At the CICLOPE Asia Pacific Awards in Sydney earlier this year, Clockwork Films director Patrick Fileti was named Director of the Year 2026.
Known for a multidisciplinary approach that moves between documentary, narrative and branded storytelling, Patrick’s work is grounded in observation: the small behavioural details, emotional textures and unspoken moments that make a film feel real.
Following the win, Patrick spoke with CICLOPE about how his background has shaped his directing style, why audiences connect with emotional truth over spectacle, and what it took to bring the internationally produced GO Mongolia to life.
Having grown up across Italy, Spain and London before settling in Australia, Patrick says moving between countries taught him to observe before participating.
“You notice things,” Patrick explains. “Small behavioural details, emotional textures, the gap between what people say and what they actually mean. That instinct eventually pulled me toward documentary, and it’s still the lens I bring to everything.”
But it was his background in editing that had perhaps the greatest influence on his approach to filmmaking.
“Editing teaches you very quickly what audiences actually connect with, because you’re sitting there watching the same footage hundreds of times. You feel exactly where attention drops and where it holds.”
For Patrick, the moments that resonate are rarely the most technically elaborate. “The answer is almost never the crane shot. It’s almost always the thing that felt slightly accidental.”
That instinct has become increasingly important in a media landscape where advertising, documentaries, feature films and phone-shot content all compete within the same feed.
“Audiences are sophisticated in a way they’ve never been before,” he says. “People can feel the difference between something constructed and something true almost immediately. You can’t fake your way through it anymore.”
Regardless of the format, Patrick approaches every project with the same intention: find the emotional truth first, then build the film around it, “If someone watches something and feels it before they clock that it’s advertising, that’s the job done.”
That commitment to authenticity became central to GO Mongolia, the country’s first global tourism campaign.
The production took Patrick and the team between Mongolia, Paris, London and Tokyo, with early starts, demanding locations and more than a few unexpected responsibilities along the way.
“I was directing, operating B-camera, recording sound and apparently also working in the smoke department—lighting piles of dried cow dung to create atmosphere in a dense forest while Mongolian warriors charged past on horseback firing arrows,” Patrick recalls.
“At some point, you stop questioning how you got there and just try not to get shot.”
Despite the scale of the international production, Patrick says the project was driven by a shared belief in the film. “Nobody was there for the money. Everyone was there because they believed in it.”
Rather than creating a conventional tourism advertisement, the team chose to build the film around something more personal: identity and belonging. “Mongolia wanted their first global campaign to feel like something other than a tourism ad, so we made it a film about identity and belonging instead.”
A defining decision was to work with an almost entirely local Mongolian crew. It allowed the production to capture the country from the perspective of those who know it best. “We weren’t arriving and pointing cameras at things. We were seeing the country through their eyes.”
Some of the most meaningful moments happened away from the set – sitting with families on the steppe, sharing meals and listening to their stories.
“That feeling found its way into the film, even if you can’t point to exactly where.”
Through both his work and his process, Patrick continues to show that the most impactful storytelling does not begin with spectacle. It begins with something honest enough to be felt.
