Author Leonardo Goi

The single strangest effect the pandemic’s had on me is that I seem to have changed the way I walk. I don’t mean how I walk indoors, or at home, but how I stroll around cities, the one I live in and those I vis...

Anytime I’ve wondered about the pandemic’s impact on my relationship with cinema – a depressing exercise I’ve indulged in far too often over these godforsaken two years – it’s the changes in how I watch films I...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

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...

“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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

“You’ve come prepared,” a member of the guest management team from the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF, in its Estonian acronym) giggled at my extra-large winter jacket as I stepped out of the Lennart ...

The tote bag I picked up at the headquarters of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) had four fluorescent words printed on it, one for each feeling the festival’s 48th edition promised to make me ex...

In the weeks leading up to the 75th Venice film festival, buzz around the festival had less to do with its stellar lineup (arguably the most promising in recent years) and more to do with the festival’s ability...

I am interviewing Donal Foreman at the headquarters of IndieLisboa about his entry in the Portuguese extravaganza’s international competition, The Image You Missed. The chat is coming to an end – a member of th...

“It’s called Black Nights for a reason,” previous attendees of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival had warned me on my way to Estonia. Named after the darkness that takes the Baltic capital hostage toward th...