Heitor Dhalia

Heitor Dhalia is a Brazilian film director who wanted to make motion pictures since he was a child, falling in love with the idea of telling stories for a wide audience. After attending university, he worked in advertising, but wanted to break into feature films. His first production was the bizarre drama "Nina," a sort of dark fantasy retelling of Dostoevsky's classic novel "Crime and Punishment" set in São Paulo. He made a bigger splash, however, with his second movie, "Drained," an absurdist blackly comedic tale about a strange man who owns a pawnshop and becomes obsessed with a woman's behind, coveting the one thing he can't purchase. His fixation on her eventually drives him mad. His next film was the sexually-charged coming-of-age tale "Adrift," about a teenage girl dealing with the sometimes tumultuous transformation into womanhood and with her novelist father's own extramarital affair. Despite the film starring international star Vincent Cassel and receiving strong critical notices at Cannes and other film festivals, the film was never released theatrically in the U.S. Dhalia was, though, lured to Hollywood on the strength of his films and next helmed the 2012 thriller "Gone," starring Amanda Seyfried and set in Portland, Oregon. Seyfried played a woman who hunts down the serial killer who kidnapped her a year earlier.