Olbia-born and Milan-based Giulia Achenza may live in a city surrounded by the trappings of traditional high fashion, but she brings something highly dynamic and fresh to each and every of her film shorts. Still only 28 years old, she has worked with everyone from Emilio Pucci to Etro, Armani to Marras.

Wearing her influences proudly on her sleeve, a love of old world film genres - from the Italian horror of Giallos to grainy noir - runs through her output. The romance of horses is teamed with gorgeous touches of melancholy and melodrama. There is a signature dreaminess and sense of nature that runs through all of Achenza’s works, making them very much her own. “I prefer to see others through my lens and my point of view,” she explains. “My creative process starts from my intimacy - an internal magnifying glass which I use to analyse what I see outside”.

In her most recent work for Marta Martino a waifish porcelain female writhes sensually on a strip-lit floor before her poetic musings on redemption are run through a vocoder with discomfiting results; in her White Island piece for Etro, Sardinia becomes a haunting backdrop for two lovers caught up in an endless chase.

“I like to play with contrast between something dirty and something clean, rather than something elegant and balanced,” Achenza explains. “It’s a very feminine style.” The prolific creative shows no signs of slowing down her output for 2018. And it seems that work for her is a necessary compulsion - “I believe that all people working in the creative field somehow exorcise themselves through what they do”.