FRED Film Radio - English Channel

PODCAST| Bénédicte Prot interviews Katharina Mückstein, director of the film L’Animale.

The Austrian director Katharina Mückstein tells us more about her second feature film after Talea (2013), featuring the same young actress, Sophie Stockinger, with whom she wanted to work again – and might collaborate with some more in the future. The motivation behind the movie not being the coming-of-age aspect so much as the gender identity theme, as Mückstein explains, she chose to surround the central character of Mati with other characters going through their own (sexual) identity crises. In the same spirit of nuancing instead of assigning roles, the mother-daughter relationship, one of the three defining relationships for Mati in the film, serves to portray the mother not just as a mother, but also to underline that Mati belongs to a younger generation of women who is able to experiment further with their gender identity and go beyond challenging traditional codes to observe (with irony) that new categories are created all the time that they can play with (more than the boys can, the director suggests). Then of course, there is also what is hidden to the others, whether it is because they are not trying to really understand the other individual, or because of that “animale” the title refers to..

L’Animale is a film about the contradictory forces that guide our lives: desire, passion, and reason. Riding on their tuned-up bikes, Mati and her posse of male friends intimidate their neighborhood and harass the girls. In their village, they rule. But when her closest pal Sebastian falls in love with Mati and her enemy Carla unexpectedly turns into a friend, Mati is in danger of losing her standing among her male friends. Meanwhile Mati’s parents have a decision to make: What’s more important, appearances or reality?

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PODCAST| Bénédicte Prot interviews Wolfgang Fisher, director of the film Styx.

A lovely and captivating talk with the author of one of the most important and significant films of the year, despite its minimalistic apparatus. Wolfgang Fisher explains that the core idea of the project, nine years ago, was always to reflect upon how we Europeans would respond to an environment so archaic and hostile, doubled with a situation so overwhelming as the one his main character is faced with, a character whose thoughts and dilemmas the viewer is forced to stay with throughout the whole film. He underlines that in order to deal with that theme, it was important to actually confront the ocean and fake nothing, despite the challenge that was a 42-day shoot on a 11-meter boat out a sea, and points out what the role of Rike entailed in this nearly dialogue-less, yet so incredibly telling feature. The Austrian director also says that as his film is about how help functions in Europe and as, contrary Rike who is completely alone, we have ways of standing together, he really values the opportunity offered by the LUX Prize to show his film at the European Parliament, where decisions are made, and thus be able to trigger dialogue not by presenting data, but through the powerful emotions fiction is able to convey. The interview ends on his telling us more about the incredibly graceful opening scene, so dreamy yet completely true to facts.

Styx: As Rike (Susanne Wolff), a German first-aid doctor, sails away to the paradisiac, tropical destinations she has been dreaming about, out in the shimmering blue, her path crosses that of a boat of migrants in distress on that majestic inferno that is the ocean, but her compulsion to rescue is met with striking reluctance on the part of the responder speaking on the other side of her radio, placing her, while human beings are dying before her very eyes, in a situation of disarray and helplessness with unbearable moral implications which reflects the apotheosis of inhumanity that is the utter indifference of our world towards the tragedies of the other half.

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PODCAST| Bénédicte Prot interviews Adina Pintilie, director of the film Touch Me Not.

The Romanian winner of this year’s Golden Bear in Berlin recounts how her project, conceived as a dialogue inviting the viewer to challenge his/her idea of intimacy, developed into the innovative, unique proposal it is now through a long, organic process during which the fourth wall grew more and more fluid up to the point where in order to engage of certain type of participation on the part of the viewer, beyond the technical apparatus making the exchange possible, the film also needed to include the filmmaker and the emotional motivation behind the whole research. With our contemporary society in mind, Adina Pintilie points out that the self-interrogation people seem to crave more and more leads to relating more with the other. She talks about her brave protagonists, about challenging normative fictions, and underlines that Touch Me Not, already sold to 35 territories by Doc & Film International, is part of a more complex, long term research project which will lead to follow-ups and extend beyond the film format.

Touch Me Not: “Tell me how you loved me, so I understand how to love.” Together, a filmmaker and her characters venture into a personal research project about intimacy. On the fluid border between reality and fiction, Touch Me Not follows the emotional journeys of Laura, Tómas and Christian, offering a deeply empathic insight into their lives. Craving for intimacy yet also deeply afraid of it, they work to overcome old patterns, defense mechanisms and taboos, to cut the cord and finally be free. Touch Me Not looks at how we can find intimacy in the most unexpected ways, at how to love another without losing ourselves.

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PODCAST| Chiara Nicoletti interviews Tom Edmunds, Aneurin Barnard and Freya Mavor, director and actors of the film Dead in a Week: Or Your Money Back.

Tom Edmunds is at the Rome Film Festival with the protagonists of his first feature film film Dead in a Week: Or Your Money Back presented in the Everybody’s talking about it section. According to Edmunds’ initial idea, a professional killer can be a very normal 70 years old gentleman who plays bridge, loves his parakeets and his dear wife. From this basis on, Edmunds decribes his writing process to find the right balance and rhytm to a film that can make us all laugh ironically on life and death but in the end is also a tale of a young man trying to find his place in the world. Dead in a Week: Or Your Money Back is essentually about two men meeting at a point in which once wants to die and the other is the right person to “provide” him of death. As in all the best films, even the noir and comedic ones, love will save us all.

Dead in a Week: Or Your Money Back: William (Aneurin Barnard) has failed to kill himself so many times that he outsources his suicide to ageing assassin Leslie (Tom Wilkinsons). But with the contract signed and death assured within a week (or his money back), William suddenly discovers reasons to live… However Leslie is under pressure from his boss (Christopher Eccleston) to make sure the contract is completed.

To discover more about the film, click here.

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PODCAST| Chiara Nicoletti interviews Cailee Spaeny, actress of the film Bad Times at the El Royale.

She’s the youngest star taking part in the ensemble film Bad Times at the El Royale, the opening film of the 13th edition of Rome International Film Festival. Cailee Spaeny is at the her second big film after Pacific Rim – The Uprising and she is the talent representing the film at the Festa Del Cinema di Roma along with director Drew Goddard. As her character is obsessed and trapped into a sort of co-dependent relationship with a “Charles Mansonian” guru played by the tall and handsome Chris Hemsworth, the actress explains the acting process she went through to fill Rosie (Boots)’s shoes.

Bad Times at the El Royale: Seven strangers, each with a secret to bury, meet at Lake Tahoe’s El Royale, a rundown hotel with a dark past. Over the course of one fateful night, everyone will have a last shot at redemption… before everything goes to hell. Jeff Bridges, Chris Hemsworth, Jon Hamm, Dakota Johnson and Cynthia Erivo lead an all-star cast in Bad Times at the El Royale.

To discover more about the film, click here.

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PODCAST| Chiara Nicoletti interviews Drew Goddard, director of the film Bad Times at the El Royale.

The 60’s, a night at the isolated and once luxurious hotel El Royale, at the border between California and Nevada and 7 strangers who meet, fight, kill, share secrets, steal and kill: these are the essential elements for the opening film of the 13th edition of Rome International Film Festival – Festa del Cinema di Roma, Bad Times at the El Royale directed by Drew Goddard. The director of The Cabin in the Woods and writer of Oscar nominated The Martian, drives us through the symbolisms and metaphors in the film, from the colours and settings to the numbers that are playing an essential part in the film, starting with the hotel room numbers. Goddard also confirms how the film is defined by the division between Nevada and California, good and bad, hope and possibilities as a juke box is set at the center of it all as the altar dividing the Hotel and the 7 strangers’ destiny and fate.

Bad Times at the El Royale: Seven strangers, each with a secret to bury, meet at Lake Tahoe’s El Royale, a rundown hotel with a dark past. Over the course of one fateful night, everyone will have a last shot at redemption… before everything goes to hell. Jeff Bridges, Chris Hemsworth, Jon Hamm, Dakota Johnson and Cynthia Erivo lead an all-star cast in Bad Times at the El Royale.

To discover more about the film, click here.

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PODCAST| Nicolò Comotti interviews Etienne Kallos, director of the film The Harvesters.

Etienne Kallos meets us again here in Rome, after his debut in Cannes with his first feature The Harvesters. The Harvesters is an extremely riveting coming-of-age film in the deep lands of South Africa, where the land is as tumultuous as the Afrikaaners’ spirit. The Harvesters won Rome Film Fest’s jury prize for best first film.

The Harvesters: South Africa, Free State region, isolated stronghold to the Afrikaans white ethnic minority culture. In this conservative farming territory obsessed with strength and masculinity, Janno is different, secretive, emotionally frail.

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PODCAST| Angelo Acerbi interviews Reinaldo Marcus Green, director of the film Monsters and Men.

Reinaldo Marcus Green is a big guy with a big smile. His film Monsters and Men has a big heart like his and an intriguing narrative, paired with a very effective direction. He wanted to tell a tragically usual story from different perspectives as there can be more than one victim and more than one guilt.

Monsters and Men: It is a night like any other in Brooklyn but on a street corner in the Bed-Sty neighborhood, an unarmed black man is killed after a confrontation with the police. The episode becomes the starting point for a complex investigation, which involves a police district and a neighborhood in which the community is very tight. Also involved in the affair is an eyewitness who filmed the aggression with his smartphone, a police official and a young student who is a rising baseball star. Through their eyes, we will come to a deeper understanding of a community unsettled by racial tensions, which is fighting for a better future.

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PODCAST| Chiara Nicoletti interviews Tye Sheridan, actor of the film Friday’s Child.

“Whether it is an indie film or a blockbuster, there’s no difference, in both films I’m trying to communicate what’s important for me” says Tye Sheridan, this year’s Alice nella Città’s main guest. After getting worldwide famous among cinefiles and big audiences thanks to Ready Player One by Steven Spielberg, the young actor is in Rome to present Friday’s Child in the panorama section of the 16th edition of Alice nella Città. He knew the director A.J.Adams since infancy and Friday’s Child was their chance to work together in their Texas where both were born. With FRED’s Chiara Nicoletti, Tye Sheridan talks about his career, the directors he learned the most from (he was lucky enough to start his career with The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick and won the Mastroianni Award in Venice thanks to his performance in Joe by David Gordon Green).

Friday’s Child: Richie is 18 years old and he must to take care of himself. The boy’s grown up in foster care and now he lives on the streets like a drifter. In order to survive the boy commits petty crimes and gets in trouble. The discovery of love changes his life but he has the police on his heels while a mysterious stranger threatens to reveal Richie’s past. Director A.J. Edwards counts on Tye Sheridan, one of the most requested young actors of the moment, to tell the dramatic condition of the orphans abandoned by society.

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