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Carlo Di Giammarino always knew he was a storyteller. Growing up in London, he was constantly writing, distracted in his classes and always itching to have a pen in hand.

“I just didn’t have much vision, but I knew I could write. As much as I messed around in my English classes, I was always scoring highly for some reason, better than the best kids,” Di Giammarino said. “I was like, ‘how is this happening?’ I figured I might just have a gift.”

Now, after leaving SU three years ago, Di Giammarino’s original documentary “Obroni No Ka Sen: An Asakaa Drill Story” has over 13,000 views on YouTube. The 21-year-old journalist found his passion as a documentary filmmaker while transcending international borders.

Di Giammarino had family from the Northeast and heard the accolades and success stories surrounding the Newhouse School, so Syracuse University was an obvious choice for him, he said. He visited for a day, took a tour and quickly decided to commit.

But when Di Giammarino arrived on campus, he was taken aback by the lack of diversity on campus and the immense wealth many of his classmates were coming from. Having grown up in London and was surrounded by great diversity, Di Giammarino said the SU campus was a culture shock, and didn’t feel how he thought it would when he committed.

“I was adamant that I could fit into the culture more than I was really prepared to do, or I was really able to do when push came to shove,” Di Giammarino said.

He felt even more out of place in November of 2019, when racist graffiti targeting Black and Asian people — which later sparked the protest movement #NotAgainSU — was discovered in Day Hall, where Di Giammarino was living at the time. When he found out about the incident, he looked around at his classmates and the school his family was spending so much money for him to attend, and began to question his decision.

“I remember it as this moment of reckoning. Like, where have I actually landed myself? For this amount of money, and this is what’s happening … How hateful these people are?” Di Giammarino said. “It was harrowing, and it didn’t sit right with me.”

By the end of his first semester, Di Giammarino said he knew he didn’t want to return to SU. Though the racial discrimination impacted that decision, when he looked at his identity and where it fit in at SU, he said he felt like his values were not reflected in the people he shared classrooms with, and that was his last straw.

“At the end of the day, I just got really stuck. I grew up in a place where I can go outside… get on a bus, go anywhere in the city, meet any friend at any time,” he said. “At Syracuse, I didn’t feel free.”

After leaving SU, Di Giammarino enrolled at the University of Manchester. While he was a writer at The Mancunion, the university’s newspaper, he was asked to cover and film a protest on campus about new COVID restrictions.

At the time, Di Giammarino didn’t think very much of it — he showed up, filmed the protest on his iPhone and submitted it to his team. Shortly after, Di Giammarino’s clip had amassed over a million views.

“I had BBC, ITV — all these major UK outlets in my inbox saying ‘can we license this?’” Di Giammarino said.

After that, something clicked for Di Giammarino. As a writer, he took hours to craft a single piece to publish, not including the time it took to find sources, do research and conduct interviews. This short video, which took mere seconds to shoot, reached millions of people in a fraction of the time. He was inspired to pivot to documentary journalism, remembering what his favorite SU professor, Corey Takahashi, told him.

“He’d tell me ‘Carlo, you need to be a Swiss Army Knife — you have to have different skills,’” he said. “I always thought I’d be writing my whole life, some editor in chief or something,… but he was whispering in my ear and I didn’t realize it until… I was older.”

From that experience, Di Giammarino decided to embark on a documentary project of his own in Ghana. He spent a brief period of time there volunteering before pandemic travel restrictions sent him home.

Courtesy of Carlo Di Giammarino

“I pretended like I had any idea of what I was doing. I got the camera equipment literally two weeks before,” Di Giammarino said. “But once I got into the rhythm, I started to realize, ‘I’m doing this. I am shooting a documentary.’ I’m doing what people are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to do with a few YouTube videos.”

The documentary, titled “Obroni No Ka Sen: An Asakaa Drill Story,” follows the rise of drill music in Ghana amid an intensely religious culture, Di Giammarino said. The youth in the country were rebelling against the religious, cultural norms and the documentary followed their successes and failures as they grow up and come into their own, he said.

In Ghana, Di Giammarino met Frank Nii Ankrah, who quickly became one of his closest friends and his roommate during the shooting process. Ankrah said he was inspired by his impressive drive, finding Di Giammarino editing videos at all hours of the night and constantly writing down ideas for his next story.

“He may be a white guy, but he is my brother,” Ankrah said. “He is not a tourist in Ghana, he is a Ghanian now.”

Larry Baptiste, Di Giammarino’s business partner in Flicky Entertainment, said he recognized this in Di Giammarino as well, saying that though he isn’t a local, that isn’t what stood out about him — his work ethic did. Now the duo has their own videography company, where they shoot behind the scenes of music videos and intend to shoot more documentaries in the future, Baptiste said.

Regardless of the success of his documentary or future work with Flicky Entertainment, Di Giammarino said he’s not in it for wealth or fame. Instead, he intends to maintain his lifelong passion for storytelling and employ his “gift.”

“I don’t want to make money. I just wanted to get something out of it, and learn, for me,” Di Giammarino said.

Published on October 19, 2022 at 10:51 pm