Authors — Leonardo Goi
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“Making the Invisible Visible”: Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias on Pepe
There’s nothing quite like happening into a film committed to not playing by the rules; that real-time realization, in the darkness of a movie theater, that the story you’re watching isn’t concerned with sticking to well-worn formulas so much as challenging your expectations around what cinema can do and be. Pepe is that kind of film. The first, per its subtitle, in a series of “studies of the imagination,” Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’s fourth feature is a cinematic UFO perched somewhere between hard facts and dreams. It is a work that celebrates imagination as the ultimate means to […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 27, 2024 -
“I Really Wanted to Push Back Against This Illusion of Japanese-ness”: Neo Sora on Happyend
“Ah man, I could talk about it forever.” It is the day after Happyend’s Venice premiere and director Neo Sora is holding court for a parade of journos in the ballroom of an Art Nouveau hotel on the Lido. I’m the last in line, and we’ve been chatting for almost half an hour when his face suddenly lights up. The topic Sora could talk about forever and to which we devote the last few minutes of our allotted time is music, a connection that long predates his first feature-length foray into fiction. An eclectic audiovisual artist, Sora’s a member of […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 25, 2024 -
Venice Film Festival 2024: Before the Revolution
I was trying to make sense of my notes on Happyend when I noticed him. Arms akimbo, left hand drumming his gun holster, the cop was patrolling the press room looking equal parts annoyed, bored, and baleful. I glanced away; when I looked up again, another colleague had joined him in inspecting the crowd of journalists typing at their laptops like exam invigilators. For a festival as militarized as Venice, the sight might not be front-page news: Ever since my first trip in 2014, the security corps deployed across the Lido have grown almost exponentially, reaching near-Orwellian levels in 2020, […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 19, 2024 -
“Ordinary People Who Become Very Violent”: Kiyoshi Kurosawa on Cloud
The J-horrors that catapulted Kiyoshi Kurosawa from reliable gun for hire under the Japanese studio system to internationally revered auteur saw terror as indissolubly bound with tech. Conceived at the turn of the millennium, they spoke to those years’ paranoias about digital life: ghosts pouring out of dial-up internet (Pulse, 2001), senseless murders upending pristine cityscapes (Cure, 1997), and lives aremodeled by perfect doubles (Doppelganger, 2003). Cloud, his latest, offers a new equation, no longer anchoring dread to media but capitalism. It’s not that computer screens are nowhere in sight; the film’s hero, Yoshii (Masaki Suda), is a hustler who […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 10, 2024 -
“It’s Very Important, When You’re Choosing Actors, To Make Sure They Possess Something That Remains Almost Unknown”: Director Constance Tsang on Her Cannes-Premiering Blue Sun Palace
Blue Sun Palace, Constance Tsang’s first feature, is a migrant story that’s vividly attuned to the temporal and emotional dislocation of those stranded far away from home. Set in Flushing, Queens—where the director grew up—the film follows three transplants as they forge new ties in the borough’s Chinese community, which Tsang depicts as a bubble suspended in time and space. Save for the occasional, blink-it-and-you-miss-it glimpses of road signs and billboards, there’d be no way of identifying this as a corner of New York City; Blue Sun Palace unfurls for the most part inside crammed apartments and massage parlors, where […]
by Leonardo Goi on May 19, 2024 -
“I’ve Always Been Interested in Making My Own Version of Goodbye Dragon Inn: Director Carson Lund on His Cannes-Premiering Eephus
“Please stop me if any of the terms don’t make sense.” A few days before his feature debut, Eephus, will premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight, Carson Lund is sitting on a rooftop terrace in Cannes and worrying I may not catch all the jargon. Understandably. A chronicle of the last baseball game played at Soldiers Field in Douglas, MA before the grounds will be paved over and replaced by a middle school, the chat’s testing my—admittedly limited—knowledge of the sport. Yet how you’ll respond to Lund’s wistful film won’t depend on your level of inside baseball. It will depend on […]
by Leonardo Goi on May 19, 2024 -
“I Really Wanted Sounds and Images to Exist Independent of Each Other”: Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Evil Does Not Exist
Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s disquieting new film, is at once a major break from the Japanese director’s previous work and a distillation of the questions and anxieties around which his cinema has long orbited; it’s the film he seems to have been working toward his whole career. Anyone mildly familiar with Hamaguchi’s work will know the cardinal role dialogue plays in his films, which often double as symposiums—a proclivity evident long before Drive My Car’s meandering chats and late-night confessions. Pitted next to its talk-heavy predecessors, Evil Does Not Exist is a stark outlier; it may well be […]
by Leonardo Goi on Mar 18, 2024 -
Venice Film Festival 2023: What is a Festival?
Nothing I heard or saw at the 80th Venice Film Festival felt more momentous than the news that came from Berlin after four days of screenings. On September 2, Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian announced he’d step down after next year’s edition, citing issues with the new management structure proposed by Germany’s minister for culture and media Claudia Roth. His premature departure will mark the end of a five-year journey that turned the festival into an event miles away from the tacky extravaganza of its Dieter Kosslick era. Shepherded by Chatrian and executive director Mariëtte Rissenbeek, the Berlinale had found […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 15, 2023 -
“Rules Stop Me from Daring”: Radu Jude on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
“Have you ever seen Romanian TikToks?” It’s a torrid afternoon in Locarno and Radu Jude and I are sitting in a container repurposed as an interview booth, a couple of days after the premiere of his latest, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Social media play a prominent role in the film, an electrifying snapshot of life in the 21st century designed to both immortalize our back-to-front digital zeitgeist and dissect its textures. A collage straddling black comedy and road movie, Do Not Expect centers on Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked production assistant whose company […]
by Leonardo Goi on Aug 10, 2023
