FRED Film Radio - English Channel

PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Zdenek Blaha, manager of the East Doc Platform.

An interview with Zdenek Blaha, manager of East Doc Platform (EDP), at the end of the 2019 edition of the largest co-production, funding and distribution platform tailor-made for Central and East European documentaries, which takes place annually in Prague in the Czech Republic. This interview covers such topics as what East Doc Platform is and how it works to provide support, training and more for the documentary filmmakers of the region and beyond, but also provides an overview of some of the main activities that took place at EDP this year and a chat about the awards that were assigned.

The East Doc Platform (EDP) is the largest co-production, funding and distribution platform tailor-made for Central and East European documentaries, every year connecting 120 East European filmmakers and more than 100 key decision makers – producers, broadcasters, distributors and festival programmers from around the world.

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PODCAST| Chiara Nicoletti interviews Mike Leigh, director of the film Peterloo.

After competing for the Golden Lion at the last edition of Venice International Film Festival, the 75th edition, Mike Leigh lands in Italy again for the italian release of Peterloo. Leigh takes the occasion of this renewed attention on his film to describe its making of, how he shot the Peterloo massacre scene in particular. The connections between what happened in 1819 in the battle for democracy and the situation nowadays where populist movements are putting democracy at stake, Leigh declares that he doesn’t want to offer solutions but help his audience get their own conclusion on the moment we are living today. Peterloo will be out in Italian cinemas from March 21st thanks to Academy Two distribution.

Peterloo: An epic portrayal of the events surrounding the infamous 1819 Peterloo Massacre, where a peaceful pro-democracy rally at St Peter’s Field in Manchester turned into one of the bloodiest and most notorious episodes in British history. The massacre saw British government forces charge into a crowd of over 60,000 that had gathered to demand political reform and protest against rising levels of poverty. Many protestors were killed and hundreds more injured, sparking a nationwide outcry but also further government suppression. The Peterloo Massacre was a defining moment in British democracy which also played a significant role in the founding of The Guardian newspaper.

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PODCAST| Francesca Raffi interviews Olga Soler-Vilageliu, Associate Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Olga Soler-Vilageliu is Associate professor at UAB, where she teaches psycholinguistics and cognitive processing to undergraduates in Psychology and Speech Therapy. With a background on language processing, her research has focused on on-line measures of handwriting in preschool and school children, and she is connected to international networks working on literacy (COST IS1401). Within the Transmedia projects she is currently setting up experiments on different accessibility services: quality of perception of Sign Language on TV and emotional involvement of users of Audiodescription and AudioSubtitling. She tells us more about the NEA (New Approaches to Accessibility: hybrid modalities, immersion and technology in audio description) project that she led with Anna Matamala, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Translation and Interpreting (UAB). The project was funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under the Excelencia scheme (reference code FFI2015-64038-P, MINECO/FEDER, UE).

NEA ran from January 2016 until December 2018, and aimed to research audio description and audio subtitling with a special emphasis on the impact of audio features on the end-user experience. To this end, electrophysiological measures were applied in the field of accessibility. Through three main phases (a descriptive phase, followed by reception studies and knowledge transfer activities), NEA aimed to: – advance in the descriptive study of audio description, with a special interest in hybrid modalities such as audio subtitling; – research the impact of audio features in user experience, especially concerning immersion with text-to-speech audio description and clean audio implementation; – apply electrophysiological or behavioural measures in accessibility research in order to evaluate emotional activation; – assess the impact of various platforms/configurations in user interaction with access services, and – transfer research outputs to academia and society.

To discover more about the Project, click here.

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PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Arthur Pratt, director of the film Survivors.

An interview with Arthur Pratt, the director of Survivors, a documentary portraying the work of the Sierra Leone local humanitarian workers in the fight against the deadly Ebola virus. The film was screened at the 2019 One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic. In this interview, Pratt shares with us some of the frustrations with the international press’ way of reporting on African matters, which at least partly birthed Survivors. He also talks about the organization supporting local West African filmmakers and journalists, WeOwnTV, that made Survivors plus the projects that will follow the work of this particular documentary.

Survivors: Filmmaker and local pastor Arthur Pratt focuses primarily on the stories of ambulance driver Mohamed Bangur and nurse Margaret Sesay, who, as first-line workers, come into frequent contact with the infected. This meticulously observational film presents their personal portraits, doubts, fears and joys, complemented by stories about their own family. The film explores not only the impact of the epidemic on families and society but also shows an infrastructure broken by civil war and misunderstandings between international organizations and local communities.

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PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Christian Frei, director of the film Genesis 2.0.

An interview with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Christian Frei on his latest documentary, Genesis 2.0, screened at the 2019 One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic. The film talks, on the one hand, about the potential of genetic research and synthetic biology and on the other hand, is the search for mammoth tusks in the New Siberian Islands. In this interview, Frei discusses his interest in these topics and the nature of his collaboration on this film with co-director Maxim Arbugaev. Frei also considers the similarities between the figure of the geneticist and the filmmaker and whether there is anything about the future that frightens him, among other things.

Genesis 2.0: A kilo of high-quality mammoth ivory costs $1000. Every year, Yakut men risk their lives to find some. Young filmmaker Maxim spends an Arctic summer with them in a captivating but raw landscape. He exchanges letters with his colleague, Christian, busy in the scientific world as he follows various genetic projects which might resurrect the woolly mammoth – or create completely new hybrid beasts. This film, which has already received many awards, including a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival, offers a unique opportunity to enter a world of primitive nature and futuristic science. And where they intersect there are some fundamentally urgent existential questions.

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PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Rafal Lysak, director of the film Unconditional Love.

This is an intimate documentary about Lysak himself, a young gay man, and his 80-year-old grandmother, whose close and loving relationship is put to the test when he opens up about his sexual orientation to her. In this interview, Lysal discusses how making documentaries helped him deal with certain aspects of his life and communicate with others. He also talks about when he decided to make this particular film and when his grandmother, whose name is Teresa, agreed to be in it, among other things.

Unconditional Love: Grandma loves her grandson very much, and for this reason she patiently waits for God to rid him of his homosexuality. He understands that it does not make sense to blame her and quarrel endlessly, and so he responds to her expressions of dissatisfaction with silence and nervous laughter. The film captures the clash of old Catholic Poland with a new generation ready to fully adopt modern values. But it also casts a personal look at specific characters who breathe for themselves and who, despite their opposing feelings, try to find a way to live together. For these suggestive self-portraits Rafal Lysak has chosen a raw approach, using a handheld digital camera that does not invade the characters’ personal space in order to achieve a very intense experience that captures all the present emotions.

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PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews RaMell Ross, director of the film Hale County This Morning, This Evening.

An interview with RaMell Ross, director of the Academy Award-nominated feature documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, screened at the 2019 One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic. The film could be described as an impressionistic portrait of Black life in Hale County, Alabama, and area that Ross describes as underrepresented. In this interview, we start by asking the filmmaker about his background and find out that he believes there is some connection between his “previous life” as an athlete and his current involvement in photography and cinematography. He also talks about the rhythmic flow of the film, that almost feels like a musical scrapbook, how the interactive nature of Hale County This Morning, This Evening prompts reactions from audiences all over the world and more.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening: With extraordinary sensitivity, director RaMell Ross follows the efforts of his protagonists to lead a happy life. Long shots looking for beauty in the everyday allow the viewer to dive into situations that are completely interchangeable, yet unrepeatable. A daughter’s romping, a sunrise, children playing in the street… The desire of a young father to earn the respect of those around him and of his wife, to graduate and to ensure a dignified livelihood. The difficulties he faces in fulfilling his dream uncover the hard facts of American reality, but also the cohesion of the African-American community and the diversity of life in one of the largest countries in the world. In some moments, the film evokes the collaboration of Terrence Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki, becoming the hit of the Sundance Festival 2018.

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PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews director Matthew Heineman.

An interview with American documentary filmmaker Matthew Heineman, who was the subject of a retrospective at the 2019 One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic. The dedicated strand presented three of his feature documentaries: Cartel Land, which takes a riveting behind the scenes look at the battle with drug cartels and the enormous impact that it has on the live sof people in Mexico and and the USA; City of Ghosts, a raw portrayal of the atrocities committed in Syria as viewed by two Syrian civil journalists; and The Trade, a film that examples the drug epidemic and communities on both sides of the US/Mexico border. In this interview, Heineman shared with us how he stumbled into documentary filmmaking and some of the ways in which he works within the works. He also discusses whether he believes the camera has any sort of direct impact on the events that he captures, the universal aspects of his works and whether retrospectives, such as that put together this year by One World, invites him to reflect upon his career thus far and the impact that his films have had or continue to have.

In his relatively short career, Matthew Heineman has built a respected position on the American documentary scene. He has already earned an Oscar nomination and won an Emmy Award. His gonzo style, reminiscent of narrative feature films, is very naturalistic and does not show any signs of the clumsiness that sometimes accompanies docudrama films. Although often working in extreme conflict situations or among the drug cartels, he is able to gain the confidence of the parties involved, while maintaining an impartial approach.

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PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Sean McAllister, director of the film A Northern Soul.

An interview with Sean McAllister, director of A Northern Soul, screened at the 2019 One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic. After shooting his last film, A Syrian Love Story, in Syria, the British filmmaker turns his attention to his British hometown of Hull and documents the story of a working-class hero: Steve Arnott, a factory worker with a dream to take hip-hop to council estates across the city in 2017, the year that Hull was chosen as UK City of Culture. In this interview, McAllister talks about how he met Arnott and discusses the importance of telling stories about people like him. He also talks about some of his techniques, such as what prompts him to include himself in his own films and some of the things that influence his documentaries when shaping their narratives.

A Northern Soul: Steve loves hip hop and his daughter, whom he sees only once in a while. As a warehouse worker he spends his days carrying out a monotonous job without any hope of improvement and barely gets by on his paycheck. When Hull is chosen as the UK City of Culture 2017 Steve has the opportunity to create an original recording studio using trucks. For some local disadvantaged children it is a chance to experience success through rap and to attract the attention of those around. The director approaches the protagonist, whose life and existential problems are like those faced by thousands of others, with empathy and uses the film to openly reflect even on his own life.

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PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews documentary mentor Mikael Opstrup.

An interview with veteran documentary Mikael Opstrup, one of the mentors of the Ex Oriente workshops at the 2019 East Doc Platform in Prague, Czech Republic. Opstrup is the former chairman of the European Documentary Network and currently serves as its head of studies. He has also produced a number of international documentaries in Copenhagen, Denmark, and has worked as tutor at a large number of workshops and forums around the world – including, of course, the Ex Oriente Film Workshop, during which this interview was recorded. In the first part of this interview, we focus on the pitching process: what the pitching is, the do’s and don’ts, the various challenges and possible ways to overcome them. We also talk about the impact that technological evolution has had on the pitching process, production and financing of documentaries. Opstrup also shares with us what, from his point of view, have been the recurring themes as of late in documentary filmmaking, and talks a bit about his work with Ex Oriente.

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