FRED Film Radio - English Channel

PODCAST | Mina Stanikic of the 11th Talents Sarajevo interviews documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer from the 23rd Sarajevo Film Festival.

This year’s edition of Sarajevo Film Festival pays tribute to documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. The audience of the festival had the chance to see two of Oppenheimer’s films: The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), both shot in Indonesia, where Oppenheimer spent almost a decade researching on the genocide that took place in 1965.

Even though both films depict the consequences of the genocide, the second one is not a sequel, but rather a part that completes the story that the first film opened: genocide executors in today’s world. For Fred Film Radio, Oppenheimer talks about his first contacts with Indonesia, which also had to do with documentary filmmaking, but had nothing to do with 50 years old genocide. He talks about his experience of living with the gangsters, about how his work affected and still affects lives of both executors and victims, as well as why he decided to show this specific genocide of all the genocides that happened in the recent world’s history. Oppenheimer also reveals his plans for future filmmaking, considering the fact that his past is largely set in Indonesia, a country he is no longer able to enter, as it might endanger his life.

Interview by Mina Stanikic, one of the members of Talents Press at the 11th Talents Sarajevo.

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PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Elliott Crosset Hove, actor of the film Winter Brothers, Best Actor of Locarno70.

Elliott Crosset Hove is back on FRED with Chiara Nicoletti to comment his PARDO Award for Best Actor in the film Winter Brothers and to thank his girlfriend for her constant support during this long and difficult film journey.

Winter Brothers: his face emerges from the chalk powder, his body stands out among the thin trees of a white forest or snaps to attention as shown on an old army videotape. The figure of Emil, lead of Vinterbrødre (Winter Brothers), can’t be separated from the physical presence of Elliott Crosset Hove, the young Danish actor who, after graduating at Danske Scenekunstskole in 2015, has already earned two nominations for the Robert of Danmarks Film Akademi awards and, this year, the Årets Reumert Talentpris theatrical award. It is not surprising then that the actor was chosen by Hlynur Pálmason even before writing the screenplay, giving means to the Icelandic filmmaker (his feature film debut) to draw Emil on the skin of Crosset Hove, with whom he had already worked on his own diploma short, A Painter (2013). In the film, Elliott Crosset Hove drops into the white: of the icy winter forest and the density of the chalk mine in which Emil works. White is also the character of his persona, wild-eyed and marginalized, who dreams of his neighbor while he distills strange liquors with chemicals stolen from the mine, it is not whether it’s a naïve game or a subtle vengeance towards those who keep him at a distance (and here the actor implies a disturbing ambiguity in his interpretation). So white is also the mark of the coldness of his relationship with the other factory workers – beside him, only his brother Johan (Simon Sears, the other focus point of the film). To tell of the loneliness and anxiety of being loved by Emil, Pálmason plays with the body of Elliott Crosset Hove, making it a compositional element in the rigorous geometries of the shots (it is not surprising that the director is also an artist) and letting lengthy footage allow his expressions and his gestures to vibrate on the screen.

For the official page of the winning film on the festival website, click here.

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PODCAST | Bénédicte Prot interviews Wang Bing, director of the film Mrs. Fang, winner of the Golden Leopard of Locarno70.

Olivier Assayas’ international jury’s verdict is in, and the Golden Leopard goes to Mrs. Fang, a masterpiece of a documentary by Wang Bing which, behind its deceptively simple title and its respectful, seemingly observational approach, hides an all-encompassing, perfectly wrought piece of cinematic grammar that might as well be called As I Lay Dying.

Mrs. Fang: as reality continues to constantly change guise and light, all one can do is document this eternal changing atmospheric fiction, aware that any record one wants to make will never be just a record, nor just a document, but the record of a vision. All the more so if the record concerns the transition from life to death and the vision is the magic circle with which Wang Bing encloses a family waiting to say goodbye to their elderly Alzheimer’s-stricken mother, Mrs. Fang. Increasingly, in Wang Bing’s works (the latest seem to form a single discourse, from Ta’ang to Ku Qian) there is a magic circle where attachment to life and disorientation for the fractures that compose it signify both a poetic sign of ancient archaism and centuries-old myths before they are lost. The director travels through his China, without destination, the only idea being to survive. Wang Bing is so inside the events that he can interiorize the sense of disorientation, as when he follows the family members during their night-time fishing in the surrounding swamps. Documentary? Yes, if by documentary one means that natural space of time necessary for the narration of reality to reach an even more natural transparency of vision. No need for staging because the immense and overriding narrativity (we could say really fiction) of the real is clear to the director. The journey to the other side of Mrs. Fang is one of desperate beauty, etched in a perfect and perfectly suspended filmic duration, which gives the sense of the leap into the dark mixed with hope, of the fear and desire of those who remain.

For the official page of the winning film on the festival website, click here.

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PODCAST | Bénédicte Prot interviews Olivier Assayas, president of the International Competition jury.

With just a few hours to go before the 70th Locarno Festival winners are announced, jury president Olivier Assayas tells us what Locarno represents in his view, compares his experience here with his jury experience in Cannes as well as his former job as a critic, and unveils some concrete details about the content of his mission – with fellow-jury members Miguel Gomes, Christos Konstantakopoulus, Jean-Stéphane Bron et Birgit Minichmayr – and about what his role means to him, underlining that it’s always all about pushing the limits.

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PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Todd Haynes, director of Pardo D’Onore Manor.

His latest film Wonderstruck was the opening film of the 70th Festival de Cannes official competition and now Todd Haynes is not only at the 70th edition of Locarno Festival to receive the Pardo d’Onore Manor but he’s already working on two projects, one of those is a documentary on the band The Velvet Underground. Starting from Carol, Haynes began considering scripts and stories that he had not personally written and that has opened up a wider range of possibilities for him. The director of Far From Heaven describes his creative process, how he perceives and then works on the thin line between fiction and reality and his reaction to not being nominated for Best Director with Carol. When it comes to talk about Julianne Moore, he has only admiration and love for this great actress he already worked 4 times with, including the last film Wonderstruck.

The Locarno Festival offers tribute with the Pardo d’onore Manor to American director, screenwriter and producer Todd Haynes. At the 1991 Locarno Festival there were 19 movies contending for the top award of the Pardo d’oro – and one of them was Todd Haynes’ debut feature Poison. Made after a series of eye-catching shorts, the film, based on the novels of Jean Genet, set the keynotes of the director’s style. Filmmaking is not a propaganda tool for Haynes, but it can be instrumental in discovering, understanding and telling stories about reality. Frequently preoccupied with 1950s America and its violent morality, in subsequent years Haynes has directed Julianne Moore in Safe (1995), Far from Heaven (nominated for 4 Academy Awards in 2002) and Wonderstruck (2017), and Cate Blanchett in the episodic Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There (2007) and Carol (nominated for 6 Academy Awards in 2015).

Click here to go on the official page on the festival website.

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PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas, directors of the film As Boas Maneiras.

Directors Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas are back on FRED to talk about their experience in Locarno and to leave their enthusiastic reaction t receiving the Special Jury Prize. Beside being excited for the award, Dutra and Rojas express their joy for how they got to interact with the audience and how good and strongly the film was received by the jury, the press and the people in Locarno.

As Boas Maneiras: for their second joint feature film collaboration, Brazilian directors Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas return to the horror genre they had already explored in 2011’s Trabalhar Cansa, using a similar jump-off point (a woman hiring a maid to help with the housework) only to then go in an unexpected, blood-drenched and thrilling direction with utmost confidence and determination. As Boas Maneiras (Good Manners) is a film whose duality (human vs. monster) is reflected in its twofold structure, before and after a crucial birth, with the split occurring fairly evenly halfway through the 135-minute running time. Adults and children alike give affecting performances as the difficulties of raising a young boy alone merge with the tropes of animalistic horror, specifically the werewolf subgenre. Expertly mixing suggestion and gore, with a laudable use of CGI that wouldn’t feel out of place in a big-budget Hollywood production, Dutra and Rojas deal with coming-of-age themes in a recognizable urban horror environment, showcasing a directorial maturity that fully justifies the award given to them by the Festival’s official jury. Walking the line between verisimilitude and full-blown supernatural madness, the duo sets a specific tone in the opening scenes and takes it all the way to the finish line, never once relenting in the name of “safe” filmmaking. It’s a new take on lycanthropy that is at once vaguely familiar and refreshingly surprising, with a final shot where sadness and exhilaration form a perfect marriage. Wherever they choose to go next, audiences and critics should follow with keen interest.

For the official page of the winning film on the festival website, click here.

The post Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas – As Boas Maneiras (Special Jury Prize) #Locarno70 appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

PODCAST | Zoe Meng Jiang interviews Gürcan Keltek, director of the film Meteorlar.

Director Gürcan Keltek was born in İzmir, Turkey, in 1973. He studied film at Dokuz Eylül University before directing several shorts. Meteorlar is his first feature film. In this interview Gürcan talks about how he come up with the idea of conjuring up poetic images of wild goats hunting, war and meteorites.

Meteorlar: they come at night. Everyone steps out of their homes.They light torches and remember those who have walked these streets before them. In the next few hours, the city is on lockdown and an eclipse appears. At night, meteors start to fall. Blending documentary filmmaking and political commentary, and connecting the earthly to the cosmos, “Meteors” is a film about memory and disappearance – of people, places and things.

For the official page of the film on the festival website, click here.

The post Gürcan Keltek – Meteorlar #Locarno70 appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

PODCAST | Irina Trocan interviews Shevaun Mizrahi, director of the film Distant Constellations.

Director Shevaun Mizrahi talks to us about the enterprise of following her subjects – the inhabitants of a retirement home – throughout her documentary Distant Constellation, what is specifically Turkish on universal about her subject’s life stories and how the creative decisions behind it took shape.

Distant Constellations: several intertwined stories of a retirement home unfold before the camera, determining us to look into the past and connect to these strangers’ life stories.

For the official page of the film on the festival website, click here.

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PODCAST | Bénédicte Prot interviews Pascal Greggory and Paul Hamy, director of the film 9 Fingers.

Two actors from the fantastically noir ensemble cast of this B&W movie – which breathlessly moves from Melville (Jean-Pierre) to Melville (Hermann) and takes us to a ghost vessel floating in time, on his way to Nowhereland, with a loot of polonium and Zeitgeist-infused words, feverishly inhabited by the many film and literature references that have always nourrished the radical work of poet, filmmaker, and punk rock musician Ossang – describe their characters and quote their favourite lines in this ‘spoken’, beautifully shot piece of art, accompanied by powerfully visceral sound work and music in 9 Fingers.

9 Fingers opens like in a film noir: at night, in a train station, a man called Magloire runs from a police control. With no luggage and no future. No sooner has he found a huge amount of money than trouble begins. A gang on his heels will soon make him a hostage then an accomplice. It is Kurtz’s gang. After an aborted break-in, they all have to flee aboard a cargo ship with a dangerous volatile freight. Nothing happens as it was supposed to be – poison and madness contaminate everybody. Kurtz’s men seem to be the pawns of a conspiracy led by the mysterious 9 Fingers…

For the official page of the film on the festival website, click here.

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PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Jim McKay, director of the film En el septimo dia – On the seventh day

FRED’s Chiara Nicoletti interviews Jim McKay who is at the 70th Locarno Festival in the international competition for the first time with En El Septimo Dia, his fifth feature film. The film focuses on a group of undocumented immigrants from Mexico whose everyday life is devoted to the hardest and tiring jobs available in Brooklyn, New York except for the 7th day, Sunday when they finally rest on the soccer fields. McKay comments on his choice of casting non-professional actors and how good they were in following his instructions and the script. Some of them want to pursue an acting career and we might meet them soon and welcome them on FRED.

For the official page of the film on the festival website, click here.

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