Jonah Ocuto
Jonah Ocuto is an award-winning director, screenwriter and journalist hailing from Woodridge, Illinois. Having grown up in somewhere completely unremarkable, he was drawn to film as a way to make the familiar look new again, shining a searing light on what many consider trivial.
His feature-length screenplay, Rises to Throne, was a semifinalist at the Big Apple Film Festival, while short films such as Dial M for Mime, Hank and Logan and more have gone on to win awards nationally. Having worked in both journalism and advertising, Jonah possesses a great perspective on not only filmmaking, but storytelling as a whole.
Currently, he is developing two short films: Georgia Peach and Bombing the Hill, aiming to develop his filmmaking skills as he looks to embark on his feature debut. In his free time, you can find Jonah at the crag rock climbing, riding his bike on the Lakefront Path, or playing dota 2 with his friends.
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Artist's Statement
Having grown up in a flat suburb in a flat state, I often found myself, as a child, questioning why exactly life felt so daunting. As a child, I possessed some clarity of where I was growing up in relation to the rest of the world -- that is to say, I understood that I was typical, average. Why then, did life feel anything but? Why, despite unending rows of trees in the Illinois suburbs, endless lawn and grey sky, did my tiny life feel so big?
It’s this question that is at the heart of all of my work. As a filmmaker, I am drawn to stories of everyday struggle - in much of my work, I prefer to defamiliarize my audience with types of people and situations in which they’ve grown comfortable with, in order to illuminate the weight and intensity of everyday life. I believe that the actions and behaviors that speak the loudest about who we are as people aren’t those that typically receive praise and admiration, but instead, are those that we glance over everyday. My goal as an artist is to get my audience to question actions and behaviors we so typically respond to with, “well, that’s just the way it is,” leading the way for a new perspective on how we live our lives in relation to one another.
In almost all of my work, gender and hierarchical relationships play a role in illuminating this behavior. I’m fascinated by traditional structures of masculinity, as well as what masculinity means in a contemporary sense - at the same time, I’ve found that through analyzing hierarchical relationships and implicit imbalances of power that are present between genders and titles, that one can find tremendous insight into the human condition. Age, and the clarity or lack thereof that comes with it, is another essential component of my work. Above all, I am drawn to intimate dramas, portraits of one person’s life, relationships, successes and failings, and I approach this work in a raw, uncompromising and honest way.
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