Faculty member helps students find their voice through filmmaking

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Gustavo Rosa says filmmaking can help students understand life. He says by learning the craft, students must ask tough questions, make good arguments and take big risks. Through that, they find their voice.

Rosa joined the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications in 2025. He teaches courses on narrative filmmaking in which students work together to create short films. His classes go beyond the practical tasks of making a movie; Rosa instills a deep appreciation for film — the art, the process, the collaboration and the competitiveness.

“The classes are a high-wire act,” Rosa said. “Because it’s highly dependent on the students, their interests and the kind of movies they want to make. So, every single time, it’s different.”

He added, “The reality is that teaching filmmaking is embracing the fact that all of them will fail in some ways. There are really profound lessons that come from that.”

Rosa was born in Tubarão, Brazil. When he was 12 years old, his family immigrated to Boston. Three years later, his love for cinema emerged after watching films online by Italian director Federico Fellini.

“Two of his films that really spoke to me were ‘Eight and a Half’ and ‘Nights of Cabiria,’” Rosa said. “I remember finding them on the internet somehow. I had heard of Federico Fellini’s name, I think because there was a rock band in Brazil called Fellini.”

Despite the newfound interest, Rosa hadn’t considered a career in film. He went to Williams College to study literature and political science — two majors that Rosa said would go on to help his filmmaking significantly.

While in college, Rosa started to fall in love with the movie making process. He devoted himself to watching a movie every day, a daily commitment that he kept for four and a half years. The cinematic journey helped him appreciate every part of filmmaking as he took in whole filmographies and grouped works by theme, style and era.

“I loved movies very much, but I realized that I would watch them and not fully grasp everything there was to get,” he said. “If you watch one movie by a director, it’s like, ‘OK, I kind of get the idea,’ but when you watch 20 of them, you start to understand that there’s a beautiful organizing principle that reveals something about the person who made the movies and how they get through life.”

For Rosa, the transition from viewer to creator was nearing completion.

On the set

After graduating from Williams, Rosa said, he took the possibility of a career in film more seriously. He got his master of fine arts degree in filmmaking from Columbia University and continued developing work that reflected his interest in identity and the human condition.

His films focus on character-driven storytelling and have been screened at more than 50 festivals around the world, including Berlin, Sundance and Guadalajara. For several years he worked at indie production company Symbolic Exchange under James Schamus, the co-founder and former CEO of Focus Features.

Rosa's short film “Carro” tells the story of an undocumented Brazilian immigrant living in Boston. It premiered globally at SXSW in 2018 and was licensed and broadcast by HBO in 2019.

Creatively and professionally, 2025 was a landmark year for Rosa. He had four separate feature film projects premiere at world-class film festivals. “So Far All Good,” a micro-budget feature that premiered at the 2025 Tribeca International Film Festival, recently won Best First Feature at the Athens Film and Video Festival in 2026, one of the premier experimental festivals in the United States. “Seconds Away,” a sports documentary that premiered at the Austin Film Festival in 2025, went on to win Best Sports Film at the Centre County Film Festival.

“Those Who Whistle After Dark,” a dark comedy about a family unraveling, set in Turkey, premiered in Goa IFF and won the best actress prize at the Istanbul International Film Festival in 2026. This film recently had its U.S. premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival in May 2026, with Rosa in attendance.

“Last year was the culmination of a lot of hard work over many years between myself and my collaborators,” Rosa said. “Having that kind of professional breakthrough has been very helpful in the classroom because I am able to model to students the kind of long-term commitment they have to put into their own projects and careers.”

In the classroom

“First of all, modern media has been made to fragment our consciousness,” Rosa said. “We’re being fed these images and being catered to, and our attention spans are being attacked. This is why I think it’s important that we find agency in the way we engage with art and the world.”

Rosa encourages his students to see film not as “content,” but as an art form that seeks answers about how they live, what they value and who they are. He sees each class project as a way students can “figure out life,” and learn to collaborate with each other to tell important stories and take risks.

One student in Rosa’s COMM 338 course pitched a film about his summer job repairing railroads. The class picked it. The student asked permission from the railroad company to use its facilities and he enlisted coworkers and classmates to act. He is now editing the short film with production set to wrap up this summer.

Rosa said those extra steps reap big rewards.

“He sent me a message when he was filming it, saying ‘Professor, this was one of the most exhausting weekends of my life, but also one of the best,’ because he felt like this enormous sense of achievement and accomplishment,” Rosa said. “Making a movie about your own experience is really what art should be about.”

Rosa’s influence on the film community at the Bellisario College goes beyond the classroom. Earlier this spring, he started the Uncanny Valley Film Series with associate teaching professor Marni Zelnick and teaching professor Kevin Hagopian. Each week, the three faculty members screened films in the Carnegie Cinema and followed each one with a discussion.

The series aims to “expand students’ understanding of what film can be in all its glorious diversity." Rosa said attendance grew each week sometimes garnering 50 viewers. The series is open to the public and will run again next fall semester.

“Gustavo has come to us filled with ideas for innovating and expanding the scope of our film production program,” said Matt Jordan, professor and head of the Department of Film Production and Media Studies at the Bellisario College. “His energy as a tireless filmmaker, whether directing or producing, is translating very well into teaching our students. We are thrilled to have him."

Rosa said he was “tremendously blessed” this past year in both the classroom and on the set. Looking ahead, he shows no signs of slowing down. Next fall, Rosa will be testing a two-semester course on social purpose short films, which will bring together students from multiple programs, including film, music, theater and art to collaborate on the production of short film projects. The course path was designed by Zelnick, who will co-teach the production segment with Rosa.

Rosa said he plans on continuing to build the film community at the Bellisario College through initiatives like the Uncanny Valley film series, and more student projects which focus on the kind of stories that can only be told in central Pennsylvania. He will also continue work on several of his own films that are in different stages of development, including narrative features based in his native Brazil.

“Signing up to be a filmmaker is a lifelong journey,” Rosa said. “I’m always working on multiple different projects at once, and whether or not the project works or doesn’t, you learn your lessons and then move on to the next one. That’s what I always try to instill on my students: You signed up to be a filmmaker, so now it is your job to make it count and to get better at it — no matter how frustrating.”

He added, “This journey goes well beyond the classroom, and can help them make sense of far more than just movies.”