Marco Bava

I'm Marco Bava. I direct and shoot documentaries and brand films, and I built Latitude 17 Films to make them where the story actually is, which is usually somewhere hard to get to.

For the last six years I've worked embedded with humanitarian and disaster-response operations, much of it in active conflict zones. I'm a trained search and rescue medic. That means a client can send me somewhere hard and know the person holding the camera also knows what to do when things go wrong.

I shot underwater cinematography on Havana Libre, the feature documentary about Cuba's underground surfers. I also filmed in Ukraine for The Bowens, a feature doc now streaming on Amazon Prime. Different stories, same job: get somewhere difficult and come back with the film.

Latitude 17 Films is small on purpose. Hire the studio and you get me on the camera and in the edit, not an account manager and a rotating crew. For bigger jobs I bring in operators I've worked with and trust, people who can handle the environment as well as the lens. The work stays in few enough hands that nothing gets lost between the shoot and the final cut.

I work with founders, athletes, expedition teams, and organizations doing work that matters. What links them is people doing something real who want a film as serious as the thing it documents. I'm built for the story, not the feed. One film that holds up beats fifty clips that scroll past.

Home base is Antigua, 17 degrees north. The work takes me a lot further. When I'm off a shoot, I sit on the board of ABSAR, Antigua and Barbuda's only volunteer search and rescue organization, running marine and land operations on zero government funding.

If you've got something real to document, and it lives somewhere most people won't go, let's talk.