FRED Film Radio - English Channel

Selected for Future Frames at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2026, André Vaara presents Sister of Mine, a subtle and emotionally restrained short film that explores identity through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy. Rather than engaging in explicit dialogue about gender and family dynamics, the film relies on gestures, sound, and physical sensations to immerse the audience in the child’s emotional world.

“I wanted to ask what happens when your sibling has access to expressions that you don’t,” Vaara explains. “Is there room to explore another identity as a child?”The story follows a young boy who admires his older sister and struggles with the expectations surrounding his own appearance when the siblings visit a barber. What seems like an ordinary family situation gradually reveals deeper questions about identity, comparison and belonging.

The director traces the film’s origins to his fascination with sibling relationships. According to Vaara, brothers and sisters constantly compare themselves with one another, whether over attention, privileges or affection. Gender became the natural extension of that dynamic because, unlike other childhood inequalities, it cannot simply be negotiated. A single visual image became the emotional seed of the project: one sibling secretly cutting the other’s hair during the night. Rather than explaining the gesture, Vaara chose to investigate the emotions that could lead to such an intimate act.

Dialogue is deliberately sparse throughout Sister of Mine. For Vaara, silence reflects the family’s inability to communicate openly, while sound design becomes the protagonist’s inner voice. “I wanted the audience to stay with the boy all the time,” he says. “The sound design was meant to capture what happens inside him.” Physical sensations also play an essential role. Hair, touch and proximity become narrative tools, allowing viewers to experience the child’s emotions almost viscerally. Vaara believes the short film format offers the ideal space for this kind of sensory storytelling, where atmosphere often speaks louder than plot.

Working with child actors required extensive preparation before filming. Lars and Alma, who play the siblings, are naturally energetic and outgoing, qualities that contrast with the film’s restrained emotional register. Instead of focusing on dialogue, Vaara developed exercises that encouraged stillness and introspection. Rehearsals often involved quietly acting through scenes accompanied by calm music, helping the performers settle into the family’s emotional rhythm. The process, he says, was ultimately about understanding what each child needed to inhabit the relationship truthfully.

Following Sister of Mine, Vaara is developing his first feature film with writer Erika Malmgren and producers Annika Hellström and Erik Andersson. The project centres on two young boys whose intense friendship gradually becomes destructive after adults decide to separate them by sending them to different schools. Moving from short films to features presents new challenges. “A feature needs much more than one feeling,” Vaara reflects. “It’s about structure, momentum, and earning the industry’s trust to make it happen.”

Despite the financial difficulties facing independent filmmaking, he remains committed to telling the stories that matter most to him. His experience at Future Frames has reinforced that conviction. Meeting nine emerging filmmakers from across Europe offered not only insight into different national film industries but also renewed confidence in the value of personal storytelling.”It gave me energy to keep believing in my own voice,” he says.

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At the Future Frames – Generation NEXT of European Cinema 2026, organized by European Film Promotion and the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Croatian director Jozo Schmuch presents Shallow Ground. Shot on 16mm, the film imagines a son who vanished during Croatia’s war of independence returning to his elderly mother three decades later, unaged and unmarked, a reunion whose warmth is shadowed by disbelief. Schmuch’s graduation film, it draws directly on the disappearance of his own uncle.

Schmuch describes Shallow Ground as “a magical realism drama where there is not a lot of magic, but it’s very present,” built around a grief that was never allowed to resolve. “It’s exploring the theme of when somebody is missing, either in the war or their body was never found, can you ever actually grieve for them?” Asked about reviews describing the film as an honest portrait of grief, Schmuch agreed readily: “It’s a film about grief mostly, but then also it’s a film about love, and about how mothers and sons, in the end, love each other.”

The film began, technically, as a graduation project, but its real origin lies closer to home. “My uncle, my mother’s cousin, he went missing during the war. They lived together, he was like a brother to her. He went missing during the fall of Vukovar and his body was never found.” Growing up, Schmuch inherited the loss secondhand. “I spent my childhood hearing about him and missing ever meeting him, having this sort of nostalgic feeling for somebody I never met.” He made the film, he says, for every family living the same unresolved story, in Croatia and elsewhere: “I wanted to make a film for people who haven’t found their loved ones and who are grieving without any concrete proof of their death.

It mattered to Schmuch that the film resist being pulled into the nationalistic register that often surrounds war stories. “It was extremely important for me not to let this movie take a nationalistic dimension, because often when movies deal with the war, they can be used for nationalistic and right-wing purposes, and this is something that I’m very against.” The idea took shape while he was editing an earlier documentary short, one that takes a critical look at how the war is taught in schools. “When you hear about the war in these big and large numbers, they are just statistics, the weapons of propaganda and of indoctrination. But when you take it to the personal level, to two people that it happened to, it becomes something that’s much larger than that.” His hope for the film has nothing to do with assigning blame: “The most important part to take out of this film is not hatred for the warring sides of this Croatian independence war, Serbians and Croatians, but rather to see that a thing like that should have never happened and it should never happen again, in any part of the world.”

Before studying film directing, Schmuch trained in medicine. “Being a doctor is so much more concrete. But I think the arts, they teach us why life is worth living, and they show us the complexity of human emotions, the messy thing about being human.” Asked about the role of European cinema today, he points to a shared culture under pressure from shrinking public funding. “We are constantly bombarded with funding cuts, investing more into defensive budgets, the European Union turning toward defense but defunding creative media. What makes us both Europeans and, say, Germans or Croatians, it’s our culture. It’s the most basic thing about us, and we must fight by every possible means to stop defunding arts.”

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At the Future Frames – Generation NEXT of European Cinema 2026, organized by European Film Promotion and the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Finnish director Helmi Donner presents The Lightning Rod (Matalappa). Her graduation film from film school in Finland, it premiered a year ago in La Cinef, the Cannes Film Festival’s student film section, an experience she still describes as both thrilling and frightening, not least because the film is deeply personal to her.

Donner describes The Lightning Rod as “a poetic horror film,” not built on jump scares or splatter but on the story of a young woman fleeing a toxic relationship, who takes shelter in her grandmother’s house, only to find the older woman unable to meet her in this situation. “They have this tension between them because I think they both know what each other are going through, or what they experienced with this domestic violence, but they are not able to talk about it. I really wanted to capture the silence and how to maybe break the silence in some way.”

Genre, for Donner, was never a distancing device but a precision tool. “I was really interested to play with the genre elements, but to try to make it as precise the experience of the manipulation and this pushing and pulling between people and the pressure. I’m really interested in finding some kind of cinematic language that would be felt in the body, that is not maybe so explanatory.” Confined to a single house over one night, the film leans on a familiar horror device, the house itself seeming to change, to signal that something is shifting beneath the surface: “It maybe comes with some kind of elevation or stylization… so that you can see that something special is happening.”

Music and sound design carry much of the film’s tension. Donner worked closely with her sound designer and composer, Peterson, to fold the score directly into the sound design. “We had this idea of meshing these things together so that the score would be deep in the sound design.

Asked about the role of European cinema today, Donner points to the same sense of belonging she found among this year’s Future Frames group. “I love being a European director, or I would love to be one, because I think there is something really special happening in Europe. I think there is a possibility for a real diversity of voices and styles and experiments. I felt like home in this group of directors.” At a moment when other film industries are losing their freedom, she sees a responsibility in that community: “I think it’s so important to try to resist the very forces that are on the move. I think films are so powerful in that.”

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At the Future Frames – Generation NEXT of European Cinema 2026, organized by European Film Promotion and the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Ollie Launspach presents Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, his graduation film from the Netherlands Film Academy, previously selected for the shorts competition at IDFA, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. What began as a portrait of his partner Sterre and the effect of his gender transition on her became, over the course of making the film, something closer to a self-portrait.

The film grew out of a conversation Launspach and Sterre had never quite managed to have. “Sterre and I hadn’t really talked about the influence of my transition on her for over three years, and for some reason we weren’t able to have that conversation. So I decided to use a camera as a way to start that conversation.” It worked, if in an unconventional way: “When you put a camera in front of your girlfriend, she will talk.” They started recording before either of them thought it would become a film.

Launspach knew, in the back of his mind, that documentaries about the people closest to a filmmaker tend to end up being about the filmmaker too. “I knew the kind of cliché of a filmmaker making something personal and eventually, around the midpoint, needing to turn the camera around, because there’s always something inside of the filmmaker that is interesting and kind of turns the story around.” Still, the shift caught him off guard. After many conversations with Sterre that seemed to go nowhere, he feared the film was failing, until he reviewed the footage. “I watched all the interview material and I came to understand that something was happening with me during these conversations, and that was something I needed to explore more.”

Launspach admits he resisted the idea of making a film about himself. “I was at first very opposed to the idea of making something about myself. It can be very annoying to watch a filmmaker talk about himself a lot. So I was scared to be an annoying filmmaker.” What he found, instead, was something more widely shared than he expected: “I heard myself projecting a lot of negative thoughts about myself onto Sterre.” A feeling, he says, that reaches far beyond his own experience: “Having those negative thoughts about yourself is something not only trans people have, that’s something many, many people have, but it’s not much talked about.”

Asked what it means to him to be a European director, Launspach, still getting used to the title itself, points to the room European cinema leaves for personal, uncommercial work. “I feel like there’s a lot of space to experiment and make really author-driven films, which I think is the most important thing. I would love to make films that aren’t made for commercial purposes but are really truly about real, authentic people and stories, and I feel like Europe is the place to do that.”

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At the Future Frames – Generation NEXT of European Cinema 2026, organized by European Film Promotion and the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Teilo Quillard presents his short film Zampano, a dreamlike story of vertigo, inheritance and the bond between a father and a son. Born to a French trapeze artist and an English aerial acrobat, Quillard grew up in the world of the circus and speaks five languages, as many as are heard in his film.

Being selected for Future Frames feels, Quillard says, like “a real excitement… a real connection or like a gateway into European cinema,” a chance to meet people from other countries and learn how they produce, in the hope of finding a co-production partner for his next projects. Asked what it means to him to be a European director, he answers with an image drawn straight from his own background: “I’ve got a very circus-like view of cinema. I like using different languages, different people from different countries just like in a circus company, and mixing cultures within a project, within a story.” That mixing, he adds, “is a real way to create connections between us and bringing the film somewhere it wouldn’t be able to go if we were only in our own culture or own country.”

Zampano unfolds in a world Quillard describes as “realistic but has some sense of magic in it,” where the era is deliberately hard to place. He borrowed devices from early cinema, like the iris shot, “the lens opening,” as he calls it, while building a modern, layered sound design around them. In the film’s central image, he says, “when he goes up, the trapeze has like an entity, it’s almost like a character you can hear.”

Zampano is set in the world Quillard comes from: he is the son of a French trapeze artist and an English aerial acrobat. The film, he explains, is about a boy who wants to break free from his father and from the expectations projected onto him. “My view was that the father was projecting his own fears onto his son, which was the cause of the vertigo.” The flying trapeze became the natural symbol for that reckoning: “I thought flying trapeze was a great way of symbolizing the importance of letting go and of flying away from your parents.”

Quillard is now developing a feature set once again around flying trapeze, but in a very different circus from the one in Zampano. “It’s going to be much more ‘punk circus’,” he says, citing the French company Archaos as his main reference: “They took the traditional animals out and replaced them with motorbikes, trucks and cars; the clowns fought not with cream pies but with chainsaws and metal bars, with live punk music. I’m in love with that aesthetic and I want to make it exist in the feature film.”

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At the Future Frames – Generation NEXT of European Cinema 2026, organized by European Film Promotion and the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, David Champaigne presents his short film Self-Sown. Selected without his knowledge by the Slovenian Film Center while he was still finishing his master’s degree in film directing, Champaigne arrives at Future Frames with a story rooted in his own adolescence, set over one summer in Ljubljana.

Self-Sown follows Nicola, a teenager forced to grow up fast by his family circumstances, who searches on the street for the stability, acceptance and love he lacks at home. Champaigne says the title comes directly from his own past: “As a young boy, I was actually a part of an environment that was full of kids that I could say are self-sown. It’s actually something that’s kind of deeply rooted in my past and something that I’ve seen, something in part that I’ve experienced.” He describes the film as one about growing up too fast, ultimately “looking and searching for a place in the world for yourself.”

Living alone with a mother who is herself still very young, Nicola ends up in some way parenting his own parent. For Champaigne, this reversal is one of the film’s central subtopics. “Because they’ve been alone with their child their entire life… at one point they collapse and they crash and they can’t handle it anymore, and usually that happens when the child needs them the most.” That lack, he says, is what builds “aggression… anger, and… pain” in the main character.

What started as an idea for a feature became a short during Champaigne’s master, a test that convinced him he wants to keep developing it into a full-length film. Behind Self-Sown also lies a reflection on toxic masculinity and what he calls “the manosphere”. “Just because you’re a man, it doesn’t mean you can’t talk about your feelings. That’s the point: you have to talk about your feelings and how you feel. Otherwise you just hold it in… you can’t be a rock if you’re going to blow up inside like Nikolai is.”

Asked what it means to him to be a European director, Champaigne points to the artistic freedom that comes with an industry funded mostly by public money. A freedom he contrasts, without diminishing it, with the more commercial logic of the American studio system: “Nothing wrong, great films come out of there, but it’s a different system.”

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At the ninth edition of Filming Italy Sardegna Festival 2026, Erin Moriarty receives the Filming Italy Women Power Award. Known for her role in the hit series “The Boys”, the American actress has become a vocal advocate for gender equity in the entertainment industry and for a more honest, human conversation about the struggles that come with life in the spotlight.

Receiving an award is always surreal, Erin Moriarty says, but this one carries particular weight. “The fact that it happens to be specifically female oriented is really poignant for me, because as a woman in the industry who’s faced a lot of the gender oriented adversities, I think it’s so important to highlight women.” At a certain point in a career, she explains, resilience stops being optional and becomes mandatory, especially in the entertainment industry. “To specifically have it be female-centric is very full circle, very poignant for me.”

When asked whether she feels a responsibility as an artist to bring up issues of female empowerment and to say no to projects that don’t represent women well, Erin Moriarty reframes the question in a way that says something important about where she is in her career. “It feels like a privilege for me, because when you first start out as an actor, you just have to say yes to everything, no matter what the role is.” The ability to be selective, she says, comes with its own obligation. “If I’ve gotten this far and I’m able to be selective about the work that I do, then of course I’m going to utilize that in terms of making sure that I choose roles that feel mindful towards the female experience and not reductive of it.”

Perhaps the most powerful moment of the conversation comes when Erin Moriarty reflects on her choice to speak publicly about her own struggles and illness. For her, the decision was straightforward: anything that humanizes public figures is good for others. “We’re put on this pedestal that frankly we don’t deserve to be on. It dehumanizes us when we put other humans on pedestals and the implication is they are superior to us.” Being isolated while going through difficulties, she adds, makes them a million times worse. “It felt like I just needed to be honest about my experience if it helps one person feel less isolated and that was achieving a goal.” The playing field, she believes, needs to be leveled, and it is on artists themselves to make that happen.

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At the ninth edition of Filming Italy Sardegna Festival 2026, Olga Kurylenko receives the Filming Italy International Award. Born in a small town in Ukraine, former model, Born in a small town in Ukraine, former model, Bond girl in “Quantum of Solace” and actress in films ranging from “Oblivion” to “The Death of Stalin”, Olga Kurylenko has built an international career that she herself still struggles to fully take in. The award, she says, is as much a surprise as it is an honor.

For Olga Kurylenko, receiving an international award carries a weight that goes beyond the recognition itself. “If someone told me as a little girl that I would be an international actress and that I would ever be getting these type of prizes, I would never believe it, because I come from so far away, from such a small town.” The path, she says, was never written for her the way it might be for others born closer to the world of cinema. “Normally it’s impossible for people like me and that come from where I come from.” The prize brings her back to appreciate what she has accomplished, something she admits she tends to underestimate. “It’s very humbling.”

Long before Paris and the modeling career, acting began as something much more private. As a shy child, Olga Kurylenko asked her mother to enroll her in an acting class, not to become an actress but as a way to open up. “It was more like a therapy for me. I had to stand on stage and I was shaking and I was scared and I was freaking out. Each time I had to step over the barrier, it was a violence I was doing to myself because it was against my nature, until it became my nature.” The transformation worked. “A lot of actors will tell you that they are by nature shy and then they just somehow go up there and they blossom.”

The ambition to truly act, rather than simply appear on screen, came later, in Paris, through long hours spent in cinemas discovering performances that moved her. One above all stayed with her: Emily Watson in “Breaking the Waves”. “Movies like that persuaded me that I really should try and follow that path.” Not for fame, she clarifies, but for something harder to define: the desire to experience those feelings and to create characters that are complex.

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At the 9th edition of Filming Italy Sardegna Festival 2026, James Franco receives the Filming Italy Creativity Award and sits on the jury for the short film competition. Actor, director, writer and now co-founder of a fashion company, James Franco has built a career defined by constant reinvention.

Asked what creativity means to him today, James Franco doesn’t hesitate. The answer comes from experience, not theory. “One of the main lessons I’ve learned is that when I’m open, when I’m open to outside influence, when it’s a weird combination of working hard but also being open, all these things that I would never have planned happen.” It was openness that led him to co-found Pali, a fashion company born from a friendship with someone who came from fashion school, something he never would have imagined for himself. “If I had stayed right where I thought, ‘I’m only a dramatic actor and I can only do this,’ it would never have happened.”

One of the turning points James Franco recalls most vividly is the moment he stopped trying to be the next James Dean. After a period of depression, a chance encounter at a film festival with his old friend Judd Apatow changed everything. “He said, ‘Why did you leave comedy? We did Freaks and Geeks together. Come back. I’ve got a project, it’s called Pineapple Express.’” James Franco said yes, and that single decision opened up a whole new side of his career. “James Dean never did Pineapple Express. But I was open.”

James Franco is also bringing to Italy a theater play he wrote, directed and acts in, called Desert Films. A dramedy based on the true story of American actor Robert Blake, known for his roles in David Lynch‘s “Lost Highway” and the Truman Capote adaptation “In Cold Blood”, who was tried and exonerated for the murder of his wife. “It’s a tricky, tricky subject. So it’s about this, but it’s also about more.”

Looking back at a career full of pivots, James Franco identifies a handful of key decisions. Dropping out of university to go to acting school against his parents’ wishes. Saying yes to comedy when he thought he was a dramatic actor only. Going to film school when he realized he wanted to direct. And then, perhaps the most important shift of all: “There was the moment when I had to learn that movies and success were not my god. When I got rid of the thinking that I would only be worthwhile if I did good projects, it made me a much happier person.”

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Presented as a world premiere at the ninth edition of Filming Italy Sardegna Festival 2026, “Other Side of Fame” is directed by Erik Bernard and stars Sveva Alviti in the role of Rachel, a young woman whose life changes during the Cannes Film Festival after a romantic encounter with an elusive American forces her to choose between the allure of fame and the promise of real love. The film arrives at the festival with the Women Power Award going to Sveva Alviti, in recognition of a career built around giving voice to women’s stories.

For Erik Bernard, “Other Side of Fame” was born out of conversations he had in Cannes with aspiring actors navigating the risks and consequences of chasing a career in the spotlight. “It is about a woman who makes a hard choice and has to find her way back to where she started, and in the middle of all that, the hardest choice is love.” From that starting point, the story grew around a question that feels particularly relevant today: what does it mean to want to be famous, and can fame and love ever truly coexist?

The collaboration between Erik Bernard and Alviti started in an unexpected way. His publicist, who had previously worked with Sveva Alviti on “Dalida”, suggested her name when Erik Bernard was looking for a European actress fluent in French. He reached out to her on Instagram, not the most conventional of beginnings. “Usually, when you have this kind of connection on Instagram, it’s not real”, Sveva Alviti admits, “but I gave him a chance because what he wrote was very deep.” After reading the script in two hours, she knew she wanted to do it. Erik Bernard, for his part, quickly discovered she would bring “value and depth to the character” that went well beyond what he had imagined.

What drew Sveva Alviti to Rachel was the complexity of the role and the weight of its message. “There is a message about the power men can have and how they play with your dreams.” Rachel, she explains, shares something with Sveva Alviti herself: stubbornness, strength, and moments of fragility. The character goes through a great deal before finding her moment, and that journey, for Alviti, is what makes the story worth telling. Every role she chooses, she says, comes with a purpose: “I want to communicate something that stays.”

Receiving the Women Power Award on the same night as the world premiere of “Other Side of Fame” felt to Sveva Alviti like a natural alignment. “I always choose characters where I can give voice to women or stories that don’t have one.” Beyond acting, she is now also directing her own documentaries about women, a path that Tiziana Rocca recognized and wanted to celebrate, honoring not just the film but the vision behind an entire career.

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