Gianfranco Fernández-Ruiz
FILM: WHEN BIG PEOPLE LIE
Gianfranco Fernández-Ruiz is an award winning writer and director. His coming of age short film JEROME, qualified for the 96th Academy Awards, was a finalist for the HBO Short Film Award, and won Best Boston Film at the Boston Short Film Festival. More recently, Gianfranco won Best New Filmmaker of the year by NewFilmmaker LA for their 12th Annual Awards and recipient of the Anthony Rhulen grant. His thesis film WHEN BIG PEOPLE LIE will have its World Premiere at the 51st Telluride Film Festival. His work was also selected by the Latino Film Institute for the 2024 Inclusion Fellowship for his short film GRANADA. His feature entitled Summer of Mercedes is a 2023 Quarterfinalist of the Nicholl Fellowship. Gianfranco holds an MFA from the AFI Conservatory in Directing. His shorts have played at over 50 film festivals globally including AFI Fest, Austin, Urbanworld, and Fantastic Film Festival and placed at a dozen more like Shore Scripts, Screencraft, and NALIP. Gianfranco marks culture as integral to a character’s identity, but second always to a character’s story.