P.J. Marcellino Launches Filmmaking Collective With African Producing Partners

On Monday, July 13th 2020, TrePalm director and Cape-Verdean Canadian P.J. Marcellino joined forces with two burgeoning film production companies with African ties to create a new joint venture that will focus on producing a series of premium television dramas. Under the imprint of the Baobab Film Collective, the group is composed of Kriolscope of Cabo Verde and Trayne Adjei Studios of Ghana with a Senegalese partner forthcoming, and director P.J. Marcellino, who not only directs commercial content with TrePalm in Toronto, Canada, but has produced award-winning feature-length documentaries under his feature film production company Anatomy of Restlessness Films. 

The focus of this new powerhouse collective will be to produce stories with a strong social conscience that bridges entertainment and the social-political realm, chronicling African stories and characters through an African and Afro-diasporic lens, for international audiences. These projects include Heirloom, a Rustic Afrofuturist SciFi thriller originally created by Canadian screenwriter Oliver Brackenbury at NSI’s 2017 Totally Television program, developed by P.J. Marcellino, and written by Brackenbury with Ghanaian screenwriter Gbontwi Anyetei; The Leviathan, a Speculative Fiction limited series written and created by Nuno Miranda of Kriolscope; and Kwame, a limited series about the formative years of Ghana’s legendary liberation leader Kwame Nkrumah, written and created by Anyetei. 

P.J. Marcellino shares the same goal with his fellow lead producers Pedro Soulé and Lawrence Adjei, which is to affirm 'African stories, visual grammars and narrative styles' and create space in the global market for such stories. 

Aside from directing music videos, commercial spots, and branded content with TrePalm, P.J. Marcellino has directed and produced web shorts, mid- and feature-length films and is best known for its award-winning music/political documentary When They Awake (with Hermon Farahi, Knock Down the House). The critically acclaimed feature premiered on opening night galas at the Calgary International Film Festival and the Hamilton and Portland Film Festivals, and was screened at Telefilm’s Movie Nights Across Canada in 2017, going on to tour 60 festivals and 300 events in 30 countries.