FRED Film Radio - English Channel

PODCAST| Chiara Nicoletti interviews Stellan Skarsgard, actor of the film Out Stealing Horses.

Five years after In Order of Disappearance, Stellan Skarsgard is again in competition at the Berlinale with a film directed by Hans Peter Molland: Out Stealing Horses. Based on the 2007 novel by Norwegian author Per Petterson, the film portrays a 67-year-old man looking back at his youth and a particular summer that defined his life, in 1948. Skarsgaard reveals how there were many attempts to adapt this novel into a film and how he received so many scripts about that but it was only when Molland accepted to do it that he agreed to lead in it. Skarsgaard defines Molland as the man of the wild nature, the only man capable of working with nature as one of the protagonists in the story. As the film goes back and forth from the present day the protagonist is living, the end of 1999 and the past, in 1948, we realize how different people acceptance towards tragedies and dramatic events has become. Skarsgaard comments on us becoming more sensitive and spoiled as people, luckily, live more happily and safe than before.

Out Stealing Horses: November 1999: 67-year-old Trond (Stellan Skarsgard), lives in self-imposed isolation and looks forward to welcoming in the new millennium alone. As winter arrives he meets one of his few neighbours, Lars (Bjorn Floberg), and realises he knew him back in the summer of 1948. 1948 – the year Trond turned 15. The summer Trond grew up.

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PODCAST| Sarah Bradbury interviews Nora Fingscheidt, director of the film System Crasher.

German film writer and director Nora Fingscheidt spoke to us about how she had always wanted to make a film about a wild little girl and coming across the concept of the “System Crasher” provided the inspiration for her story. Fingscheidt also explained to us how she discovered and worked with the young Helena Zengel to bring out an incredible performance as troubled Benni, the important connection and chemistry between Helena and Albrechte Schuh as Micha and why her film sought to present the story without making judgment on Benni or the adults in her life and child services wanting to help and protect her.

System Crasher: Bernadette, or Benni as she prefers to be known, is a delicate-looking girl with unbridled energy. She is a ‘system crasher’. This term is used to describe children who break every single rule; children who refuse to accept any kind of structure and who gradually fall through the cracks in Germany’s child and welfare services. No matter where this nine-year-old is taken in, she is booted out again after a short time. And that is exactly what she is after, because all she wants is to be able to live with her mother again: a woman who is totally unable to cope with her daughter’s incalculable behaviour. Made from her own multi-award-winning script, Nora Fingscheidt has created an intense drama about one child’s overwhelming need for love and security and the potential for violence that this engenders. At the same time, the film depicts the tireless attempts of educators and psychologists who use respect, trust and confidence to create a way forward for children who threaten to destroy others and themselves as a result of their unpredictable outbursts.

To discover more about the film, click here.

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PODCAST| Nicolò Comotti interviews Marie Kreutzer, director of the film The Ground Beneath My Feet.

Marie Kreutzer has her latest feature The Ground Beneath My Feet in competition at the 69th edition of the Berlinale. Starring Valerie Pachner as Lola, a very successful business consultant, The Ground Beneath My Feet is an insightful and moving study on a too-often overlooked subject.

The Ground Beneath My Feet: Lola is almost thirty. A successful management consultant, she is constantly on the move between the companies she is tasked with restructuring. Her chic apartment in Vienna is more of a mailbox and a launderette than a home. A hundred working hours a week is not uncommon in addition to five sessions at the gym, expensive dinners with clients and nights spent in sterile hotels. Her career, which she is advancing with cleverness, efficiency and ruthless cunning, appears to be unstoppable. She applies a similarly disciplined approach when it comes to managing her private life. This means that nobody is allowed to know about the existence of her older sister Conny, who has been suffering from mental illness for a long time and who never leaves her apartment. But when Conny attempts to commit suicide, Lola searches for a way to be there for her. Marie Kreutzer’s portrait of the jet-setting Lola reveals that there is sometimes just a thin line separating polar opposites such as order and chaos, rise and fall – even for someone who thrives in a society fixated on achievement.

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PODCAST| Nicolò Comotti interviews Yaron Shani, director of the film Chained.

Yaron Shani is at the Berlinale with Chained, the second film of his Love trilogy. Chained is a darkly ironic and extremely veritable look on a man’s life that with kafka-esque rhythm will completely fall into ruin. Chained stars Eran Rain, Stav Almagor and Stav Patai and is in Panorama’s official selection.

Chained: Rashi has been in the police force for sixteen years and is a strict and relentless advocate of law and order. This is something experienced by a handful of young people who appear to be dealing drugs in the park in the afternoons when Rashi orders two of them to strip naked. The next day it transpires that the father of one of the boys is a high-ranking secret service official. Rashi is promptly accused of sexual harassment and suspended from duty. His world is thrown into disarray and not only his own future, but also that of his small family is called into question. Rashi and his partner Avigail have long been trying to have a child together. Avigail’s 13-year-old daughter Yasmin does not make the situation any easier. She is in the throes of puberty, dreams of a career as a model and always stubbornly tries to impose her will. Things are really heating up for Rashi. Yaron Shani employs a cast of non-professional actors to create this profile of an outwardly strong man whose questionable idealism leads to disaster. A drama about love and the bid to win control that features intense and utterly authentic dialogue.

To discover more about the film, click here.

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PODCAST| Nicolò Comotti interviews Rita Azevedo Gomes, director of the film A Portuguesa.

Rita Azevedo Gomes is here at the 69th edition of the Berlinale with her latest film A Portuguesa – The Portuguese Woman. A Portuguesa is a contemplative work where time, history and language fuse with each other and invite the viewers to go beyond what is represented on screen. A Portuguesa is in Forum’s official selection and stars Clara Riedenstein, Marcello Urgeghe, Ingrid Caven, Rita Durão, Pierre Léon.

A Portuguesa: His home is war. Her home is Portugal. Yet the young, newly married wife of Lord von Ketten is determined to make her husband’s family abode, an inhospitable castle on a cliff in northern Italy, into her home. When he sets off to battle with his men and tries to send her back to her parents, she decides to stay. Over the eleven long years he stays away, she insists to her relatives on their rare visits that this is where she belongs, even as they see the house as her mausoleum and lament her loneliness. And she does indeed carve out a life for herself here. She reads, sings, plays music, dances, swims and rides in the forest. She also rears a young wolf to which she is closer than to her two sons – or at least that’s what’s suggested by this adaptation of Robert Musil’s novella The Portuguese Woman, which is set in the Middle Ages and features magnificent costumes and opulent images captured by the elegant, gliding camerawork. The animals are positioned in conspicuous fashion, as if they stem from somewhere else, just like the figure of Ingrid Caven in a shoulder-less evening gown cooing songs or reciting Walther von der Vogelweide in the courtyard. Tandaradei!

To discover more about the film, click here.

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PODCAST| Nicolò Comotti interviews Carlos Conceição, director of the film Serpentário.

Carlos Conceição joins us to discuss his debut long feature Serpentário, in Berlinale’s Forum selection. In Serpentário, a young man drifts through an emptied-out African landscape in search of the ghost of his mother – a glittering journey between past and future that borrows from different film genres along the way. Serpentário‘s visual prowess is startling and mesmerising; Conceição’s debut is permeated by his original and capable voice able to deliver a film of rare beauty.

Serpentário: The opening titles say Carlos Conceição was born in Africa and left for Europe in his teens, his mother stayed behind. She said she wanted to adopt a bird that would live for 150 years, but only if he would take care of it when she died. The landscape the young man flies over afterwards can only be Africa too, mountains and great plains, antelope herds, earth the colour of an impossible clay. A woman speaks to him in voiceover when he lands, imploring him to come find her without delay and thus a journey begins. There will be roads, cities, boats and all manner of shimmering landscapes, although the path isn’t linear but governed by gleeful digression, folding back on itself, snaking through past, present and future and wandering off into different genres, as the size and texture of the image shifts and piano or violin replace synths. We see the man as a ruff-wearing colonialist, a gun-slinging cowboy, an astronaut in a retro spaceship, or just a hipster in jeans and sunglasses, but otherwise little changes, even as the end is nigh. He keeps on moving, the same playful, melancholy thoughts in voiceover, the same solitude, the rushing of the wind, the voices of birds.

To discover more about the film, click here.

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PODCAST | Katy Scoggin, director and cinematographer.

Katy Scoggin has been at Berlinale many times as a festival goer or as part of a film team. This year she is one of the Berlinale Talents and she is so thrilled to take part as a director for the first time. A big step for her!

Flood is her cinematic, decade-long search to understand her evangelical family. It begins with her failed attempt to thaw her relationship to her young-earth creationist father in a fiction short. When he charges that her film caricatures his beliefs, she turns her camera around on them. As divisive family drama takes over her script-writing, she finds herself slipping into her movie as a protagonist. But will her filmmaking teach her to love across her deepest divides?

To discover more about Flood, clik here.

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PODCAST | Gonzalo Ladines, director and screenwriter.

Gonzalo Ladines is a Peruvian filmmaker who has been involved in 4 feature films as writer, director and / or producer.

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PODCAST | Guy Nemesh, director and editor.

Guy Nemesh is one of the Talents of this year’s edition of Berlinale Talents. He shares with FRED’s listeners his background and experiences.

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PODCAST | Simone Smith, film editor.

Editor Simone Smith from Toronto, Canada, comes to Berlinale Talents for the Editing Studio. Find out more about Simone here.

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