Nicolò Gallio - Marketing Strategist & Audience Designer

Casa
Italia
Milan
Nicolò Gallio - Marketing Strategist & Audience Designer

I am a consultant specialised in the audiovisual industry, working across fiction films, documentaries and TV series. I hold a PhD in Film Studies.

I provide services ranging from marketing, communications, audience design, to script development. I provide services ranging from marketing, communications, audience design, to script development.

11/08/2026

The Locarno Film Festival was hot. Literally, because of the temperatures the city was under when I was there last week. But, most importantly, for the vibe: a mix of serious industry topics, cult icons being awarded, and great films being screened. And yes, this time I managed to see quite a few titles, including a nighttime special 4-hour long extended cut of “Dances with Wolves”, a film that, as a kid, made me fall in love with cinema – how epic was the visual restoration boosted by John Barry’s score spreading through Piazza Grande at almost 4am: thank you Cinegrell and Locarno Heritage programme, you made my day!

I am not one for tagging everyone I had the pleasure to engage with either in business conversations or simply relaxed comments before a screening, so I'll just say thank you again to Markus Duffner and Marcello Paolillo for having me there with so many professionals, both experienced and emerging talents from all around the world. Although we always worry about the state of the audiovisual industry, cinema in particular is alive and well. And it will remain such for as long as we care for it, as professionals and fans of the seventh art.

Much of the Locarno Pro activities I was involved in took place behind closed doors, but here is a sneak peek I am allowed to share. At the time of posting this, is still in full swing, so head over to the festival’s social media to get the latest updates. And if you’re close to Locarno, just do yourself a favour and gift yourself with a good film.

28/07/2026

“We can tentatively define a superintelligence as any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.” – Nick Bostrom, SUPERINTELLIGENCE: PATHS, DANGERS, STRATEGIES (2014)

Hearing about systems that might one day become superintelligent might sound a bit abstract to those who use artificial intelligence for mundane tasks, but the notion of superintelligence has been at the centre of the debate around the existential risk of this technology for quite some time, and how to solve the AI control problem while building machine intelligence with positive values is still the crux of the matter for many researchers.

A few years back, I first approached this subject through Nick Bostrom’s book, which admittedly is the most speculative and philosophical among the titles I’m sharing, yet it’s a fascinating dive into a side of the field that explores the potential dangers of AI from a cognitive perspective and on a universal scale.

For those interested in exploring the implications of machine minds potentially surpassing human minds, and the type of power that might be unleashed, SUPERINTELLIGENCE still holds up more than a decade after its release. I consider it a good introduction to a relevant area of research that doesn’t feel sensationalist.

21/07/2026

It makes me happy to see projects that I meet at script stage grow into films and travel the world. It’s part of a mysterious process of discovery: whatever local elements are in those stories, they carry a seed strong enough to make them cross oceans and reach the other side of the globe.

I am glad that this time it happened to a script penned by Irene Dionisio and Marco Borromei, directed by Dionisio herself. IDDA will have its world premiere at TIFF 2026, in the Platform section. I met the film team, which also included creative producer Isabella Weber for KINO produzioni, back in 2023 at IDM Film & Music Commission Südtirol’s Racconti Script Lab, and we spent some time together for an introduction to audience design.

It struck me as a project with a strong artistic approach about two childhood friends, now adults, who reunite to finally tackle the ascent of Mount Etna together. Later on, Tecla Insolia, Romana Maggiora Vergano and Giuseppe De Domenico boarded the project, and the rest – as the saying goes – is history.

IDDA is the only Italian film competing for the Platform Award, which this year automatically qualifies the winner for the Oscars’ Best International Feature Film category. Best of luck to the whole team and partners: what a hike from Sicily to Canada!

17/07/2026

“One of the most difficult questions in the future of AI will involve precisely the possibility that our machines can know things that we ourselves cannot comprehend.” – Nello Cristianini, THE SHORTCUT: WHY INTELLIGENT MACHINES DO NOT THINK LIKE US (2023)

Carrying on the reading list on AI I’ve started a few weeks ago in preparation for my next workshops and seminars, I’d like now to point to a few resources more focused on the “thinking” aspects. And since I am at times asked to provide titles authored by non-US researchers and scholars, I am glad to begin today with a fellow Italian.

When I started to approach artificial intelligence a few years ago, one of the names that came up right away in the local libraries I was studying in was Nello Cristianini. Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bath, he has published a few accessible books that are among my recommendations to anyone who is engaging with AI for the first time and has an interest in the different ways in which human beings and machines understand things, learn and solve problems.

If I had to point to just one of Cristianini’s books, it would be THE SHORTCUT, which, among other things, gives a sneak peek under the tech’s hood into how machines use massive statistical data to mimic intelligent behaviour. It is highly approachable and widely available in English.

So there you go, happy reading and until the next title.

09/07/2026

Locarno Film Festival revealed its Official Selection earlier today and I am extremely excited to see A MARGEM DO RIO (THE RIVERBANK) selected in the International Competition. I have such a great memory of this story, which I discovered at script stage during a TorinoFilmLab Extended – Audience Design Lab that I curated in collaboration with the World Cinema Fund in Berlin.

It was a very special residential workshop, the training ground for six new audience designers, and we had not one but two writer-directors in the room with us from Brazil: Matheus Farias and Enock Carvalho, a fantastic creative duo who allowed us to explore the rich tapestry of their story and immerse ourselves in a lesser-known angle of Recife.

As it happens, I’ll be attending the festival this year, so what better chance to see the film on the big screen and celebrate its world premiere?

Boa sorte à equipe do filme!

01/07/2026

A little reminder before everyone starts disappearing for the summer break: EAVE (European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs) is accepting applications for the 2026 AI Skills Booster until August 3rd.
Take a deep breath and dive into what's happening in artificial intelligence for the audiovisual industry.
Link in the first comment.

25/06/2026

“AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. Rather, artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications.” – Kate Crawford, ATLAS OF AI: POWER, POLITICS, AND THE PLANETARY COST OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2021)

Back in 2024, I visited the installation “Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500-2025” by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler at Fondazione Prada in Milan. I remember it as the first time I saw a bit behind the scenes of how we got to artificial intelligence under the lens of corporate and technical architectures, and how power and tech intertwined for centuries.

Immediately after that, I picked up Crawford’s book ATLAS OF AI, which to this day I consider a must read for anyone interested in the impact of AI on the extraction of natural resources, human labour and data. It’s a journey from mining sites to the keys of your keyboard, touching upon the interests of a small group of people shaping a technology that touches us all.
Those who critique AI from an environmental, inequality, and governance angles will find plenty of arguments here.

16/06/2026

“Computers love to read.” – Dennis Yi Tenen, LITERARY THEORY FOR ROBOTS (2024)

Here’s another non-fiction title to strip away a little of the allure around generative artificial intelligence. What if the “ChatGPT moment”, instead of being regarded almost as a rupture in the technological timeline, was just the culmination of processes started hundreds of years ago?

I can’t think of a better book than Tenen’s to put LLMs into context. From medieval Arabic philosophy to Hollywood script-formula manuals, this journey into human intelligence mediated by technology does put things into perspective. No magical genies, but centuries of evolution of “smart” tools such as dictionaries and grammar books. More talking libraries than digital oracles.

This book is the right place to dig deeper into an alternative history of AI, one that started well before the silicon age.

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