Biography
Maria Diane Ventura was born in Manila, Philippines, where she studied art and advertising management. From 2003, she worked in various areas of the music business: as a talent manager for international labels (e.g. Sony, MCA Universal), as a songwriter and producer, and as a producer of music videos, live shows and album release events, among others. Parallel to these activities, Ventura attended a film class at NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2009. In 2010, she founded her own company in New York, DVent Productions, a full-service production company with which she mainly realised music videos and concerts, for example for the very popular Filipino rock band Eraserhead.
In November 2011, Ventura presented her first short film at the Cinemanila International Film Festival in Manila: "TheRapist" (PH 2011) shows a psychologist's assessment of a young man accused of rape. The film, much discussed for its seemingly ambivalent stance, screened at a number of festivals, including the International Film Festival Manhattan.
Ventura made her feature film debut with "Mulat" (PH 2014), a surreal romantic drama about the self-discovery of a young woman about to get married. This film also screened at the International Film Festival Manhattan, among others, where it won the awards for Best Director and Best Actor (Jake Cuenca). At the World Cinema Festival in Brazil in 2016, "Mulat" won the award for Best Narrative Feature.
In 2017, Ventura attended the London Film Academy. In July of the same year, she shot the feature film "Deine Farbe" ("Your Color") in Germany and Spain, a mixture of coming-of-age story, road movie and socio-political drama about the friendship of two young men (Jannik Schümann, Nyamandi Adrian), one of them an Afro-German, who flee together from the German province to Barcelona. The German-American co-production, described by Ventura as her "official directorial debut", premiered at the Hofer Filmtage 2019 in Germany. In the months that followed, "Deine Farbe" screened at numerous other festivals around the world and won several awards, including the Director's Award and the Actor's Award (for both lead actors) at the Calella Film Festival (Spain), and the Cinematography Award at the Canadian Cinematography Awards. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, "Deine Farbe" did not open in cinemas in Germany, but instead was released as video-on-demand in February 2021.
Maria Diane Ventura lives in Los Angeles (USA) and Berlin.