FRED Film Radio - English Channel

During the 24th edition of Alice nella Città, in Rome, we spoke with character designer Thibault Leclercq for the film Wildwood, e mesmerizing tale of adventure and discovery that uses the stop-motion animation technique with a bigger scale than ever. The film adapts a novel by Colin Meloy enriched by his wife Carson Ellis’ illustrations, which provided a distinctive starting point also for the character designs of the film. Leclercq describes indeed how the team sought to honour that visual identity while shaping characters for a feature film with a more mature tone, also revealing how Portland’s landscape and the practical demands of puppetry helped in creating the film’s blend of naturalism and fantasy.

During our interview on FRED Film Radio, Leclercq stated that the Wildwood design process began with a commitment to retain the charm and illustrative quality associated with Ellis’s work. That influence appears in the puppets’ fine details, from their hair and anatomical features to the patterns on their costumes. The designs also preserve a simplicity in their silhouettes, keeping a connection to the source material without reproducing it unchanged. At the same time, Leclercq aimed to give the characters greater sophistication, suited to a story that moves between wonder, hardship and darkness.

The narrative strenght of Wildwood also lays in its relationship with the natural world shaped the visual approach, character designer Thibault Leclercq also explains. Rather than relying on obvious symbols, the designer team drew on organic forms, subtle curves and asymmetry, allowing small irregularities to make the characters feel connected to nature. His own experience of moving to Portland to work on the film offered a close view of how residents relate to the surrounding woods and landscape. Observing local habits and ways of dressing helped him develop a more grounded sense of the world the characters inhabit.

Also the animal characters required a balance between expressive movement and believable animal behaviour. What Leclercq said to FRED Film Radio is that the Wildwood design team worked alongside the puppet team to make the creatures convincing, including coyotes that move upright despite being naturally four-legged. The “Napoleonic” costumes of some of the characters also add an intentionally unsettling quality, while the characters remain recognisably animals rather than humans concealed by animal disguises. A balance of fantastic and realistic, among many other incredible aspects, that makes Wildwood in of the most astonishing examples of stop-motion animation of our times.

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Marian Arechega, the director of the Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival, discusses the evolution and highlights of the festival’s 13th edition. She emphasises the festival’s growth in Scotland, its diverse programming, and its efforts to foster cultural exchange through Spanish cinema. This interview offers insight into how the festival continues to strengthen its role as a key platform for Spanish films in the UK.

Marian Arechega explains that the Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival began thirteen years ago with no prior experience in organising such an event. Over time, it has established itself firmly within Scotland, attracting a growing audience and creating a stable cultural initiative. Originally focused solely on Edinburgh, the festival now extends its screenings to several Scottish cities and even beyond, including one event in Manchester, broadening its impact and visibility.

This year’s edition features a wide-ranging programme that defies a single theme, offering genres from drama and comedy to social cinema and romance. Marian highlights that the core focus is on imperfect family relationships, exploring conflicts and secrets across generations. The festival also emphasises stories of individuals seeking their place in the world, with films portraying both youth and older generations, and dialogues connecting past and present. A notable aspect is its commitment to showcasing female voices and stories of resilience.

The festival maintains a strong presence of Spanish films, with special sections that highlight films made in the Basque Country and in Latin America. Marian notes that Latin American cinema is always part of the programme, despite logistical challenges and costs. The Basque window is a recent addition, supported by a sponsor, showcasing films in both Euskera and Spanish. This year’s selection includes the queer ageing dramedy Maspalomas (Dirs. Jose Mari Goenaga and Aitor Arregui, 2025), and folk horror fantasy Gaua, directed by Paul Urkijo. This diversity underscores the festival’s role in promoting lesser-represented regions and languages within Spanish-speaking cinema, enriching the cultural dialogue in Scotland.

Among this edition’s highlights, Arechega discusses the sold-out gala screenings of Rondallas/Band Together (Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, 2026), which opens the festival with the presence of leading actors Judith Fernández and Fer Fraga (in the photo with Marian), and the special preview of this year’s Spanish Oscar contender La bola negra, directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (winners of this year’s Cannes Festival Award for Best Direction). Author and screenwriter Alberto Conejero will be in attendance at the Festival for a Q&A after the screening.

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In Italian cinemas from October 1, distributed by MUBI, Her Private Hell is Nicolas Winding Refn‘s first feature in ten years, since The Neon Demon.

Set in a surreal, futuristic metropolis shrouded in pink mist, the film follows Elle (Sophie Thatcher), a rising movie star preparing to shoot a space odyssey alongside her ex-lover turned stepmother (Havana Rose Liu), while elsewhere in the haze an American GI (Charles Melton) wanders the desolate streets in a desperate search for his daughter. As a sinister figure known only as the Leather Man stalks the city’s shadows, their lives begin to converge, dissolving the boundaries between past and present, memory and fate.

The director talks about blending many genres into a single film, the father-daughter relationship at its core, his collaboration with composer Pino Donaggio, and the near-death experience that brought him back to cinema after years spent in the world of streaming.

For Refn, the starting point was the idea that genres no longer need to be kept apart: “I wanted to make a movie that was sci-fi, thriller, horror, camp, comedy, symbolism, opera, melodrama, but all in one. So, suddenly everything became elements”. He traces that impulse back to a childhood memory: “I remembered when I first came to America, when I was 8 years old, and I discovered television and the idea that I could click channels. That was so new to me, that on every channel there would be something else. So it’s what you would do in scrolling today, and I would be very addicted to this constant movement of my hands between the channels”. Going back to filmmaking, he explains, meant a clean break: “I wanted to get away from my past and to completely re-envision what I think cinema of the future is. And obviously that became Her Private Hell”.

At the heart of the film is the bond between fathers and daughters, which Refn describes as “a very complex theme, because having two daughters, it’s very complex”. He wanted to overturn a genre convention he finds peculiar: “Most films of genre are about violent men doing violence to save their children and justifying extreme violence. And I found that very peculiar, because it was almost like pornography for men. It’s a very male kind of fetish and fantasy”. So he flipped the perspective: “I thought it could be interesting to reverse engineer it, that it’s about a daughter whose father is taken away from her by her lover. So you have a pretty dramatic triangle, and then she creates an alter ego, which is the perfect father that would go to hell to bring back his daughter, which is something we all would want to be as men”. Refn sees the film as a companion piece to Only God Forgives, “which is very much about a mother and son relationship and the incestuous component of the mother species devouring her children”.

Unlike his previous projects, Refn had no idea at first what the film should sound like: “I usually have a musical idea very early in the stages of a film or the shows I make. But with Her Private Hell, I didn’t have any idea what the film was going to sound like, because there were so many elements combined. And it was a bit frustrating”. The answer came during the shoot: “About halfway through the production, I realized that what I really wanted to make was an opera. And I said, ‘Okay, it’s an opera. At least I know what that sounds like’”.

That led him to Pino Donaggio, whose music had been with him for a long time: “Like the last 20 years I’ve used Pino’s music as a kind of source, and I realized that he was still alive. So I reached out to him, and he was young at heart even though he was an older gentleman”. Refn set only one condition: “That you turn it into an opera, because all these pieces had to be tied together. Something had to connect all these various ideas that I couldn’t and I wouldn’t change, and that would be the music. So what would tie everything like a bow would be Pino’s music”.

Explaining the long gap since his last feature, Refn recalls being at Cannes with Only God Forgives just as Netflix was launching its original shows: “I could see right away, in my opinion, that this was going to change everything”. After The Neon Demon, he says, “I’d kind of come to the end of what I really wanted to do with movies, and then I went into the world of streaming, or let me put it like this, I fell into the rabbit hole of streaming”.

He made a show for Amazon and Copenhagen Cowboy for Netflix, both of which he enjoyed making, unlike the streaming environment itself, while a planned HBO show, Maniac Cop, never happened. Then came a collaboration with Prada and the half-hour film Touch of Crude: “It was the first time I made anything that had no desire to be commercial. It was like painting a white wall blue, and it was never going to be as good as that again. So why continue?”

“And then I died”, Refn says plainly. “When I was dead for 20 minutes and came back, it was almost like God gave me a second chance, and I realized that I want to go back and start over again, and that is cinema”. By then, he says, streaming had turned into “more generic algorithmic content”: “It’s a very functioning mechanism, but I don’t find it particularly interesting, because I don’t think the algorithm is very healthy for the human soul. It just consumes your time. But trust me, being dead, you come back, you realize how valuable time is”.

Between Her Private Hell and the exhibitions created with Prada in Tokyo and New York, cinema is now, for him, part of something larger: “For me, cinema is no longer one thing, it’s part of many things. So one idea which used to be cinema is now an opportunity to create multiple avenues of the same idea because of technology. And I think that is super fascinating”.

That experience, Refn explains, “deconstructed the sense of what I think narrative is and should be”: “A lot of our time is spent on getting or having information through entertainment, but not a lot about experiencing time. And to me, I think the most important aspect of any creative experience is having a sense of an odyssey. And to do that, you need to break the barriers of our brains, our skull, our armor. So art becomes an act of violence meant to penetrate your mind and inspire. But to do that, it needs to infuriate you or it needs to make you cry or make you happy. That’s why polarization is the success of creativity”. And he concludes: “Time is everything, and time is what deconstructs your life, and it’s just incredibly valuable”.

With his daughter, Refn says, the exchange goes both ways: “It’s always important that you try to educate your kids and everything, but at the same time, you also have to listen to them. So she kept on trying to persuade me how good Riverdale was, and it took me some time to accept, and then when I saw it, I was like, ‘You’re right’”. In return, he showed her Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc: “Seeing how she reacts to something that is so foreign to her normal day entertainment, and how she was affected by it and could see that this is probably the greatest film ever made. Like those are the things that give you hope for the next generation”. In that generation he sees a new kind of freedom: “The democracy of filmmaking, the ecosystem has been completely turned upside down. So now everything is accessible and everyone can create. And I think that’s incredibly healthy and it’s very inspiring”.

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Torsten Frehse, director and founder of the EWIP – European Work in Progress platform, discusses the significance of this initiative in supporting European and international film projects. The conversation highlights the platform’s role in bridging the gap between production and distribution, and  emphasizes the importance of EWIP in fostering a more dynamic and accessible market for emerging filmmakers.

Frehse explains that EWIP serves as a crucial marketplace where projects in the midst of production or post-production can be showcased to a targeted audience of buyers, sales agents, and festival representatives. It’s focus on distribution is due to the extensive experience of its director: Torsten Frehse is CEO of the German distribution company Neue Visionen, and his co-director Olimpia Pont Cháfer, is the coordinator of the Spanish film distributor association, ADICINE and responsable of acquistions of the German distribution company Piffl Medien.

One of the key initiatives within EWIP is its focus on authentic African films, which Torsten Frehse describes as a response to the often stereotypical representation of African cinema in the international market. He recounts how his own efforts to connect African filmmakers with European distributors led to the creation of the African European Distribution Academy (AEDA), now part of the international distribution training program Toolbox of the Berlinale EFM. Frehse stresses that the platform aims to showcase genuine stories from Africa, often made by filmmakers from the diaspora, rather than conforming to festival trends or neo-colonial expectations. This approach seeks to give African projects a fairer chance at international circulation, emphasizing authenticity and cultural diversity.

Looking ahead, Torsten Frehse highlights the ongoing evolution of EWIP and IFDS  as a vital hub for innovation in film distribution and financing. He mentions that the platform not only facilitates deals between producers and international sales agents but also fosters dialogue among distributors, funders, and festival programmers. The platform’s awards and in-kind support for completing films are designed to incentivize filmmakers and ensure projects reach the finish line. Frehse concludes that EWIP’s expanding network and its commitment to diverse, bold projects will continue to shape the landscape of European and global cinema, making it an essential part of the industry’s future.

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Avec Pascal Diot, directeur du Venice Production Bridge, nous avons discuté des résultats obtenus après 15 ans — puisque c’est la 15e édition cette année — d’avoir créé un endroit où les professionnels du cinéma ont plaisir à revenir pour discuter, négocier, échanger et travailler dans une atmosphère à la fois détendue et efficace.

Diot nous dévoile un nouvel événement au sein du Venice Production Bridge, le VPB Location Market, destiné à couvrir l’ensemble de la chaîne de production du cinéma. Les lieux de tournage étaient un maillon manquant, pourtant essentiel pour les producteurs : sans lieu, pas de tournage possible. Le VPB Location Market rassemble des commissions du film et des studios, en créant un événement dédié au sein d’un festival de classe A — une première.

L’événement se tient au Matchpoint Arena, où ont lieu traditionnellement les masterclasses du festival chaque après-midi. La programmation a été adaptée pour le matin : l’espace accueille deux ou trois panels chaque matin, destinés aussi bien aux professionnels qu’au grand public, puisqu’il s’agit d’un lieu ouvert à tous.

Diot confie avoir reçu de nombreuses demandes cette année, notamment pour des panels sur l’intelligence artificielle : submergé de propositions, il n’en a finalement sélectionné que deux ou trois. Pour soutenir le VPB Location Market, il a également créé un panel dédié aux lieux de tournage. Les sections traditionnelles du VPB restent inchangées, comme le Book Adaptation Bridge, limité à 30 participants tenus de venir avec l’intégralité de leur catalogue, ou encore le Venice Gap Financing Market, le marché de coproduction, qui compte déjà plus de 900 rendez-vous prévus sur trois jours.

Deux pays particulièrement chers à Diot sont cette année les pays d’honneur : la Suisse et la Grèce. Il se réjouit de cette double présence, qui correspond pour ces deux pays à un moment charnière. En Grèce, la fusion de plusieurs entités a donné naissance à une structure unique, le Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Centre (EKKOMED), qui devrait considérablement faciliter et soutenir l’industrie cinématographique du pays. En Suisse, les autorités réfléchissent également à revoir et à augmenter leurs subventions afin d’attirer davantage de tournages.

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Presented in the Open section, out of competition, at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival 2026, Boatbuilders is set at the head of a remote Maine harbor, where the sixty-some workers of the Brooklin Boat Yard coax wooden planks around a frame, make precise saw cuts, and sand edges for flawless joints, resulting in some of the most stunning and sought-after wooden vessels in the world. Over the course of four vibrant seasons, director Luke Lorentzen tracks the boatbuilders’ meticulous construction of a 56-foot sailboat while embedding us in the lives of these men and their close-knit community. Lorentzen talks about why he chose this story after a difficult previous film, about building the film as an ensemble rather than around a single lead, and about the attention to detail he learned from the boatbuilders themselves.

Lorentzen explains that Boatbuilders was, in part, a deliberate reaction to the film he had made right before it: “I had just finished a film before Boatbuilders that was incredibly meaningful to me but was emotionally very difficult. It was about end of life care in a hospital in New York City. And I knew that I loved filmmaking, but I needed to pick another topic that would be playful and delightful.” That search led him back to a place from his childhood summers: “Maine is a place that I grew up going every summer, and I always just felt really good when I was there. I decided to try and find a story that would ask me to be there for a really long period of time. So I found the Brooklin Boatyard and shot with them for about 16 months. It was just a totally life-affirming, beautiful experience, and I’m hoping the film can give the audience the same thing I was craving, and I think many of us are.”

Trent, the yard’s project manager, emerges as one of the film’s most present figures, but Lorentzen is careful to frame him as part of a larger whole: “Trent stuck out from the very first day of being in Brooklin. He’s such a tender, sweet person, and he’s also just incredible at building things. But it’s really a film about community as well, and it’s not just about one person doing something. It’s about a whole collective of people who each have their own part of the project and can only finish the boat together.” That collective structure, he says, shaped the shoot and the edit alike: “It’s different from any other film I made, in that it’s really an ensemble of many people. Throughout the shooting I needed to really get to know all of the 60 people who work at the boatyard, and in the edit figure out how all of their personalities and the energy of their work together could come through, without it feeling like the film needed a core person to follow.”

Learning to look at the world like a boatbuilder

Asked about the almost hypnotic, meditative quality of some sequences, Lorentzen says it reflects exactly what he was chasing on set: “My goal was to live the story and to be there as much as possible. The yard welcomed me into their family, and I knew that over time that would work its way into the film. I was just looking for things that were satisfying or mesmerizing, things I couldn’t look away from, but not always knowing why.” That quality of attention, he explains, came directly from the boatbuilders’ own discipline: “I was trying to get into a headspace where I wasn’t overlooking things, where small little tensions or small little details mattered. And that really came from the boatbuilders: their job is to be incredibly detail oriented, and I learned how to look at the world through that perspective.”

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Liryc Dela Cruz, director of the short film A Brief Encounter, discusses his latest work at the International Critics Week section of the Venice Film Festival 2026. The film explores themes of trauma, tenderness, and human connection amid a backdrop of violence and digital detachment.

Dela Cruz explains that the story was inspired by a conversation about Filipino digital cleaners, highlighting the often unseen labor behind online footprints. The narrative centers on a woman who receives distressing news about loved ones’ suicides, but instead of dwelling on violence, the film emphasizes intimate gestures and human care. He emphasizes that the off-screen tragedies serve as a stark contrast to the gentle physical contact portrayed on screen, aiming to evoke empathy without explicit violence. The filmmaker also notes his intention to capture fleeting moments of connection that stand out amid a flood of violent images in contemporary media.

The director discusses his deliberate use of changing aspect ratios, shifting from color to black and white and from wide to square formats, to reflect the evolving nature of digital identities. He sees cinema as a collective experience that can produce profound emotional responses, especially when depicting moments of tenderness and joy often invisible in mainstream portrayals. Dela Cruz highlights his desire to offer viewers a different perspective—one that celebrates human pleasure and desire beyond suffering, challenging the Western tendency to fetishize poverty and pain. His aim is to create a space where viewers can see others as complex beings capable of feeling and self-determination.

Dela Cruz shares that he is working on a new feature titled Una festa peruviana, a love letter to Rome that explores the presence of bodies in the city’s landscape. Unlike his previous works rooted in his home country, this project reflects his current life in Italy and his interest in how bodies inhabit and reroute through space without invasion but through coexistence. He expresses enthusiasm for his upcoming film and hopes that his recent short, A Brief Encounter, will resonate with audiences by emphasizing subtlety and human connection in a time dominated by images of violence.

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Presented in Venice Open – Out of Competition during the Venice Film Festival 2026, The Basics of Philosophy follows John Jorissen, a philosophy professor in the American Midwest working on a book about Spinoza, whose quiet life with his partner Becca and her son Willie is upended when the sudden reappearance of a young man, Miguel Basque, at his estranged father’s funeral forces him to confront a past incident he has never accounted for.

Wracked with guilt and doubting that Spinoza’s God will ever pardon him, Jorissen buys a lethal dose of euthanasia powder even as he asks Becca to marry him. Director Paul Schrader talks about the film’s questions of change and forgiveness, and about how he sees film criticism in the age of the internet.

Asked about the possibility of change, both in the film and in his own filmmaking over the decades, Schrader ties the question directly to the line his character speaks: “As the character says, I think I have changed but I have not been forgiven.” He describes what drew him to that idea: “Can we really change, and can we really forgive ourselves? I thought that was an interesting theme.” He is less convinced, though, that people themselves change very much at all: “If I go back to even the days before I was a filmmaker, when I was a film critic, I don’t think I have changed that much. The mold is cut for us in our childhood, the computer is programmed, and we run that program for the rest of our days.”

Asked how he, a former film critic himself, sees film critics today, Schrader points to the internet as the great disruption: “Film criticism has obviously been changed by the internet. You used to be able to come to a festival and do about 20, 30 things, and that would cover the world. Now you do 10,000 things, and you can’t cover the world. Everybody has a blog, everybody has a website. It’s just huge, in a way. So in order to reach the same number of listeners or readers, you just have to do a lot more work.” He says he still keeps a hand in criticism himself, in a smaller way: “I’m quite active on Facebook because it allows me to be a kind of critic of sorts. I can go to a movie, have an opinion about it, and just post it on Facebook. It’s a way for me to return, in a small way, to criticism.”

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Presented out of competition in the Open section of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, Queer Edward II is set in the spring of 1991, as queer life in Britain faces renewed attack and filmmaker Derek Jarman adapts Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II into a radical protest film. Built from never-before-seen footage shot by Seamus McGarvey on Jarman’s set, the documentary is about the refusal to separate art from life, politics from pleasure. Director Theo Rollason and activist and film advisor Peter Tatchell talk to David Mart about how the archive came to Rollason, Jarman’s legacy as a cultural revolutionary, the reclaiming of the word queer, and the rights their subjects fought for that are once again under threat today.

Asked why this story, for his first feature film, Rollason traces it back to the footage itself: “It’s an entirely archival film and the archive kind of came to me. I was working as an archivist and was asked to give an opinion about this footage that no one had seen for 35 years”. He describes the pull he felt toward one thread within it: “And very quickly, maybe slightly bigheaded of me, I thought this is an amazing film that needs to be made and I really want to make it because I feel a really strong attachment to a particular story within this footage about queer rights in the UK in the late 80s and early 90s which I felt was under told, hadn’t been told enough, certainly not to the extent that I was familiar enough with it”.

Asked to explain Jarman’s importance to viewers who may not know him, Tatchell describes a figure both gentle and radical: “Derek Jarman was an incredible, innovative, pioneering cultural revolutionary. He was polite, charming, but a revolutionary in art, film, and many other forms”. And, he adds, that radicalism always carried a purpose beyond the work itself: “In his films he tried to not only produce great art but also to tell a social message, to have a moral purpose, and in particular to expand understanding and consciousness about the struggle of LGBT+ people, and that for him was really, really important”.

Asked how the meaning of the word queer has shifted since the period the film covers, Rollason describes a term still being contested at the time: “The period that we’re looking at in the film is kind of when queer was still being adopted as a word in the UK. It had come over from America and the Queer Nation, and it wasn’t at all without controversy”. He explains why Jarman embraced it, unlike the label that came before it: “He always had a difficult relationship with what was the gay community, that he always put in scare quotes, because he didn’t feel totally represented by it and it felt maybe too prescriptive for him at times. And I think queer as a term, as a reclaimed term, just felt like something exciting, something more expansive, and something that they could turn around and say, well, screw you if you’re going to call me queer, I am queer”. Tatchell adds that for Jarman the word pointed toward something larger than equality: “So for him, the use of the word queer was a defiant affirmation that he had a vision of something bigger and better, which would not only benefit LGBT+ people, but also straight people as well. So his idea of queer was beyond equality, equality plus, a transformation of society rather than a fitting into it”.

Asked whether the sense of progress on LGBT+ rights felt a decade ago is now being reversed, Tatchell lays out a global picture that is still far from won: “Even assuming the battle was won, it was only won in the West. There are still over 60 countries in the world that criminalize same-sex relations. 12 have the death penalty and 43 have various restrictions on trans people. So globally the battle is far from won”. He describes the backlash now reaching the West as well: “Even in the West the gains we’ve won are under attack and we are witnessing a backlash, particularly targeted at the trans community, but not entirely, and that is scary. The rise of the far right in Europe and the United States is a very, very frightening moment. It has echoes of a dark past and so far democracies are more or less holding the line, but things are very, very threatening”. A pressure, he adds, that reaches well beyond LGBT+ people: “I think not just LGBT+ people, but also Black and ethnic minorities, immigrants, refugees, Muslims, Jews are all feeling pressure”. For Tatchell, that is exactly what makes Jarman’s film still speak to the present: “In a sense Edward II, Derek Jarman’s film, was really a statement or a kickback against marginalization, in his case the marginalization of LGBT+ people, but also in a wider sense against all people who are marginalized, discriminated, and victimized”.

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Listy-Letters from the Silenced Country by director Andrei Kutsila, presented at Venice Film Festival, explores the realities of contemporary Belarus through personal letters from those who have experienced repression, imprisonment, and exile. The project is included in Venice Open and sheds light on a country where freedom of expression remains severely restricted.

Kutsila emphasizes that his own forced exile following the 2020 protests deeply influenced his desire to tell stories from Belarus. With many friends still inside the country facing imprisonment or hiding, he felt a moral obligation to give voice to those silenced by the regime. The film’s focus on letters allows for an intimate glimpse into the lives of political prisoners and exiles, offering a deeper understanding beyond conventional reporting.

Kutsila explains that letters serve as a bridge to the private worlds of individuals living under authoritarian rule. Unlike news reports or human rights documentation, letters reveal emotional depth and personal perspectives. He spent years exploring innovative ways to present these letters visually, aiming to preserve their intimacy while making them accessible on screen. He believes that this approach allows viewers to engage with the stories on a human level, fostering empathy and awareness about Belarus’s ongoing struggles.

A key element of  Listy-Letters from the Silenced Country is the inclusion of Andrei Astapovich, a former Belarusian investigator who defected and sought asylum in Poland. Kutsila underscores how vital it was to incorporate a voice from inside the system, someone who chose to break away rather than conform. Developing Andrei ’s story involved years of close collaboration, during which Kutsila learned about the moral dilemmas faced by insiders. He sees Andrei’s example as a testament to the possibility of individual resistance, even in the most oppressive circumstances.

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