My flight departed from Charles de Gaulle early morning on May 17th, 1991. I had a backpack, many expectations, and still nowhere to stay. But I wasn't worried, specially now that I had a contact there – just in case. The airplane was filled with people going to the film festival: young and beautiful women, journalists, photographers, agents, actors and directors, executives from all ends of the movie industry. I could look at each one of them and assign a job. Fairy Godmothe

As I told you in my last post, Laura in Paris, I was able to purchase last minute tickets to the Cannes Film Festival, 1991 edition. I was ecstatic. After four cups of tea and two cigarettes, I decided I would go disguised as a Brazilian journalist, covering for a local newspaper. I spend precious hours carving a stamp out of a big raw potato with a sharp knife: I engraved the initials of the newspaper and the current date. Well, of course I used a letter-headed notepad that

It was a bright afternoon in Paris, maybe too luminous for my spirits, when I left the small screening room after watching La Strada, by Fellini. To better cope with the impact the film had on me, I decided to walk back home. A long but delightful promenade. Spring was already pushing throughout the city, coloring corners of once lifeless streets. The sun was warm enough for me to enjoy it at the Jardin de Luxembourg. I let myself sink in an uncomfortable iron chair, amazed b

I wrote my first book when I was 8 or 9. I can’t really precise the exact date. It was a time travel middle-grade fiction that my journalist and very patient father typed on his gray Remington. It was called “The Punjabi List”, about a boy who would travel in time after switching groceries lists with an older man, the guardian of a secret. We made copies, stapled them together and I bounded them on the long edge with a cool turquoise blue tape that gave it the aspect of a kid