Pascui Rivas

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.

Pascui Rivas was born in New York City. After his parents’ divorce—and after a series of trips back and forth from Manhattan to Cordoba—Pascui joined his mother, a New York classical ballerina, and returned to her hometown, Villa Maria, a small village in the Argentine pampas. It is there that 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. Pascui 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. Conceived as a film noir essay, El Sereno examines the displacement of the elderly in Argentina by means of a metaphoric crime tale with an expressionistic style. In addition to being the first film in Cordoba to be shot as a large-scale production, El Sereno 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.

Throughout Pascui’s work, it is the simplicity that lies beneath the mundane and the beauty hidden in “ordinary” people, that becomes a recurring motif of exploration. Driven by his undeviating curiosity of the elderly and his fascination with undiscovered lives Pascui directed and edited his documentary short JEAN LEWIS (Tribeca & Los Angeles Film Festival), in which we discover 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. His enthusiasm navigating all forms of storytelling (narrative, documentary, advertising) moved him to study screen-writing with Academy Award Nominee Guillermo Arriaga. Since 2006, Pascui 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. In 2017 Pascui won a WEBBY Award for his SnapChat Interactive Experience, which he directed for Toyota’s RAV4 Hybrid. That same year he was chosen by the Director’s Guild of America (DGA) among a select group to be a protégé in the Diversity Directors Initiative. Mentored by Pilot Director David Semel, Pascui is venturing into the world of episodic television, both as a director and as the creator of his own dramatic series, The Angles. Pascui’s feature debut, ORDINARY GODS (Fox Studios) explores the fragile, human side of professional soccer players. It will have its World Premiere at the 2019 Santa Barbara Film Festival.