A.D. Calvo

Renowned for his genre-blurring tales of the supernatural, Argentine director A.D. Calvo became a favorite of the independent horror circuit before changing tack with quirky character study "The Missing Girl" (2015). Born in Buenos Aires in 1967, Alejandro Daniel Calvo moved to Rio with his family aged four and then to Connecticut where he worked as a software engineer for 15 years before deciding to pursue his filmmaking ambitions in his late thirties. He first took on his regular roles of producer, writer and director on "Sitter" (2004), a Hitchcock-inspired short about an eerie apparition, and followed it up a year later with "Hypnogothic" (2005), the story of a troubled man trapped between his waking and sleeping mind, and "The Several Severed Heads of Daniel Edwards" (2005), a brief portrait of the controversial titular sculptor. Calvo then made the leap to feature-length films with "The Other Side of the Tracks" (2008), a fantasy horror about a man struggling to deal with the death of his girlfriend. Follow-up "The Melancholy Fantastic" (2011) centred on a reclusive young girl who constructs a life-sized doll in the wake of her mother's suicide, while "House of Dust" (2012) focused on a group of students who become possessed by the ghosts of an old asylum. Following "The Midnight Game" (2013), a horror in which a bunch of teens are terrorized after carrying out a pagan ritual, Calvo abandoned his signature style on "The Missing Girl" (2015), the offbeat tale of a disillusioned comic book store owner who becomes fixated on the disappearance of his aspiring graphic novelist employee.