EMMANUELE ALLAMANI

I was raised between Italy and the Bay Area, in a family whose history runs in opposites. I move through queer, multiple, and ever-shifting identities shaped by life between countries and cultures, and I learned early that identity categories fail to capture what people actually live.

Growing up Albanian-Jewish in Italy, then navigating Berkeley High's working-class communities as both insider and outsider, then living between the UK and Mexico before returning to the Bay taught me how identity shifts across contexts. Building and sustaining real relationships that make collaborative projects possible.

I move between the underground queer and trans art scene, commercial production, activist networks, working-class East Bay neighborhoods, underground music and rave culture, and academic spaces. I connect artists and filmmakers from communities on the fringes with production worlds that have more resources but often lack lived experience.

Building a filmmaking practice that empowers and transforms rather than extracts, rooted in the belief that community-specific stories can speak across worlds, connecting those often held apart.

The most radical position is not the loudest, or the one with the strongest claims to purity, but the one that uncompromisingly acts in alignment with one’s values while holding as much of the world’s complexity within it as possible.

My passion for filmmaking stems from its collective process and capacity for nuance, the way the camera amplifies subtleties, its power to convey what escapes articulation.

Trilingual in English, Italian, and Spanish.