About

Chiara Messineo, Senior Producer and Director

Chiara Messineo, founder of Weekend Pictures, is a London-based, BAFTA-nominated Executive Producer and Director with over twenty years’ experience making high-end documentaries and series for global platforms including CNN, Netflix, Amazon Prime, BBC, PBS, Discovery and National Geographic.

An innovative creative, she specialises in developing and delivering award-winning original films and series, guiding projects from first spark of an idea through to final delivery. Her work is grounded in careful listening and a strong intuitive sense of story, combining rigorous research with emotionally intelligent interviews to reconstruct complex events from multiple perspectives and question simplified or official narratives.

Fluent in three languages, Chiara has set up complex shoots around the world, often managing multiple teams to stage film‑quality drama recon or follow high‑stakes real‑life missions.

As a director, Chiara is known for creating the space for contributors to reveal their truth and for finding the overlooked angles that others miss. She has a rare knack for gaining access to the inaccessible – from institutions never open to the public, such as the Vatican or secret archaeological digs, to people who have previously declined all approaches, whether law enforcement officers or the suspects they pursue.

Her films often make history, from the epic – constructing a full-scale Roman lift in the Colosseum and releasing a wolf into the gladiatorial arena for the first time in 1,500 years – to the intimate, such as uncovering a set of lost Picassos sketched on restaurant napkins. Her series for CNN, Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, won multiple Emmys, while her Netflix series Vatican Girl received BAFTA and Nastro d’Argento nominations and prompted the creation of a new parliamentary commission and two fresh investigations, marking the first time the Vatican has reopened the case. Most recently, her Netflix feature documentary Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea offered a new social portrait of the Costa Concordia tragedy and reached number one in the Films category in nearly thirty countries.

A storyteller, an explorer, a mentor and a leader, she is a fearless architect of seemingly impossible projects – driven by curiosity, compassion and a belief in the transformative power of storytelling.