About Theo Solnik — Cinematographer & Director, Haikai Media

I directed my first film at seventeen and have been working with a camera for nearly thirty years since. What follows is how that happened — the work itself, and the proof behind it, lives on my credentials page.

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I was born in São Paulo in 1981 and picked up a camera early. By fifteen I was working as a freelance press photographer, which is where I learned the thing that still shapes how I shoot: that an image is about access and trust before it's about technique. You get the picture because someone let you close enough to take it.

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At seventeen I left Brazil on my own, as far as I could get — Norway, more or less the opposite of São Paulo in every way I could imagine at the time. I directed my first short film there and studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Oslo. I've never thought of those as a detour from film. Understanding how people and societies actually work is most of what a director does; the camera is the easy part.

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Before I settled into cinema I spent time on stage. I made my performing debut as an actor and pianist in Cacilda! at Teatro Oficina in São Paulo, directed by José Celso Martinez Corrêa — one of the most influential figures in Brazilian theatre. I later performed as pianist and actor at the Maxim-Gorki-Theater and the BAT Theater in Berlin. That background in performance is quietly useful on a shoot: directing someone on camera is largely about making a nervous person feel safe enough to be themselves.

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In my early twenties I moved to Berlin to train in directing and cinematography at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin, the dffb — one of Europe's most selective film schools. There I studied cinematography under Fred Kelemen, Béla Tarr's cinematographer on The Turin Horse, who mentored me across several projects. That apprenticeship is the core of how I see: how an image is lit, how a camera moves, how light and shadow carry feeling rather than just illuminate a subject. It's the discipline I still bring to work most people treat as a technical exercise.

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My first feature, Anna Pavlova Lives in Berlin, came out of that period, and it remains the work I'm most known for. It followed a young Russian woman through Berlin's nightlife, and what I was really trying to do was collapse the distance between the camera and its subject — to make an honest portrait rather than stand outside looking in. The film found an audience I never expected: as well as a national award, it was exhibited daily for four months in its own room at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin's foremost contemporary art museum. That a film I'd made for cinemas was received as art told me the thing had resonated beyond what I'd intended.

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Since then my work has taken two parallel paths. One is cinema and documentary, screened at festivals and museums in more than 25 countries. The other is commercial and corporate work — films and photography for companies and institutions across Europe, North America and Latin America — and a strand of access-sensitive assignments for diplomatic and governmental clients, including work at state-visit level. Different rooms, same instinct I started with at fifteen: get close, earn trust, make an honest image.

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When you commission a project, I'm the person who plans it, lights it, operates the camera and delivers it. What that looks like in practice, and the full record of clients, awards and credits behind it, is on my credentials page.