Ghost Cities: The 58th Viennale Leonardo Goi January 2021 Festival Reports Legally speaking, I wasn’t sure if the trip would amount to trouble. I’d read the news, and made a few calls, and checked online. The website of the Italian embassy in Vienna said the border between the two cou...
Lest We Forget: the 31st FID Marseille Leonardo Goi October 2020 Festival Reports Are you ready to attend the first “real” festival post COVID-19? The invite came in early July, four and a half months since my last memory from the festival circuit, a late-night Berlinale screening of Song Fa...
Closer Than Ever? The 1st Long Distance Film Festival Leonardo Goi July 2020 Festival Reports For all the festivals forced to cancel their yearly rendezvous in response to the COVID pandemic, there’s a tiny contingent that have blossomed under it, digital safe havens put together in the midst of the apo...
Learning to Breathe: A Conversation with Joanna Hogg Leonardo Goi April 2020 Conversations with Filmmakers Across the Globe “She hasn’t had anything since breakfast,” a publicist warns me, nodding at the lady nibbling on a salad and chatting with a journalist a few tables across from mine. “And she has to run to her Q&A in about...
A Festival is a Space in Time: the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival Leonardo Goi April 2020 Festival Reports As I type these words, a few months after leaving the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF), I don’t exactly know when the next fest will be. Stranded in quarantine in the north of Italy as the C...
The Year of the (Re-)Discovery: A Conversation with Luis López Carrasco Leonardo Goi April 2020 Conversations with Filmmakers Across the Globe “I think cinema has helped me turn sadness into anger. But this is not an angry picture.” From the third floor of de Doelen, Luis López Carrasco stares at the floor to ceiling windows shielding us from a storm ...
A Simple Life: Arun Karthick on Nasir Leonardo Goi April 2020 Conversations with Filmmakers Across the Globe At the young age of 27, Tamil cineaste Arun Karthick has already taken Rotterdam twice. In 2016, his debut feature The Strange Case of Shiva found a slot in the festival’s Bright Future sidebar, and followed a ...
This Is the Way the World Ends: The 10th Odesa Film Festival Leonardo Goi October 2019 Festival Reports Midway through my second year at the Odesa International Film Festival (OIFF), a curious feeling began to emerge from my screenings. To the extent that films festivals can hope to sponge up something of the moo...
“You don’t get to hate it unless you love it”: Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails on The Last Black Man in San Francisco Leonardo Goi October 2019 Interviews Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails met when they were kids. Legend has it that it happened in a fight, and Fails watched his soon-to-be best friend clash with some teens by the San Francisco projects he’d recently rel...
Islands in the Current: The 16th IndieLisboa Film Festival Leonardo Goi July 2019 Festival Reports I am flicking through the notes of my second year at IndieLisboa, and sensing a pattern. Writing from Portugal a year ago, I remember praising a handful of documentaries, hailing one (Donal Foreman’s The Image ...
Youth in motion: the 18th Transilvania International Film Festival Leonardo Goi July 2019 Festival Reports It took an open-air screening of Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy - held in the courtyard of an abandoned castle in the middle of Transylvania, and with lead actor and megastar Nicolas Cage in attendance - to make me real...
The God of the Camera is a Coloniser: An Interview with RaMell Ross Leonardo Goi July 2019 Interviews Sitting in the dim-lit bar of Berlin’s most iconic theatre, the Volksbühne (a slab of concrete of modernist grandeur located in the heart of the former East Berlin, the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz), RaMell Ross is wai...