Interview: Carolina Costa, DoP

Selected as one of American Cinematographer’s Rising Stars of 2018, Brazilian cinematographer Carolina Costa has traveled the world photographing feature films, documentaries, shorts and commercials. She most recently shot director Minhal Baig’s coming-of-age story Hala, which premiered at Sundance and to which Apple acquired worldwide rights.

“When I was 15, I was already working with a photographer, from his lab in the back of his house,” Costa recalls of her childhood in Brazil. “That’s where my passion for images started. I got my first camera and went around shooting, and I learned the basics about exposure and composition.”

She studied journalism in Brazil then moved to London in 2005 to pursue film at the University of the Arts. “The [college] programme was very general and more theory than practice but there were a few of us who wanted to shoot so I spent my days in the camera room playing with equipment,” she recalls. “It was just very clear in my mind that I wanted to be a cinematographer.”

Costa was mentored by the late Sue Gibson, the renowned first female member of the British Society of Cinematographers and the BSC’s first female president.

“In her career she had…