FRED Film Radio - English Channel

At the 16th Bari International Film & Tv Festival, FRED Film Radio interviewed the director Gala Gracia to talk about “The Remnants of You”, a film presented at the Meridiana section.

“The Remnants of You” has some autobiographical elements. Was it therapeutic for Gala Gracia to be able to direct and tell this story? “I think most of the people that do the first movie have a very shocking experience in their lives. And at some point it’s kind of therapeutic to write about this. At least the first draft of the script. For me it was like that”, says the director. “I had this idea because I felt a lot of pain because of the death of my father. I must say that the first draft of the script was more attached to the reality of what happened, but as I rewrote the script it started to be less autobiographical”.

The main character of “The Remnants of You” tries to reconcile her desires and the expectations that people have on her. How did Gala Gracia manage to write and work on this balance? And how does this aspect reflect her own experience? “The death of her father for the protagonist means that she has to leave behind the life that she had as a pianist in New York and to assume the reality. In my personal experience I had to come back from London, because I was living there. I was exploring life in a foreign country”, remember the director. “Sometimes you have to stop your life to do another completely different thing that you didn’t expect, because I had to be in charge of a sheep farm that I had with my father and my sister. When he died, we had to work on it. I tried to balance Sara’s desire of coming back to New York and the weight of the guilt that is stopping her”.

Sara is a jazz musician and “The Remnants of You” uses music in a narrative way. “In the movie there are two main aspects that belong to the father. One is the obvious one: the sheep and all the farming around their lives. And the other one is the music, because the father is a fanatic of jazz music and it’s what links him to his daughter”, says Gala Gracia.

Many movies of the Meridiana section at Bif&st share the same themes. “I think this is because of the changes in the world”, underlines Gala Gracia. “We are connecting to our roots, because we are starting to see the wrong face of globalization and now we are immersed in so many theories about defending, going back to the origin, or defending more sustainable models. We have to step backwards again, think about our origin, our roots, our family. All these themes, maybe, that now we are touching in cinema as well”.

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At the 16th Bari International Film & Tv Festival, FRED Film Radio interviewed the director Mark Anthony Green to talk about “Opus”, a film with John Malkovich, Ayo Edebiri, Juliette Lewis, Murray Bartlett presented at Rosso di sera section.

“Opus” describes celebrity as a dangerous cult. How does Mark Anthony Green think the obsession of fame, even among ordinary people through social media, is influencing our society? “I think the thing we interrogate in the movie is bigger than just celebrities” says the director. “It also goes to elected officials, it goes to community leaders. Opus is a super fun movie, it’s a wild ride. But the thing we interrogate – this idea of tribalism – it exists in religions, in churches, on television and in radio. Unfortunately it’s a universal kind of global pandemic that’s bigger than just celebrities. I chose a pop star because it felt like the most fun way to do it, but it’s a big problem”.

Before becoming a director, Mark Anthony Green was a journalist like Ariel, the main character of “Opus”. Through the film, the director also tells the story of the obsession of a certain type of journalists to be in the spotlight. “The journalism in Opus, to me, was really important to get the power dynamic correct. And that was it”, says Green. “If her relationship to Moretti was different, if she was an assistant or something like that, then I still think we could have told this story. I’m sure that I brought a lot of my experience when I look back at young Mark Anthony and the mistakes that he made when he was Ariel’s age. It was easy for me to apply a lot of that, because I lived it and was a journalist for 13 years. But the most important thing was just for it to feel accurate, for young journalists to watch this film and feel like: “Oh, that is an accurate representation of me”. And I felt the same way about pop stars. I wanted Elton John, Liberace and David Bowie, if they were still here, to be able to watch this film and to be like: ‘Yep, those songs sound right’. I think that authenticity is something that I owe the audience. And I’m super proud to say that Opus is a very authentic film’”.

It took Mark Anthony Green six years to make “Opus”. And in these years the world has become even darker, making the film even more relevant. “I would trade the relevancy in a heartbeat if it meant the film was less relevant. But unfortunately, that’s not our current situation”, says the director. “And I think in particular, this very specific thing that Opus kind of tackles and interrogates, the world has gotten much worse in that regard. And so I don’t pretend to have any answers. I don’t think artists are supposed to have answers. We’re supposed to provoke and to create experiences that people share and that smart come up with the answers and figure out a better path forward for us”.

“Opus” puts a cult at the center of the story. But why, according to the director, do we need idols so much? “I think it’s very human. One of the most human instincts is to want to belong to something bigger than yourself. To want to belong to a group, to be connected and tethered to other classes of people and a guild or a movement or whatever. That is so human”, says Mark Anthony Green. “And with less and less people being religious and having organized religion in their life, I do think that we’ve kind of supplemented the void of that with these people. And it’s so visceral and it can also be fun and it can feel like you really belong to something. But I think the question that Opus asks is: ‘Does this still serve us?’. Are we better off because of our extreme belief and idolatry of these people or has this institution gone too far?’”.

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At the 16th Bari International Film & Tv Festival, FRED Film Radio interviewed the director Samira El Mouzghibati to talk about “(Y)our Mother”, a film presented at the Meridiana section.

In “(Y)our Mother”, Samira El Mouzghibati asks her sisters what family means to them. But what does family mean to the director? Did the concept of family change after the documentary? “It’s interesting because in the movie it’s also a question I ask to myself and to me family was very much a relationship I needed to preserve and not to lose. And all the fears that come with it”, says El Mouzghibati. “So the fear of talking, the fear of saying the truth because you are afraid to lose your family if you say too much. But with this film, I understood that family ties are so strong that you can go a long way with your family and tell deep truths because we are family and the ties are very strong”.

In “(Y)our Mother” the director has the opportunity to delve into very intimate aspects of her mother’s life and the relationship between the woman and her sisters. Does Samira El Mouzghibati also consider the documentary a gift to herself and to them? “Maybe there was something of a fantasy of a gift. I’m the youngest of my siblings and I had this fantasy: ‘I want all my family to come together and that everything would be okay’. But this film is mostly my journey towards my family and towards my mother. And for sure, it was already a gift to myself and, I hope, a gift for them also”.

In the documentary, the director films her parents and sisters, including some family footage. What was their reaction when she told them she was planning to make “(Y)our Mother”? “A lot of people ask me that question because I come from a very conservative family, especially my mother. And so a lot of people are like: ‘How did you convince her to do this film?’”, says Samira El Mouzghibati. “Actually I didn’t really have to convince anyone because I think they understood before me that I needed to do this film. And there is really a gesture of love from them towards me, accepting to do this film with me. And some of them said that maybe it was also something useful for them to talk, to try to gather, to film and to tell our story. Because there is also a common story”.

Many of the films in the Meridiana section of the Bif&st deal with themes such as heritage, identity, roots. How do you explain that so many directors from different parts of the world felt the need to talk about similar themes? “I think our world today is like that. We are very much mixed up and our identities are always moving, always reshaping itself. And it brings a lot of joy and richness with it, but also a lot of complexities, a lot of pain, a lot of loss. And I think as humans, we need to deal with those questions because these are very actual questions”.

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At the 16th Bari International Film & Tv Festival, FRED Film Radio interviewed the director Ameer Fakher Eldin to talk about “Yunan”, a film presented at the Meridiana section.

“Yunan” is a film that talks about identity and memory. Two elements deeply linked to the concept of “home”. What does “home” represent for Ameer Fakher Eldin. “I come from a place which is a bit conflicted with this matter”, says the director. “I come from the occupied Golan Heights, which was Syrian back in 1967, and since then it’s been under Israeli occupation. Growing up there felt very much like an exile. Usually we connotate it with some movement that you have to flee. In my situation I didn’t need to flee. I was displaced in my home. I’ve never been to Syria and I can’t go to it. The idea of home in this regard is complicated. I tend to suggest in my films that home could be also in our fantasy as well”.

Thanks to Mounir’s mother and the fairy tale, “Yunan” also talks about memory. But what does it mean for a person who can’t go home and can’t even go to their motherland? “I think, my main character is more feeling that his fear is not only that he lost something in the past but that he will be forgotten. The whole film started with a question: ‘Who are you when your mother forgets about you?’”.

We are living in a really dark time and talking about roots. What did Ameer Fakher Eldin feel when he heard Trump’s words about the future of the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian people? “Terrible, of course. This guy is just crazy. I don’t think anyone should take him seriously”, says the director. “It’s scary, but on the same impulse, I’m not surprised because the world has always been kind of torn between the north and the south. And now somehow the wrong people are in charge. And it’s funny because for this film I was inspired by the suicide letter of Stefan Zweig, which is a Jewish Austrian author who fled the World War Two from Austria. He tried London and he failed, he tried New York and he failed. He found a peaceful refuge in Brazil. Somehow the cycle is now turned. It was the north seeked refuge in the south. And now it’s somehow the opposite. When I read his suicide letter, I was inspired. This is so relevant to any odyssey of a human kind of exile”.

“Yunan” is the second chapter of a trilogy. What will the last chapter be about? “The trilogy, called ‘Home,’ started to explore the idea of displacement and the idea of home. And it starts with ‘The Stranger,’ which was mainly about a man who doesn’t want to leave his country, even though it’s in crisis and in a kind of war. He had a reason why he wanted to stay, but he was a stranger among his own people. And so he also had an existential crisis there”, says Ameer Fakher Eldin. “The second one was kind of the opposite. There’s a character in exile, unable to go home and he also has an existential crisis. The third film will be about a character who is free from all borders. He’s a free character. He’s very successful. He comes from a small village somewhere in the Middle East, but he’s free. He’s all over the world and there are no borders anymore. But he’s still nostalgic. But this time I won’t look at him as a victim. It’s important for me to close this trilogy to make sure that we look at the nostalgic not as a victim, but as a toxic presence. And this toxicity of being nostalgic is to understand that, maybe, the borders are in his head”.

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As part of the 2025 edition of the Cinema Made in Italy festival in London, Fred FM spoke to the director of the closing night film, “The Great Ambition.”

Andrea Segre revealed the motivations behind returning to this period of Italian history, particularly when Enrico Berlinguer was the leader of the Italian Communist party in the 1970s, as well as the painstaking research that went into making the film.

Beyond looking at texts, transcripts and video archive footage,  Segre also turned to other features such as “Milk” and “Malcolm X” as a source of inspiration in the way of telling his story and weaving in the archive to his fictionalised storytelling.

The director praised his star, Elio Germano, for his phenomenal incarnation of Berlinguer that went beyond something of an imitation to truly understand the politician as a way of authentically portraying him.

Finally, Segre shared his hope that returning to this period of history might help contemporary, and particularly younger audiences, regain some sense of renewed vigour in reaching for an ideal in modern-day society and “build collective dreams” once more.

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London audiences were treated to something a little different as part of the Cinema Made in Italy festival 2025: “Diva Futura,” a darkly comic, satirical look at the beginnings of the porn industry in Italy back in the 80s, courtesy of Riccardo Schicchi.

Fred Film Radio sat down with the movie’s writer and director, Giulia Steigerwalt, to hear about telling the story from the perspective of his secretary, Debora Attanasio, based on her 2013 book, “Don’t Tell Mom I’m a Secretary.”

Steigerwalt explained she was drawn to exploring this tale on screen after learning how everything about the porn studio, and Schicchi himself, was the opposite of the exploitative and degrading environment she imagined, and indeed, what is has since become.

The director also gave some insight into the roots and execution of the movie’s irreverent playful tone, one stemming from both Schicchi‘s own book and testimonials from others, describing him as a “childish, playful man”. We further heard about nailing the retro aesthetic of the era, as well as the complexity of shooting the many intimate scenes with a female gaze with care alongside an intimacy coordinator.

With a shocking statistic that nowadays, 95% of porn is violent, Steigerwalt emphasised how she hoped her feature would prompt conversation about the state of the porn industry today – and one day see it improved.

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Ahead of a screening of his movie during the Cinema Made in Italy festival in London, Fred Film Radio sat down to a chat with co-director Casey Kaufmann to discuss all things “Vittoria“.

Emerging as a kind of trilogy alongside previous films based in Torre Annunziata, Naples, “Butterfly” and “Californie” , “Vittoria” tells the real-life story of Jasmine, a hairdresser who the filmmakers met while making “Californie“. So taken with her and her tale of dreaming of wanting a daughter after having three sons, and going through the rigmrolol of adopting, that Kaufmann and his fellow director Alessandro Cassigoli not only wanted to share it on the big screen, but have Jasmine and her husband play themselves.

Kaufmann shared what it was like working with the couple cast as their own characters, and how the movie sits in a liminal space between documentary and pure fiction. He also spoke about how the pair at times could use the mise-en-scène to in some ways confront buried aspects of their relationship and past. Furthermore, we talked about the role that fate and dreams plays in Jasmine’s reality, without the film ever moving too far away from a grounded reality, and the journey the audience is taken on by following the badass, if not always readily likeable, Jasmine.

Finally, Kaufmann reflected on the place the feature has within Italian cinema as presenting a specific and personal, yet universal story about a working class Naples family, and how, although their next film will finally take them out of Torre Annunziata, they have fond memories of all they learnt about filmmaking while telling stories in the region.

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At the 2025 Cinema Made in Italy festival at London’s BFI, Fred Film Radio had the chance to speak with singer-songwriter turned filmmaker Margherita Vicario about her stunning directorial debut, “Gloria!“.

Margherita Vicario explained her two-part compulsion to share the story as autobiographical elements borne out of her desire to capture the intricacies of the creative process “inside the soul of an artist,” as well as to unearth a part of feminist history, in terms of female composers, that’s long been buried, like “dried flowers caught in the pages of history”.

We discussed how the movie mashes up genres in the sense of serving up core tropes of a traditional period drama, yet then often totally subverting them with anachronistic music, and injecting a contemporary feminist energy into proceedings, perhaps recalling the likes of Sofia Coppola‘s “Marie Antoinette“.

She further revealed how she fostered a close bond between the actors to replicate the sisterly bond the characters had within the convent, as well as having them take music classes to convincingly pull off playing the violin and piano.

Finally, Margherita Vicario shared how she wanted to balance shedding light on how female talents of the past were never given their full chance to shine under oppressive patriarchal structures, with a sense of joy, empowerment and inspiration as audiences leave the cinema.

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During the 2025 edition of the Cinema Made in Italy festival in London, Fred FM had an in-depth chat with the charming star of “The American Backyard“, Filippo Scotti.

The actor revealed how he was actually brought on last minute to take on the lead role in the gothic, noir thriller, loosely following one man’s search for a missing woman he holds an unrequited love for, by veteran of Italian cinema, Pupi Avati. With the director now into his seventh decade of movie-making, Scotti was at first a little intimidated but soon found he could collaborate and communicate honestly with the filmmaker.

Digging into the macabre nature of the story and his character, a lonely, obsessive writer, Scotti discussed the story’s theme of avoiding quick judgement of others, while the stylised sensibility of the black-and-white film not only transports its audience in terms of time period but also in the way it’s shot, heavily influenced by Avati’s love of 1940s American noir movies of Alfred Hitchcock’s ilk.

Scotti also reflected on Avati’s belief that working within a small budget is something more filmmakers should be adept at in Italy, noting, “If you build an industry, you build respect for the art.”

Commenting on the divided response to the unsettling, surreal and, at times, absurd feature out of Venice, Scotti reflected that not all movies need to be loved by everyone. He further spoke about how the title fits within his broader career, particularly building on his pivotal role in Paolo Sorrentino’s semi-autobiographical “The Hand of God“, and whether he still gets comparisons with Timothée Chalamet.

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Ahead of the 39th edition of BFI Flare, Fred FM got the lowdown on this year’s lineup from one of the festival’s programmers, Diana Cipriano.

Cipriano shared some of the highlights for this year, particularly some of the trends and key themes arising across the selection and how they reflect the current landscape for LGBTQIA+ film, for instance, parenthood in all its iterations in opening night title “The Wedding Banquet“, Rebecca Lenkiewicz‘s “Hot Milk” and “Outerlands“, about a non-binary nanny tackling trauma.

The programmer gave some of her own personal recommendations of movies that spoke to her, such as “Queens of Drama“, told in flashback, which is “funny, camp, trashy and full of earworm songs”, and “Night Stage“, offering a queer take on the erotic thriller genre, plus those that she expects to make a splash during the 10-day event at London’s BFI, like the restoration of 1983 Brazilian cult comedy movie “Onda Nova“.

We also discussed the broader landscape for queer cinema and the continuing importance of the festival as a platform for films and filmmakers in the LGBTQIA+ sphere, particularly for providing a safe space for connections to be made and conversations to be prompted.

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