FRED Film Radio - English Channel

“If I Float” directed by Bogdan Alecsandru is showcased in Future Frames – Generation NEXT of European Cinema at the 58th KVIFF.

The queer Romanian filmmaker is particularly proud of representing the future of his country’s filmmaking as it is also an artist’s mission to see the world, represent it and address important social topics.

“If I Float” is a coming-of-age story and its title inevitably leads to a metaphor on what we’re all trying to do from adolescence on: stay afloat. “If we manage to do it” adds the director Bogdan Alecsandru .

Besides Future Frames at Karlovy Vary which will give him the opportunity to meet other emerging filmmakers from the EU and enjoy networking, Bogdan Alecsandru will be part of the Directors Summit in the Talents Sarajevo program.

As Bogdan Alecsandru declares in his short bio: He is interested in visual storytelling and explores the thematic fusion between anxiety and intimacy in fiction film.

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“Almost everything you see in the movie is taken from documentary research that we’ve done in the camp, and on volunteer work, for many months, in a camp.”

“This is all born from the state people are in, in the camp, which is very specific, which is hard to explain unless you are there. Because it’s a place that is nor here, nor there, which means your state of mind is stateless, and that creates a shift, constantly, based on moods, on what happens in the moment, and everything is amplified. Any rumours of conspiracy is amplified, anything that might go wrong or might go right, and the highs are high, and the lows are low. And the danger is extreme, because it is such an intense pressure cooker, being inside this situation.”

“A friend of mine said it was a movie about borders: the ones we create in our minds, and the ones that are imposed on us.”

“They carry a very intense trauma, just from the road to Greece, and often, they have lost somebody or left somebody behind. They don’t necessarily talk about this when they arrive, because they’re trying to prepare their minds for a new place, a new world, but I think that a lot of trauma is suppressed, and it starts to come out in different ways. And it’s something people don’t realise… You meet people later, in Europe, and you don’t realise, you don’t know what they’ve had to do to get to this place, if that place offers them any love back. What they’ve had to go through… It’s heartbreaking to see what’s happening in Europe right now.”

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At the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, we met William Sehested Høeg, a talented young director selected for the FUTURE FRAMES program. Høeg’s short film “The Complaint” is a satirical exploration of corporate culture and self-help, set against the backdrop of a teambuilding event gone awry.

When asked about his experience at Future Frames, William Sehested Høeg expressed his excitement and gratitude. “It’s been a really wonderful experience, especially meeting, you know, nine other directors from Europe who have the same passion for film as I do, but we make films in so different ways,” he said. “It’s been a really inspirational trip for me, and I just really hope that I can follow them in their future careers and see what’s, what’s going to happen.”

Describing his film, William Sehested Høeg said, “The Complaint is a dark comedy about a group of colleagues who attend a coaching seminar during a weekend at this very luxurious hotel. The main protagonist, Mona, then receives an anonymous complaint about her behaviour. That sets her on a journey to find out who had the audacity to complain about her.”

William Sehested Høeg’s inspiration for “The Complaint” stemmed from his fascination with self-help and corporate culture. “The idea for the film arose during a coaching seminar at a luxury hotel, where I saw the potential for drama in such a confined setting” he explains. “But the other thing is it’s a very personal story. I think my mission is to talk about, you know, different aspects of my personality, especially the sides that I’m not necessarily proud of, but to somehow communicate them in a, you know, funny way so that we can share the emotions, and we can all perhaps learn something.”

Reflecting on how current times influenced his film, William Sehested Høeg noted, “I always thought that I just want to do films about, you know, how social media has affected us and especially my generation because we’ve grown up with Facebook and Instagram that is like a very narcissistic tool.” The director highlights the influence of egoism and the fragility of our insecurities, which are amplified by social media, leading to a collective desire to belong.

William Sehested Høeg skillfully balances humour and serious themes in his film. “I always say that I want to make films about socially relevant issues. But putting it in a satirical or comic way, I think sometimes it opens up the discussion as more instead of just being a drama, for instance,” he explained. “I think we can always be better. We can always try to work on us, but the most important thing is that we can laugh at the end.”

Working with his sister, Emma Sehested Høeg, added a unique dynamic to the film. “Emma and I, we’ve made films ever since we were like six years old,” William Sehested Høeg shared. “When I first talked to her about the film, she could feel that I was trying to tell a very personal story. And she told me: if someone needs to act out all your insecurities, who could do that better than me?”

“The Complaint” is not just a critique of corporate and social dynamics but also a mirror reflecting our own struggles with identity, belonging, and self-worth in an increasingly interconnected world. William Sehested Høeg ’s approach encourages viewers to laugh at their insecurities and ultimately seek improvement, making his work both entertaining and thought-provoking.

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At the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, we had the chance to speak with Marthe Peters, one of the promising directors selected for the FUTURE FRAMES program. Peters’ short film “Baldilocks,” a poignant self-portrait drawn from her battle with cancer, uses her father’s archival footage to explore memory, survival, and the lingering impacts of her childhood illness.

When asked to introduce “Baldilocks,” Marthe Peters describes it as an autobiographic documentary. “I think is the best way to describe it, and well, it’s based on my experience with cancer when I was a child, but it’s also about my reflections on the consequences that illness or trauma has had on me. And it is also a big love letter to my parents.”

Marthe Peters reflects on the emotional journey of revisiting these memories. “It was actually mostly lovely to really get a visual image of myself as a child,” she explains. “It’s also a strange experience because I don’t necessarily identify with this child because it’s a period in my life where I have no memory. But it was really helpful for my mental health and for leading a personal life.”

Looking back at her childhood through her father’s lens, Marthe Peters gained new insights into her family dynamics. “I got to get a little insight into my parents’ personal life,” she shares. “I usually thought about my parents in relation to me, and it’s really beautiful to get to see your parents when they’re a bit younger as well and get a bit more of an insight of how the experience was for them was also just what they like to do for fun, the conversations they had between the two of them, of which, of course, I’ve never present.”

Discussing the challenges she faced, Marthe Peters admits, “The way I make films is quite lonely, but it’s also nice. I do the writing, the filming, the editing—I do it all by myself. So I definitely have to make sure that I get feedback from people regularly enough; otherwise, it can get into this solipsistic.”

“Baldilocks” takes audiences on a poignant journey through director Marthe Peters‘ childhood memories and the lasting impact of her illness. This powerful film also showcases the unwavering love of two parents, beautifully captured through video and gestures, as they express their deep affection for their daughter.

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A talk with the immense filmmaker and documentary maestro Sergei Loznitsa on his latest non-fiction work, “The Invasion”, directed remotely from Berlin, where he resides, with the help of the talented cinematographers Evgeny Adamenko and Piotr Pawlus. The film premiered in Cannes, and is now screening at the 58th Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Horizons section.

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“Real cannot be called a film. And it cannot be called a documentary. It is a document of this war recorded by accident during one battle.”

Ukrainian director and activist Oleh Sentsov tells us more about “Real“, a 90-minute document involuntarily filmed in the trenches, not as a filmmaker but as a soldier, which world-premiered as a Special Screening at the 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

This “accidental” film came with a preliminary message recorded by the filmmaker, also known for spending five years in jail as a political prisoner in Russia.

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Almost 10 years after 2015’s Oscar®-winning “Inside Out“, Disney and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” returns to the mind of newly minted teenager Riley.

“Inside Out 2“, coming out in cinemas on June 14th worldwide and June 19th in Italy, is directed by Kelsey Mann taking over Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter.

Produced by Mark Nielsen, who served as associate producer for “Inside out“, the film finds Riley’s mind headquarters in the typical chaos that comes with coming-of-age: new emotions are unexpectedly joining Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. Among them, the most irreverent and difficult to handle will be Anxiety.

The  idea  of  Riley  entering  adolescence  provided  filmmakers with the perfect  canvas, confirm Kelsey Mann and Mark Nielsen as they both realized with Inside out that kids are much more capable of understanding a profound film like this than we think.

“We knew that we were if we went down a similar road with this film and tackle more complicated emotions, and bigger concepts, kids would be on board to do that with us” say director Kelsey Mann and producer Mark Nielsen.

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The new film by director Jeff Nichols, The Bikeriders, coming out in cinemas on June 19th, follows the rise of a midwestern motorcycle club, the Vandals.

Distributed by Universal Pictures and starring Austin Butler, Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer, the film is set in the city of Chicago in the 60’s and it is the story of a mysterious motorcycle club member Benny (Austin Butler), finding his place in the group led by Johnny (Tom Hardy).

Inspired by iconic motorcycle films such as “The Wild one” or “Easy Rider“, director Jeff Nichols focused on the universal theme of the film, our constant search for our identity and the need for everybody to belong, to fit in.

“While we’re looking for our place in the world, we often end up in a group” comments Jeff Nichols adding that in the film “you’re looking at guys that are formalizing the idea of rebellion”.

As his Benny doesn’t really talk much while he has so many scenes in which everything happens without a single word coming out, Austin Butler explains his method of writing down his characters’s thoughts despite not spelling them out.

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