Gabriele Mencaroni

Gabriele Mencaroni is an emerging director and cinematographer. After high school, he studied at the Luchino Visconti Film School in Milan and later at the Accademia Renoir in Rome, where he trained with prominent figures of Italian cinema. He also took part in directing labs and workshops on photography and storytelling at festivals in Turin and Bobbio. Since 2019, he has been working in television documentary (RAI) and has contributed to film productions as a second assistant camera (2AC) and second assistant director (2AD). During his time in Milan, he explored the visual and narrative language of fashion film, developing a particular sensitivity to composition and the relationship between image and body. Alongside this, he developed an interest in stop motion animation, independently creating his first short films, which were selected and screened at European festivals dedicated to animated cinema. A key stage in his formation took place at Panalight’s rental house in Rome, where he deepened his practical knowledge of professional film equipment — from lighting and grip to camera systems — building a solid technical foundation, particularly with Arri cameras, that continues to inform his work on set. His visual world is shaped by a cinema that is both poor and epic, by an intimate gaze, and by a strong attention to spaces and faces. Central to his practice is the idea of “cinema as a prayer,” guiding a form of expression suspended between realism and a spiritual dimension. His influences include Pasolini, Alice Rohrwacher, Ermanno Olmi, Tarkovsky, Terrence Malick, Hlynur Pálmason, Werner Herzog, Ingmar Bergman, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Theo Angelopoulos. In 2024, he directed and shot a Spanish-language medium-length film entirely on location in Tenerife. In the same year, he completed a new independent short film supported by an international crowdfunding campaign. He is currently working on several short films on film, pursuing a material and formal research that reflects his interest in analog processes and a more physical, tangible dimension of cinema.