FRED Film Radio - English Channel

PODCAST | Matt Micucci presents Big FRED Venice, FRED Film Radio’s daily and live-streamed show from the 79th Venice Film Festival.

Matt Micucci presents Big FRED Venice, FRED Film Radio’s daily and live-streamed show from the 79th Venice Film Festival. In this fifth episode, Matt is alone again, with the exception of a special guest appearance from Filippo Guarna, FRED’s videomaker and part of our radio’s wonderful behind-the-scenes team. Matt also talks about some of the big films that have been screened recently at the Lido, including Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985, Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener and more, and makes a plea to PRs to let him interview the folks of The Banshees of Inisherin.

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PODCAST | David Martos interviews Laura Poitras, Nan Goldin, Harry Cullen, Megan Kapler, director and actors of the film All the beauty and the bloodshed.

Laura Poitras brings a new documentary to Venice Film Festival, a new film that’s competing for the Golden Lion in the Mostra. All the beauty and the bloodshed tells the story of photographer Nan Goldin, how she fight for the visibility of people with AIDS and then decided to launch PAIN. It’s an organization that tries to make the world aware of the thousands of people that became addicted to drugs because of the pharmaceutical companies owned by the Sackler family. In FRED we talk to the director and three of the subjects of the documentary, including Nan Golding herself.

All the beauty and the bloodshed: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate dialogue, ground-breaking photography and rare footage of her fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis. The film interweaves Goldin’s past and present, the deeply personal and urgently political, from P.A.I.N.’s actions at renowned art institutions to Goldin’s photography of her friends and peers through her devastating The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and her legendary 1989, NEA-censored AIDS exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. The story begins with P.A.I.N., a group she founded to shame museums into rejecting Sackler money, destigmatize addiction and promote harm reduction. Inspired by Act Up, they orchestrated protests to expose the Sacklers and the crimes of their Purdue Pharma, makers of OxyContin. At the core of the film are Goldin’s art works The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; The Other Side; Sisters, Saints and Sibyls; and Memory Lost. In these works, Goldin captures her friendships with beauty and raw tenderness. These friendships, and the legacy of her sister Barbara, anchor all of Goldin’s art.

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PODCAST | David Martos interviews Soudade Kaadan, director of the film Nezouh.

Syrian director Soudade Kaadan talks to FRED about how she managed to make her second film after winning the ‘Lion of the Future’ award in Venice. In her second visit to the Mostra she’s premiering Nezouh [Orizzonti Extra], a story about emancipation an freedom set in the Syrian war

Nezouh: An allegorical tale of female emancipation set amidst the Syrian conflict in Damascus, about a family who decides to stay behind in the besieged area. When a shell rips a giant hole in the roof of the building where 14-year-old Zeina and her family live, they are suddenly exposed to the outside world. One day a young boy living nearby lowers a rope through the opening in the family’s roof and Zeina discovers her first taste of freedom. Whilst her father is determined to stay in his home and not become a refugee, this new window opens up an unimaginable world of possibilities to her and her mother who now face a dilemma of whether to stay or leave.

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PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Timothée Chalamet, Luca Guadagnino and Taylor Russell, actor, director and actress of the film Bones and all.

For his first American film, set in the 80’s Midwest, Luca Guadagnino chooses to adapt Bones And all, a book by Camille DeAngelis. In competition at the 79th Venice Film Festival, the film is, to quote Guadagnino’s words about impossible love, about the disenfranchised, and about the dream of finding a home.” Bones and All is a love story among Maren ( Taylor Russell) and Lee ( Timothée Chalamet), two outcasts from society, because of their cannibal instincts. The actors along with Luca Guadagnino comment on what it means to become adults in this coming-of age story and how love can be found by everyone, even “monsters”.

Bones and all: First love finds Maren, a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee, an intense and disenfranchised drifter, as they meet and join together for a thousand-mile odyssey that takes them through the back roads, hidden passages, and trap doors of Ronald Reagan’s America. But despite their best efforts, all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and a final stand that will determine whether their love can survive their otherness.

To discover more about the film, click here.

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PODCAST | Matt Micucci interviews Joel Edgerton, actor of the film Master Gardener.

An interview with Joel Edgerton, lead actor in Paul Schrader’s new film, Master Gardener. The film was presented out of competition at the 79th Venice Film Festival, where the filmmaker also received a career achievement award. In this interview, Edgerton talks about working with Schrader and the things he admires about his movies, as well as the character he portrays in Master Gardener, finding a way to accept and forgive his difficult past.

Master Gardener: Narvel Roth is the meticulous horticulturist of Gracewood Gardens. He is as much devoted to tending the grounds of this beautiful and historic estate, as pandering to his employer, the wealthy dowager Mrs. Norma Haverhill. When Mrs. Haverhill demands that he take on her wayward and troubled great-niece Maya as a new apprentice, chaos enters Narvel’s spartan existence.

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PODCAST | Simone Soranna interviews Sébastien Lifshitz, director of the documentary Casa Susanna.

Sébastien Lifshitz tells us how he discovered the story of Casa Susanna and hot it was important for him to try to make a movie about that.

Casa Susanna: In the ‘50s and ‘60s, deep in the American countryside at the foot of the Catskills, a small wooden house with a barn behind it was home to the first clandestine network of cross-dressers. Diane and Kate are now 80 years old. At the time, they were men and part of this secret organization. Today, they relate this forgotten but essential chapter of the early days of trans-identity in this film. It is a story full of noise and fury, rich in extraordinary characters, including the famous Susanna, who had the courage to create this refuge that came to be known as Casa Susanna.

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PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Cate Blanchett and Todd Field, actress and director of the film Tár.

Even though she feels like a real person, the Lydia Tár whose biography it is depicted in TÁR by Todd Field, in competition at the Venice International Film Festival, doesn’t exist. The character masterfully played by Cate Blanchett is only based on real, existing people. Cate Blanchett and Todd Field started in 2020 to build Lydia Tar, first-ever female chief conductor of a major German orchestra, from scratch. They developed her story as a fierce “Maestro” until she became almost independent, alive. Is she aware is aware of the way she acts in the world and insinuates her presence into other people’s lives? Cate Blanchett thinks she’s not, as she’s as human as we are. The actress adds that she never judged Lydia, her toxic behaviors or her virtues as that she never judges her characters.

Tár: Set in the international world of classical music, TÁR centres on the first-ever female chief conductor of a major German orchestra.

To discover more about the film, click here.

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PODCAST | David Martos interviews Michal Vinik, director of the film Valeria is getting married.

Michal Vinik, director of Valeria is getting married – selected by Orizzonti Extra in the 79th edition of Venice Film Festival- talks to FRED about the struggle of female directors trying to finance their new productions. She also talks about the idea of telling the story of Valeria, a woman born in Ukraine that travels to Israel in order to wed a man she had never met before.

Valeria is getting married: Christina is a Ukrainian woman who moved to Israel through a ‘bride-to-order’ kind of deal. Compared to her life back in Ukraine, life in Israel is great for Christina. She works in a beauty salon, earns her own money, and loves Israel. Her Israeli husband Michael is also satisfied with this marriage. He is happy that he found a woman who can live with him. In fact, he is so satisfied that he starts his own little business scouting for Ukrainian brides for other Israeli men. Michael’s recent matchmaking is a special one—the bride’s name is Valeria, and she’s Christina’s younger sister. Michael went out of his way and found the best man he could get for her. His name is Eitan, and while he may not be the most handsome guy in the country, he is a good-hearted, generous man. However, Valeria is different to her older sister. And the whole delicate balance is at risk.

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PODCAST | David Martos interviews Steve James, director of the film A compassionate spy.

Steve James, director of the documentary A compassionate spy, out of competition in Venice Film Festival, talks to FRED about how he discovered the story of Ted Hall. He was a young scientist hired to work in the Manhattan Project that began to leak classified information about nuclear weapons to Russia. The film leans on the testimony of Ted Hall’s widow, Joan, and some TV material found by the production team

A compassionate spy: Recruited in 1944 as an 18-year-old Harvard undergraduate to be the youngest physicist on the Manhattan Project, to create a bomb before the Germans did, Ted Hall didn’t share his colleagues’ elation after the successful detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb. Increasingly concerned during 1944—with Germany clearly losing the war—that a U.S. post-war monopoly on such a powerful weapon after the war could lead to nuclear catastrophe, he decided beginning that October to start passing key information about the bomb’s construction to the Soviet Union. After the war, at the University of Chicago, he met and married Joan, a fellow student with whom he shared a passion for classical music and socialist causes — and the explosive secret of his espionage. Living under a cloud of suspicion and years of FBI surveillance and intimidation, the pair raised a family while Ted refocused his scientific brilliance on groundbreaking bio-physics research. A Compassionate Spy reveals the twists and turns of this real-life spy story, and the couple’s remarkable love and life together during more than 50 years of marriage.

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PODCAST | Matt Micucci interviews Abel Ferrara, director of the film Padre Pio.

Abel Ferrara talks about his latest film, Padre Pio. The film was presented at the Giornate degli Autori, the parallel and independent section of the 79th Venice Film Festival. Aside from speaking about the film and the events it portrays, including the too little talked about massacre at San Giovanni Rotondo of 1920, Ferrara talks about his own spirituality and talks about casting Shia LeBeouf in the role of Padre Pio because he felt the actor was undergoing a similarly profound awakening of his own.

Padre Pio: It is the end of World War I and the young Italian soldiers are making their way back to San Giovanni Rotondo, a land of poverty, with a tradition of violence and submission to the iron-clad rule of the church and its wealthy landowners. Families are desperate, the men are broken, albeit victorious. Padre Pio also arrives, at a remote Capuchin monastery, to begin his ministry, evoking an aura of charisma, saintliness and epic visions of Jesus, Mary and the Devil himself. The eve of the first free elections in Italy sets the stage for a massacre with a metaphorical dimension: an apocalyptic event that changes the course of history.

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