Weeks before a film opens, people usually meet it on a phone screen as a two-minute trailer, on a poster in the metro or in a thirty-second spot before an awards broadcast. Nazli Donmez produces these first encounters. A theatrical advertising producer and creative project manager, she has spent more than six years on campaigns for theatrical, streaming and broadcast releases. Her projects include the fourteen-time Emmy-winning series Widow’s Bay, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Picture winner One Battle After Another, studio releases such as Marvel Studios’ Fantastic Four: First Steps and DC’s Superman, and, most recently, the trailer for the Cannes Best Actress winner All of a Sudden.
Her work has two sides. On the creative side, she decides how a long film or series turns into a short piece of cinema of its own, guiding the pacing, the taglines, the custom sound design and the score. On the operational side, she manages production on campaigns worth millions of dollars, keeping budgets, vendors and timelines on track and delivering everything the studio needs, from the first concept to the final audio mix.
From Paris to London to California
Donmez studied cinema in France, lived in London and then moved to California, where she earned a business degree and an MBA and built a career in arts and entertainment. She chose that path deliberately, wanting to master both the soul and the structure of storytelling. Her curiosity about the human mind, paired with a deep love of art, music and cinema, still shapes how she works. It helps her understand what makes people tick, so she can sell a story well and protect its artistic integrity at the same time.
“I’ve always wanted to understand what moves us, what motivates our choices and how stories shape the way we see the world,” she says. “What captivates me is what connects people across cultures and emotions.”
Her first projects were in live culture, with international art fairs, immersive pop-ups and public events, where she could watch an audience respond in real time. The same interest in how people react to a story led her into creative project management and trailer producing. A trailer has about two minutes to build atmosphere and intrigue and make someone want to see more, and for Donmez that makes it the place where psychology, narrative design and strategy meet.
Award-winning trailers and major releases
The campaigns Donmez worked on for Problemista and Midwinter Break received Grand CLIO and Golden Trailer honors. Both are industry awards for entertainment advertising, so they are given for the campaign work itself, including trailers and key art.
She also worked on the digital campaign for One Battle After Another. It had to convey the scale and tension of Anderson’s film and keep pace with its critical reception all the way through awards season, which ended with the Oscar for Best Picture.
Later, on Widow’s Bay, the task was tonal. The series mixes horror and comedy, and a teaser that leans too far toward either side misrepresents the show. Her team cut three core teasers that held that balance. They became the backbone of a global rollout that reached millions of viewers, and the campaign also included targeted FYC ads. FYC, short for “For Your Consideration”, is advertising addressed to awards voters, and for a series in Emmy contention it works as a separate campaign with its own audience and rules.
Her most recent project is the trailer for All of a Sudden, which won Best Actress at Cannes. The film’s full campaign is still ahead, and Donmez calls it a special and important film.
Between the director and the studio
Most of the pressure in Donmez’s work comes from three directions at once. A director has a personal vision of the film, a studio has financial targets, and the campaign has to perform in many markets with different habits and expectations. Donmez treats these demands as one brief. In her experience, a campaign earns the most when it protects the emotional core of the project, because viewers can tell when a trailer promises a different film from the one they later see. “Creative advocacy and business strategy are partners,” she says. “The commercial impact is highest when you protect the soul of the project.”
Live production taught her to make those calls under pressure. At an art fair or an immersive pop-up, opening day arrives whether everything is ready or not, and she credits those projects with the composure she brings to studio deadlines. At the same time, the structure and precision of studio advertising make her live projects sharper, and the freedom of art spaces keeps bringing new ideas into her trailers and key art.
Donmez aims to stay hands-on with campaigns for festival films, studio tentpoles and global TV releases while stepping into executive leadership, building creative infrastructure and leading cross-functional teams. Her goal is to show on a larger scale that a campaign can be commercially strong and still respect the art it sells.
She often returns to a line by Federico Fellini: “A different language is a different vision of life.” For her, cinema, music, business and human psychology are all languages. Fluency in all of them lets her turn a complex story into a short, emotionally charged piece that builds atmosphere and desire and leaves audiences around the world wanting the story itself.
