For indie filmmaker Bernardo Britto, Miami sets the scene for his next award-winning project.
Bernardo Britto with his film Yearbook (INSET), which won the Short Film Jury Award for Animation at Sundance.
Up until a few years ago, the only award of note that Bernardo Britto had ever won was that of “Best Legs” in high school. That has certainly changed. In January, the 25-year-old filmmaker was awarded the Short Film Jury Award for Animation at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival for his film Yearbook, a darkly comic piece in which a man must compile a thoughtful history of human existence before the planet explodes. This, following a Grand Jury Award for Best Animated Short at the American Film Institute’s AFI Fest in 2013 for his previous film, The Places Where We Lived, created a double whammy, which led noted industry bible Filmmaker magazine to christen Britto one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” last summer. “It’s all completely insane,” says Britto, still a little flabbergasted by the rush of acclaim. “I never imagined this could happen so fast. None of it seems real.”
Born in Brazil and raised north of Miami in Weston, the young Britto had always been obsessed with film but had trouble admitting it. The fact that he was writing scripts in notebooks by the eighth grade should have been a dead giveaway. “I was a closeted film fan,” says Britto. “I didn’t want to tell people that I wanted to be a filmmaker because it seemed like such an arty, lofty, crazy dream. I was embarrassed by it, so for a long time I said I wanted to be an architect.”
He couldn’t stifle his passion for long, however, and by high school he was making short films starring his brother and childhood friends. When they weren’t available, Britto, who loved to draw in his spare time, began dabbling with animation on the family PC. He was hooked.
That passion for all things animated and the off-kilter, melancholic tone of his work thus far would be nurtured through his years as a film production major at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and via commissions from the noted Miami film collective Borscht Corporation, which yielded his two award-winning shorts.
With his name making the rounds through the film world, and a whirlwind schedule that finds him shuttling back and forth between New York and Miami, Britto is now in preproduction for his next project: a live-action, feature-length movie to be shot between here and Argentina. “It’s exciting, in part because I don’t want to get pegged as strictly an animator,” says Britto. “I love live action, and there’s a lot more I want to do.”