Director, writer and composer Maximianno Cobra was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Beginning his career as an orchestra conductor, it is here Maximianno learnt the “essential value of the text as the epicentre that leads a performing artist to build the spiritual and physical life of either a music score or a character”. From a very early age he discovered his passion for film seeing Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece "Metropolis" (1927); initializing a lifelong fascination with German expressionism. Spending much of his formative years absorbing the great works of cinema, his understanding of storytelling was enriched after watching Fellini's "Amarcord" (1973), Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) and Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941); but it was a love of Olivier's "Hamlet" (1950) that first ventured him into the magnificent world of Shakespeare. “Discovering Shakespeare was" - in his own words was - “an existential upheaval. He impacted me the same way Bach's music had."