Leonardo Martinelli

Leonardo Martinelli is a filmmaker from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His shorts were selected in more than 400 festivals worldwide, including Cannes, Toronto, San Sebastián, BFI London, Clermont-Ferrand, Zinebi, Poitiers, Palm Springs, Biarritz, Montreal, Toulouse and others. With Fantasma Neon, he won the Golden Leopard for Best International Short Film at the Locarno Film Festival. Pássaro Memória premiered at the Locarno and TIFF competition. His latest film, Samba Infinito was selected for the Festival de Cannes, competing at the Semaine de la Critique. A focus session featuring his complete filmography was a highlight at the 63rd Cartagena Film Festival, making him the youngest filmmaker in the festival’s history to receive this recognition.

Leonardo’s films often blend genres while exploring iconography and postcolonial structures, examining how these elements manifest in daily life, labor, and the relationship between the individual and the city. He experiments with different film forms, frequently incorporating aspects from choreography and musical cinema. He holds a Master’s degree in Communication from PUC-Rio is currently developing his first feature, which has been selected for the Locarno Residency, Hubert Bals Fund, and was pointed out by Variety as one of Brazil’s most anticipated feature debuts.

Leonardo Martinelli participated in “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025, a first-ever poll of its kind as a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image. yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, in collaboration with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, distributors, critics, and scholars worldwide to nominate 10 audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. This was Leonardo Martinelli’s submission:

Movie	Original Title	Director	Country	Year
FIRST TIME [The Time for All but Sunset – VIOLET]	Nicolaas Schmidt	Germany	2021	50’
Seeing this film in the cinema was one of the most unique theater experiences I've ever had, because the experience of watching this film also becomes an experience of watching the audience. FIRST TIME is a poetic and visual essay that manages to encapsulate conflicting feelings and the enormous contrasts of living in the 21st century, in a world full of information, propaganda, war, and loneliness. The relationship between ideology and dopamine.
Isle of Flowers Ilha das Flores	Jorge Furtado	Brazil	1989	13’
It can be necessary to deconstruct something down to its obviousness to understand the absurd nature to which we subjugate other human beings.
Possibly in Michigan	Cecelia Condit	USA	1983	12’
I bite at the hand that feeds me / Slap at the face that eats me / Some kind of animal cannibal (Animal? Cannibal?)
Cold Tropics Recife Frio	Kleber Mendonça Filho	Brazil	2009	22’
Telling a lie as if it were the truth, as a way of understanding something. Cinema has always been like this.
Je vous salue, Sarajevo Hail, Sarajevo	Jean-Luc Godard	France	1993	2’
Look at the image in pieces to truly understand its entirety.
A Kind of Testament	Stephen Vuillemin	France	2023	16’
Narratives within narratives that are connected by the thread of everyday absurdity.
Meshes of the Afternoon	Alexander Hammid , Maya Deren	USA	1946	14’
Cinema is raccord.
Sherlock Jr.	Buster Keaton	USA	1927	44’
Inventive and ingenious as it is creative and comical. More than one hundred years ago, there was already so much cinema.
Ice Merchants	João Gonzalez	Portugal	2022	14’
Imagining realities from another dimension, so close to the love that lives within us.
Le Voyage dans la Lune	Georges Méliès	France	1902	15’
A trip to all that came before and that will come after.