Pro
Profile Complete
Pro
Profile Complete
Argentine/American Multi Award-winning Director of Films & Commercials.
Pascui Rivas has been shaping the U.S. Hispanic Market directing national campaigns and winning the most prestigious awards, including the first Cannes “Lion” in the history of advertising agency Conill Saatchi & Saatchi, a “Gold Medal” at the New York Festivals, and a “Best of Show” at the AdAge Awards for a film he directed for UNICEF. His work in documentaries and commercials features high-profile Latin American artists, such as Goyo, Camila, Elvis Crespo, Soledad Pastorutti and Natalia Lafourcade.
Life
By the time Pascui started directing professionally he had already worked for a plumbing company; sold ice-cream on a bicycle; and paid for his film studies teaching English as a Second Language, in Argentina. Born in New York City, he and his mother who was a New York classical ballerina returned to her hometown, Villa Maria, a small village in the Argentine Pampas where Pascui grew up. At age nineteen, he temporarily set aside his passion for composing and recording music, in pursuit of a visual art form that would allow him to both, shape the intense experiences of uprootedness, change and loss lived as a child, and to honor and compare the idiosyncrasy of life in Argentina with his equally intriguing first-world background: He graduated from an intensive five-year Film Directing program at Cordoba’s National University where he directed El Sereno (The Night Watchman) as his thesis assignment. This film was the Winner of the Kodak Film School Competition and was selected by legendary cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs to represent Argentina at the Cannes Film Festival.
Commercials & Documentaries
After moving to Los Angeles Pascui begins to combine his passion for Documentary Filmmaking with his work as a Director and Lead Editor for national commercial campaigns. This enabled him to hire and collaborate the highest ranked professionals in the industry: including cinematographers Fred Elmes, Stefan Czapsky and Guillermo Navarro. His short documentary “Kid” for the UNICEF Tap Water Project was the Winner of the Gold Medal at the 2011 New York Festivals.
Driven by his undeviating curiosity and his fascination with undiscovered lives, through his documentary short “Jean Lewis” (Tribeca & Los Angeles Film Festival) Pascui
discovers the lonely soul of an elderly building manager and former female Hollywood reporter who was connected to some of most renowned stars of the 60's and 70’s.
The simplicity that lies beneath the mundane and the beauty hidden in “ordinary” people have becomes a recurring motif of exploration for Pascui. His feature debut “Ordinary Gods” (Fox Studios) explores the fragile, human side of professional soccer players. This film had its World Premiere at the 2019 Santa Barbara Film Festival).
Later this year Pascui directs and produces a documentary short on the book by author Jonathan Mooney ,“Normal Sucks.” Tackling the tyranny of "normal" and celebrating the power of different this film his being screened at the most educational institutions, including the Lab School at UCLA.
At present time Pascui is nearing completion of his second feature documentary “MANDE.” Shot over the course of a decade it portrays the employer-employee relationship between Willie, a Californian journeyman plumber, and Felipe, his Mexican apprentice.