Since 1980, he has worked as a film critic and historian (articles and essays for daily newspapers and periodicals in Italy, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland; books and essays for histories of cinema in Italy, France and Spain). Since 1982, he has created and directed several series of books on the cinema for a number of publishers (in Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland), has personally curated some monographic publications and has regularly written essays and articles on cinema.
The author and writer of documentaries on the cinema (for RAI and TSR - the Italian state television and Swiss-Romansch television respectively), between 1982 and 1989 he began his first trials as assistant and actor on the film-sets of feature films (amongst others, for the "founding fathers" of New Cinema, Jean Rouch from France and Allen Fong from Hong Kong).
Since 1978, his new role as "festival maker" has progressively established itself. After collaborating with various European festivals (including as curator of monographic programmes), he created and directed the first large film festival in Turin. This was called "Electric Shadows" (and comprised a major retrospective of the history of Chinese cinema in 135 films), and was followed by his move to the International Exhibition of New Cinema (Pesaro), initially as programming manager (1983-1985) and then as festival director (from 1986 to 1989). He collaborated in various ways in the selections for the Venice Film Festivals from 1980 to 1994 (especially for the selection of Asian films).
From 1989 to 1991, he was director of the Rotterdam International Film Festival (in the Netherlands), and in that context created the Huub Bals Fund and the Coproduction Workshop (now called "Cinemart Projects"); these were two instruments that were to play an important role in Europe and elsewhere to ensure financial and "cultural" support for independent films from the South and East.
From 1991 to 2000, he directed the Locarno International Film Festival (in Switzerland), renewing the criteria for the programming from the roots up: alongside the numerous "discoveries" of directors who subsequently became famous, these programmes were marked also by the retrospectives: the group of screenings and debates animated by Jean-Luc Godard around the cinema centennial (and the world premiere of the series of his Histoire(s) du cinéma); the cross-referenced review of 50 years of "American cinema seen by its creators" by Coppola, Scorsese, Eastwood, Allen, Bigelow, Jarmusch, Carpenter, Lynch, Van Sant, Ferrara, Woo and other "greats" of US cinema (who all wrote an original text for a book published in the Actes Sud Cinéma series directed by Thierry Fremaux); the full screening of Joe Dante rounded off by the range of "second-generation" directors from the school of Roger Corman; the first and never repeated true full-length screenings of Marco Bellocchio (with the first exhibition of his sketches and preparatory drawings for the cinema), Abbas Kiarostami (with the first exhibition of his watercolours and photographs) and Youssef Chahine; the discovery of 30 masterpieces of Soviet film-making, made to disappear by the censors and never before "liberated".