Filipe F. Coutinho

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 provides 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.

Filipe moved to the United States in 2010 where he spent the next two years between New York and Los Angeles getting a Masters Degree in Filmmaking. Convinced that his studies in business would pay off, started to perfect his trade. He would now coalesce his filmmaking skills with the values learned in Business School, a tableau that proved to be essential to handle cinema's most searing hurdles. In the meantime, Filipe nourished his favorite art form by creating and experimenting within the realm of his writing and directing. 'Black Mask' would be the culmination of a period engrossed in film noir. The ambitious short film was quickly veered 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.

Born Filipe Ferraz Coutinho in Oporto, Portugal. Filipe grew up in a family that would often take him to the movies where he started to develop a taste for the projection room and 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 mode of living and his passion deepened on the day he saw 'Elizabeth: The Golden Age'. Inspired by Cate Blanchett's tour-de-force performance, Filipe created a blog - 'Cinema is my Life' - 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 of published press on cinema 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.