FRED Film Radio - English Channel

Terence Davies – director – Sunset Song

Terence Davies is one of great living European directors. His new film SUNSET SONG is a confirmation of his talent, his views and his craftmanship. In this movie, he sticks with his style and his passion for telling about the past, either his own or not. Talking to him, we’ll find out why modern times have no appeal on him, or almost none.

SUNSET SONG: Scotland, early 20th century. The Guthrie family falls apart when their mother dies. The young children are sent to live with their aunt and uncle, while adolescent Chris stays with her brother and father to work on the farm. The two men have a stormy relationship and the brother soon emigrates to Argentina, leaving the weight of running the farm on the girl’s shoulders. When her father dies, Chris decides that her bond with the land is too strong to search for a job in the city. So she marries a farmer, Ewan Tavendale, and has a child with him. But her re-found happiness is shattered when the war breaks out.

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Hany Abu-Assad – director – The Idol

After being nominated for an Oscar twice (Paradise Now and Omar), winning a Golden Globe (Paradise Now) and a Jury prize in the Un Certain Regarad Section of Festival de Cannes (Omar, 2013) director Hany Abu- Assad decided to embark in a new project, different from his previous films, a film written for the big audience with a great hope for a connection.

This is why THE IDOL was born. At the Torino Film Festival, after Toronto and London, the film is based on the amazing true story of Mohammed Assaf, a palestinian refugee from Gaza who, in 2013, won the popular talent show ARAB IDOL.

While telling a great and real story, the film also deals and describes the big responsability that this young man must have carried upon his shoulder since he represented and still represents HOPE for his country.

THE IDOL: Young Mohammad Assaf lives in Gaza with his sister Farrah, who shares his dream of singing one day at the Cairo opera. When Farrah is admitted to hospital for kidney failure, Mohammad promises the girl he will make their dream come true. For the aspiring singer, this is the beginning of a journey in Egypt that will take him to the 2013 edition of the talent show Arab Idol.

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Corin Hardy – director – The Hallow

Corin Hardy, who has been defined by Screen International as “the star of tomorrow”, is in Turin at the 33rd edition of the Torino Film Festival as a juror of the main competition and as the director of his first film THE HALLOW, which he presented in the After Hour section.

Since he was a kid, Hardy has always been fascinated by monsters and their human insight so when he finally got the chance of portraying and creating, he gave them something that can be felt like a soul, a reason (though despicable) to behave badly.

The monsters of THE HALLOW want to restore their euilibrium, they would even want a community, a family somehow. The film also deals with the horrific thought of not being able to trust our own instict. Corin Hardy calls even into question the maternal instict.

THE HALLOW: An environmental conservationist from London moves to Ireland with his wife and infant son to patrol a stretch of forest, which local superstition considers hallowed ground. His presence inevitably stirs up a series of demonic creatures that do not like to be disturbed and have no intention of leaving their home.

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Craig Roberts – director – Just Jim

FRED’s Chiara Nicoletti meets Craig Roberts in Turin to present his directorial’s debut JUST JIM, a coming of age story exploring the theme of the double.

The constant fight, typical of adolescence, between who we think we should be and who we really are is the focus of the story and Roberts develops it by introducing a sort of Jim’s alter ego, american, cool and successful Dean, played by Emile Hirsch.

JUST JIM: Jim doesn’t fit in at his school. Shortly after his only friend abandoned him, his dog also ran away, leaving him all alone. Everything changes when Dean moves in next door: a mysterious American guy who seems to have come straight out of a movie. The two become friends and Dean helps Jim look cool and finally become popular at school. But everything comes at a price, and Jim has to manage his new life as well as the challenges of keeping Dean’s secret.

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Daniel Dencik – director – Gold Coast

Daniel Dencik crafts a visually beautiful and poignant film about one of the less known pages of Danish colonial history, with the help of the original letters of Frederick Wulff, Danish officer and botanist who was sent by the king to Guinea to follow the development of a coffe plantation on the Gold Coast. Based on these real words, the film develops an intense storyline with an attentive and precise aesthetics, that gives it an additional intriguing quality.

GOLD COAST: In 1836, the king of Denmark orders the botanist Wulff to set sail for the Gold Coast in equatorial Africa, where a Danish colonial camp is located. The mission’s goal is to establish a number of plantations there. What he leaves behind at home is the great love of his live; what awaits him is the unknown.

To Wulff, a scientist who looks at nature in a visionary way, it is the beginning of an adventure with unexpected and dramatic consequences, in which he will clash with the local populations, threatened by the slave trade, but also the conspiracies and the plotting that act in the shadow of power.

Gold Coast Trailer from Haslund / Dencik Entertainment on Vimeo.

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Henri Steinmetz – director – We Are Fine

Using his background as a painter and an artist, Henri Steinmetz gives us a film of sheer beauty and glamorous looks, with seven episodes that involve the daily life of a gourp of kids, four boys and a girl, who spend the summer together as a family, kind of disfunctional one actually. A dream-like film, with no references and connections with contemporary reality but sensually involving and mesmerizing.

WE ARE FINE: The lives of Tubbie, Tim, Jojo, Birdie, and Marie took an unexpected twist, as if their summer vacation never ended. The five youths are a tightknit group of friends, wandering around like stray dogs in an anonymous city that pays them no heed, experiencing moments of unexpected bliss in the suffocating heat of an endless summer. But soon this game of hide-and-seek with reality, this escape from the world will start revealing its consequences, undermining the group’s unity.

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Paul Katis – director – Kilo Two Bravos

Paul Katis constructed an astonishing first feature, the story of a group of British soldiers in the War in Afghanistan. There is no room for imagination or fictionalisation of the events that are precisely reported in the film.

Straight to the point, dry and pressing, at a high pace and never compromising, KILO TWO BRAVO is a war movie with a completely new perspective, and an intensity that will keep the audience glued to their seats: reality can be more terrifying than any fiction.

KILO TWO BRAVO: Afghanistan, Kajaki region. The paratrooper squad Kilo Two Bravo is on a mission to neutralize a Taliban road bloc. The platoon is exploring a dry riverbed that turned into a gorge, when the soldiers are ambushed by the remnants of a distant war: the landmines left by the Soviets during their invasion in the early 1980s are buried all around them, making it impossible for the troop to move out of fear of triggering a bloodshed.

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Scott Graham – director – Iona

FRED’s Chiara Nicoletti is joined again by Scott Graham, at the Torino Film Festival to present, in Festa Mobile, his second feature film IONA. After winning the Torino Film festival in 2012, Graham focuses again on a female protagonist who goes back to her native village with her son, to escape a reality she can’t face anymore.

Her scottish village, IONA, who she is named after, may be the worst place possible to escape since she is, maybe unconsciously forced to come to terms with all the things she left unsolved. Eventually IONA will find her release at a painful cost.

IONA: Iona left the island where she was born and the Christian community that raised her when she was fifteen years old. Now that she has a son of her own that age, she returns to her hometown, finding peace of mind in physical labor. While Iona shies away from her former community’s displays of spirituality, they seem to intrigue her teenage son Bull. Something serious drove mother and son to seek refuge on that island, something they cannot seem to forget despite being protected by the waters surrounding them.

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Adam Cork / Alecky Blythe – screenwriter / music composer – London Road

FRED’s Chiara Nicoletti is joined by Adam Cork and Alecky Blythe,, respectively music composer and scriptwriter of the musical LONDON ROAD and its transposition on the big screen, directed by Rufus Norris.

The film, based on the true events of the killings of 5 prostitutes in London Road in the county of Suffolk, was first a musical, staged in 2011 at the National Theatre of London. This musical noir, written in verbatim style, focuses on the residents of London Road and on how much these happenings have affected their life.

LONDON ROAD: In 2006, the apparent tranquility of the rural town of Ipswich is shattered when the bodies of five women are found. This unprecedented, gory crime sows panic in the small community, which is already shaken by its long fight against the spread of prostitution. It is a true shock to the residents, who deal with it by joining forces to discover the truth. Based on a true story which was successfully staged as a musical at the National Theatre.

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Stefano Galli – director – Lamerica

Stefano Galli is an Italian photoographer who moved to Los Angeles some years ago. In his search for the true America as perceived by Europeans, fruit of the dreams and fantasies shaped by movies, he went on a trip – which in fact were two trips – through the United States.

From coast to coast, Stefano met with average joes and created a puzzle that composed the core of the American population. No narrative, just people. People telling us about themselves and their lands.

LAMERICA: A visual narrative into the heart of the United States with the filmmaker from Torino Stefano Galli. His only companion throughout the journey: a 16mm camera. From Florida to California, passing through Texas, Ohio, Minnesota, Montana, coming across a series unique characters met by chance along the way and captured on film with their expressions and mannerisms.

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