After earning his Bachelor's Degree in Graphic Design, Giovanni Rustanto started his professional career as a fashion and art photographer. He took some of the skills from the university and studied the art of photography on his own. He spent five years as a professional fashion photographer before deciding to shift into filmmaking. Then after a firm decision which he has to abandon his comfort zone jobs, he joined a summer workshop to study filmmaking at The Prague Film School. Shortly after, he pursued a Master's Degree in filmmaking studies at a small film school under FAMU, Prague, titled FIOFA in Ohrid, Macedonia.
His personal, real-life memories of growing up in a very repressive middle-upper Chinese-Indonesian family were always the inspiration for his films. It is a cinema that allows him to explore and combine various genres to retell those memories, from hyper-realism and magical-realism to science fiction. He is also interested in exploring the socio-political, historical, ethnic-racial, and cultural-mysticism aspects of his country, Indonesia. Therefore, he has always placed a core on family conditions in his storytelling to make it more universal. This is also related to his vision: to bring local tales and stories to be recognized even further internationally.
He has also established a platform for aspiring filmmakers dubbed as “Sinema5” (www.sinema5.com) that focuses on short films while carrying the vision and primary objective to gather various short films created by young directors and filmmakers from all regions in Indonesia. Recently, he was accepted as a participant in BIFAN NAFF Fantastic Film School 2021 in Bucheon, South Korea. Also, his recent mini-series project 'GLORIA' has been accepted into Torino Film Lab (TFL) Next TV Series Workshop.
