photo credit: Jared Gastreich
I am a filmmaker who creates cinema with a musical heartbeat. I co-founded the Los Angeles arts collective THE MASSES with Heath Ledger, building a space where emotional storytelling and music could evolve together in fresh and profound ways.
I’ve had the joy of collaborating with artists whose work moves me: Beach House, Bon Iver, Dido, Explosions In The Sky, Daughn Gibson, Lavender Country, Mia Doi Todd, Soko, Trixie Mattel, Wild Nothing, Willie Nelson, and many others. My work with show-biz icon Barbra Streisand has led to three films together, including Cry Me A River, which won a Telly Award in 2023.
My work has screened at the Rome Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art, and in exhibitions at the New Museum, MOCA/Blythe Projects and The Luminary Arts. I served as a creative consultant and executive producer on the documentary I Am Heath Ledger, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
For the Biden-Harris campaign, I made For the Beauty of the Earth, Jesus Loves The Little Children with Tony Award–winner Betty Buckley and a children’s choir, a film created as a compassionate response to the trauma of immigrant deportations, a reminder that art can insist on the dignity of every life.
My filmmaking has been praised for its sensory immediacy and poetic engagement with music. Film critic Diane Carson wrote that my work “encourages us to look, learn, and think about our world from different perspectives in a reinvigorated way, calling us back to our senses.”
I’ve always been drawn to stories of iconoclasts and personal histories, so I continue to document the life and work of historic preservationist Larry Giles in Unbraid, an ongoing portrait of passion and place. Early chapters screened at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.
My debut narrative feature Never My Love, starring Sheryl Lee, Grace Zabriskie and Jay R. Ferguson, explores love’s ability to crack open the heart and change the course of a life.
“A prismatic love story. Amato is a radical filmmaker, willing to make a movie that travels like a river, or unfolds like a piece of music or a real human life.”
St. Louis Magazine
"This beautifully acted and photographed drama leaves a lasting impression. Amato, a veteran helmer of music videos, invests the proceedings with a subtle, dreamlike quality that gives the film an undeniable, but never stultifying, artsy feel. If you’re not already in love when you see the film, you’ll desperately want to be afterwards.”
The Hollywood Reporter
“Amato has the eye of an artist, soul of a poet, mind of an intellectual and heart of a dreamer.”
St. Louis Film Critics Association
“An uncompromisingly visionary and unconventionally methodical film (think Antonioni circa 1960).”
Twitch Film