination of a period engrossed in film noir. The ambitious short film was quickly revered by its rigor and was often compared in style and tone to many of the films shown on Turner Classic Movies. The months that followed signaled a shift in thematic interests and 'Homecoming' became the main vehicle to channel them. The short, an intimate portrait of a family on the brink of separation, was shown in four continents to critical and public acclaim. 2014 brought an extremely successful internship at Eclectic Pictures where Filipe helped develop 'Septembers of Shiraz' and 'Late Bloomer'. His strong storytelling skills were noticed elsewhere. Filipe was hired as Creative Executive at Kilin International, a company that provided consulting and production services for and between creatives and executives in the U.S., China, and New Zealand. Despite a busy schedule Filipe still found time to work closely with an independent Hollywood Producer and collaborate with The Mirror Cube, a website dedicated to the independent arts. During this period, Filipe was invited to become a part of the newly founded Portuguese Academy of Cinema, which every year distinguishes the best of Portuguese Cinema at the Sophia Awards. In 2016 Filipe started writing short fiction and television. He developed two pilots and a late night show. The same year, he partnered up with Ben Mehlman and over the next 5 years they wrote several projects together, both in film and TV, most notably, 'Whittier', an '80s set noir that led them to be selected to the 2020 Black List Fellowship Lab, during which they were mentored 1-on-1 by House of Cards creator, Beau Willimon, and His Dark Materials EP, Jack Thorne. Through this creative partnership, Filipe has had several projects optioned and has met with Netflix, Lionsgate, Amazon, Hello Sunshine, Gunpowder & Sky, Jackal Group, FX, & Village Roadshow to name a few.