Luis Villanueva is a Filipino filmmaker based in New York and is currently making his imprint on the global film industry. He recently graduated from the Columbia University with dual degrees in Film Studies and Business Management. Hailing from Manila, this young Filipino filmmaker and musician stands out for his innovative work as a creative.
Last year, Villanueva won the “Best Visual Effects” award at the 2023 edition of the National Film Festival for Talented Youth (NFFTY) for his work in post-production as a video editor and vfx designer. Based in Seattle, NFFTY is the world’s largest film festival for young directors. Many filmmakers at NFFTY have gone on to win Oscars and Academy awards — for example, Benoit Berthe Siward was nominated for the Academy Awards and an Oscar for best animated short film in 2022 only a few years after screening his film in NFFTY in 2015.
Villanueva also had the opportunity to direct a music video for Saint Levant in 2023, Dior Ambassador, and one of the world’s fastest-growing recording artists with over 100 mil-lion streams on Spotify alone. This year, as a cinematographer, he shot Vogue cover models and Forbes 30 under 30 members Irina Shayk and Alton Mason at Peter Do’s New York Times featured runway show for Helmut Lang. Let’s delve into this young artist’s career and how Filipino creatives are changing the narrative and representing the international Filipino diaspora.
The first music video he did was for his track Pí‰CHO, featuring two other all Filipino artists living in New York — kakie and Wilchai. The music video is a bilingual French-English piece inspired by house music culture and world cinema from Hong Kong to Manila to New York. A non-linear narrative drives the film’s plot as it paints the artists within an imaginative, hallucinatory vignette of love and betrayal. Villanueva was the director, editor, and director of photography for the video.
Pí‰CHO received a Remi award at the WorldFest Houston film festival, qualifying the film for consideration for a Canadian Screen Award, the Canadian equivalent of the Emmys and Academy awards in the US or the BAFTA awards in the UK. Furthermore, Pí‰CHO was also an award winner at 12 others international IMDB qualifying film festivals, including the New York International Film Awards, Rome Prisma Film Awards, and Swedish International Film Festival.
In Villanueva’s next project, he aims to expand the scale and creative scope of his work. His next project “Wish U Were Here” is a track that features Jess Connelly and Jason Dhakal, who are two leaders in the Asian RnB Scene with over 20 million cumulative streams on Spotify alone. Villanueva directed, edited, produced, composed, and shot the music video for “Wish U Were Here,” an art film that explores the use of state-of-the-art technologies at the frontier of the video installation art spheres such as projection mapping.
The first project he directed for another artist was the music video for Saint Levant’s hit single, Facetime. The video has since amassed 590,000 views at the time of writing. Saint Levant is a rapidly growing artist who was recently named as the Middle East’s first Dior ambassador. Saint Levant released the hit single “Very Few Friends,” which has amassed over 60 million streams on Spotify alone.
Villanueva co-directed the video for Facetime with Pedro Damasceno, a peer from Columbia University and a member of Saint Levant’s management. Villanueva was also the director of photography of the video’s second unit, and he contributed to VFX and editing as the project’s assistant editor. The video was a big jump for Villanueva’s career considering the wider audience, and the greater budget and production value allowed Villanueva to focus on the creative side without limitations — the film includes a variety of visual motifs inspired by other works in world cinema, such as scenes inspired by the visual iconography of Wong-Kar Wai’s Fallen Angels and other works that Villanueva was exposed to during his time at Columbia’s film school.
Eventually, Luis graduated and was acquired by Holyjungle Films — a Filipino-run film-production company in New York that specializes in content for the fashion and beauty industries with past clients including Apple, Nike, Prada, Alfa Romeo, Adidas, NARS, among many others. Talent in past productions includes Selena Gomez, Sydney Sweeney, Paris Hilton, Hailey Bieber, Gisele Bí¼ndchen, Kate Moss, Derrick Rose, Stan Smith, Andy Murray among many others. With Villanueva’s involvement, the production company plans to scale and expand into the music video and narrative spaces.
Villanueva’s first music video project with Holy Jungle Films was the music video for “Bansa 7aly” (pronounced, in Egyptian colloquial texting Arabic, Bansa Ha-Lee) — released at the same time as the original track by Egyptian artist and vocalist Bayou. This was Villanueva’s first released project involving the use of Unreal Engine, a 3D software used primarily by video game developers that is also widely used in the production of films for its capabilities in VFX and 3D CGI. For this project, Villanueva rendered a 3D model of Neo-Cairo, a neon-filled city set in the future based on Cairo, the hometown of the track’s vocalist Bayou. Villanueva also directed and edited the project — this was a big step up in his capabilities as this was the first time he worked with 3D CGI that he modeled himself using his expertise in VFX design that he picked up during his time at Holy Jungle Films.
Currently, Villanueva is working on the unreleased short documentary film KAPWA, an experimental short about how the colonial history of the Philippines’ past was the catalyst for the religious fanaticism in the Philippines, centered around the tradition of the Black Nazarene and the Siete Palabras play in Pampanga. As he ventures into the narrative and documentary space, Villanueva hopes to uplift Filipino art by expanding into the feature film and documentary mediums. Holy Jungle Films CEO Anton Esteban and Luis Villanueva hope to scale Holy Jungle Films into a multinational production company in order to create global creative opportunities for the Filipino diaspora.