Cary Fukunaga

Director

“Definitely faces are important to me. One of my problems with a lot of things I watch is that everybody’s too pretty and it takes me out of the film because I’m thinking that all these people look like I’ve seen them in a café in Los Angeles.”

Biography

Cary Joji Fukunaga (born July 10, 1977) is an American film director, writer and cinematographer. Fukunaga was born in Oakland, California, has lived in France, Japan and Mexico City, and now resides in New York City. His father is Japanese and his mother is Swedish. Fukunaga graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a BA in History in 1999 and attended Institut d’études politiques (IEP) de Grenoble, and New York University in the Graduate Film Program. He has received several grants including a USA Rockefeller Foundation Fellowhship, the John H. Johnson Film Award, a Princess Grace Foundation Fellowship, and a Katrin Cartlidge Foundation Bursary. In addition to English, he is fluent in French and Spanish.

Fukunaga wrote and directed the short film Victoria para Chino (2004) while at NYU, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival and received a Student Academy Award in 2005. He made his feature film debut with Sin Nombre. It has also been announced that… read more