FRED Film Radio - English Channel

PODCAST| Angelo Acerbi interviews Till Schauder, director of the documentary When God Sleeps.

Till Schauder tells us the story of When God Sleeps, a documentary about Shahin Najafi, a young Iranian singer and musician who was forced to flee his country to run away from life threats and a fatwa on his head, for his music and his lyrics. The movie was complex to make and the life of the main character made it even more difficult, as you can hear from the voice of the director.

When God Sleeps: “My songs did not make me famous. The fatwa did”. That’s what the Iranian musician Shahin Najafi says after being sentenced to death for blasphemy, exiled to Germany and forced to live in hiding. He is guilty of writing hip hop songs about delicate subjects such as censorship, theocracy and, most of all, violence and discrimination against women. After fleeing to Cologne, he will live an incredible adventure and the will even fall in love with the granddaughter of the Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran. A sort of modern-day Romeo and Juliet, in which the protagonist has to deal with a multifaceted music scene and threats to his life, while the danger he faces is always underestimated by the police. A story that highlights the intimate and existential sides of a battle against silence. Shahin Najafi is an example to all migrants and refugees who try to realise their hope for freedom, his only weapons being the lyrics of his songs, rich in poetic, literary and philosophical references, and his live concerts.

SEEYOUSOUND International Music Film Festival 2018, the first festival in Italy dedicated to international cinema with a musical theme, returns with the fourth edition, which will be held in Turin from 26 January to 4 February 2018, at the Cinema Massimo of the National Cinema Museum. There are 62 films scheduled in the 10 days of the festival, divided into 4 competitive sections, 2 out-of-competition reviews and 1 retrospective, accompanied by panels, meetings and events. With 1 international preview and 1 European preview and 27 Italian premieres, the festival increasingly aims to establish itself internationally, in the light of a path that has lasted four years and which, with passion and constancy, has led to the construction of a dense network of reports on the territory.

The post Till Schauder – When God Sleeps #SYSF2018 appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

PODCAST| Chiara Nicoletti interviews Florian Weghorn, programme manager of Berlinale Talents 2018.

If last year’s theme was “Courage Against All Odds”, Berlinale Talents celebrates its sweet 16 years of life by deciding to focus on the mysteries of cinema and developing the new theme: Secrets. Florian Weghorn, programme manager of the Talents is once again on FRED to describe how this theme has been developed and shaped into the various talents’projects, activities and panels. “Sharing and participation are true secrets for success”, Weghorn remarks while proudly quoting a new talents’ record which received 3,191 applications from 133 countries this year. 250 filmmakers from 81 countries have finally been chosen, 128 women and 122 men. As in the previous years, the Berlinale Talents is proud to announce that the only two debut films in Competition, Touch Me Not and Las herederas are both by alumni directors, Adina Pintilie and Marcelo Martinessi besides David Zellner who co-directed with his brother Nathan and is in competition with Damsel. Even if it’s by chance that there’s a majority of women among the Talents selected, the Berlinale Talents doesn’t fail to keep on track with the recent happenings and discussions in the cinema world and not only, about equal treatment and gender equality and takes this opportunity to organize debates on how to achieve a better gender and power balance. As a tradition, many important guests are going to hold workshops and panels. To mention only a few: Gus Van Sant (Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot), Christian Petzold and Barbara Auer (Transit), Jury President Tom Tykwer, director of the fortunate TV series Babylon Berlin, Lav Diaz, the makers of the new German Netflix series Dark and composer and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto. The new key visual for Berlinale Talents 2018 lends a visual dimension to the theme of “Secrets”: by not revealing everything, Talents, guests and the Berlin public are invited to complete the various statements with their own interpretations.

Berlinale Talents is an initiative of the Berlin International Film Festival, a business division of the Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, in cooperation with Creative Europe MEDIA, a programme of the European Union, the Robert Bosch Stiftung and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. It was initiated in 2003. In addition to the extensive summit programme of master classes and panel discussions with top-notch experts, Berlinale Talents offers a range of Project Labs in which you can further develop and present your own project. Berlinale Talents also provides Studio programmes and workshops for specific groups of film professionals. As an initiative of the Berlin International Film Festival, the entire event is closely linked with the programmes of the festival sections and the European Film Market. While the roots of Berlinale Talents are firmly planted in Berlin new shoots of the initiative have been sprouting internationally. These Talents International editions, Talents Beirut in Lebanon, Talents Buenos Aires in Argentina, Talents Guadalajara in Mexico, Talents Durban in South Africa, Talents Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Talents Tokyo in Japan have the familiar structure and purpose of their German counterpart; all the while retaining a regional perspective and finding support and the necessary amenities in a locally based international film festival. Talents initiatives are supported by local partners as well as by the Goethe-Institut.

To know more about Berlinale Talents, click here.

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PODCAST| Angelo Acerbi interviews Phil Cox, director of the film Betty: They Say I’m Different.

Phil Cox worked for 5 years on the project, two years just to locate Betty Davis, who has been living secluded for years. She was a rebel, a pioneer of female rock funk performers and she paid a huge price for her freedom. She could have been huge, but she was far too ahead of the times. As Miles Davis said she was “Madonna before Madonna, Prince before Prince”.

Betty: They Say I’m Different: Betty Davis was an icon of music, style and feminism. She grew up on a farm in Carolina, then among the steelworks in Pittsburgh. At the age of sixteen, she moved to New York, where she began working as a model and she had the opportunity to meet famous musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. She was married for a year to Miles Davis, who described her as the forerunner of Madonna and Prince. Her funk debut album, Betty Davis, challenged the male chauvinism of 1973 with its explicitly provocative energy, especially on sexual themes. For this reason her career was never a commercial success; however, she gained the cult status of a Black Power Goddess, before retiring in 1979. Phil Cox’s documentary goes back through Betty’s life, analysing the way she influenced modern music: from soul to pop and rock, revealing all the personal challenges she had to overcome during the thirty-five years of her almost invisible career.

SEEYOUSOUND International Music Film Festival 2018, the first festival in Italy dedicated to international cinema with a musical theme, returns with the fourth edition, which will be held in Turin from 26 January to 4 February 2018, at the Cinema Massimo of the National Cinema Museum. There are 62 films scheduled in the 10 days of the festival, divided into 4 competitive sections, 2 out-of-competition reviews and 1 retrospective, accompanied by panels, meetings and events. With 1 international preview and 1 European preview and 27 Italian premieres, the festival increasingly aims to establish itself internationally, in the light of a path that has lasted four years and which, with passion and constancy, has led to the construction of a dense network of reports on the territory.

The post Phil Cox – Betty: They Say I’m Different #SYSF2018 appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Aditya Vikram Sengupta, director of the film Jonaki.

Director Aditya Vikram Sengupta presented his latest film, Jonaki, at the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it had its world premiere in the festival’s Bright Future strand. The film was inpired by the stories her mother used to tell the director and the emotions, thoughts, and experiences that resulted in him from his grandmother’s coma and subsequent passing. “It was my way of coming to terms with things because I was very deeply attached to her,” he explains. “As a child, when I would hear these stories, I had an innocent way of constructing and imagining the stories … even in the film … it’s almost like a fairytale.” The director also talks about the reason for his disjointed but cohesive narrative, the influence of dream on Jonaki, and the influence of music on everything he does. “Most of the things that I do are very musical,” he tells us in this interview. “I’ve been a musician since childhood … there’s an attempt to achieve this balance and rhythm and this form of balance and dance in whatever I do, whether it’s film or painting.”

Jonaki, an eighty-year-old woman, finds herself in a decaying world of nostalgia. She relives moments of her life with a strangeness that churns up feelings buried deep in her soul. Her memories surface in dream-like modes in which the line between real and surreal blurs. The echoing space of this fascinating meditative journey gently and carefully confronts us with a possible moment of transition between life and death. The cinematic form of a beautiful, esoteric trance with meticulously created painterly images suggests a temporal and spatial void inhabited by a less immediate kind of time. The Bengali director (also a painter, animator and film author), whose remarkable debut Labour of Love was screened at IFFR in 2015, daringly and successfully digs deeper in search of an exciting personal cinematic language.

The post Aditya Vikram Sengupta – Jonaki #IFFR2018 appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Alexey Fedorchenko, director of the film Anna’s War.

Director Alexey Fedorchenko presented his latest film, Anna’s War, at the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it had its world premiere in the Voices strand. The film is set in Ukraine in 1941 and follows a little Jewish girl entering survival mode and finding an unlikely hiding place in a Nazi-occupied building. Fedorchenko explains in this interview that Anna’s War is based on a true story and as a filmmaker, everything about this story interested him. The film opens with the shot of a shallow mass grave and not much information is given because, as Fedorchenko tells us “I respect my spectator and I understand that everybody knows what happened during those times in those territories that were occupied by the Germans.” He also talks about the challenge of having a child lead character and finding the right child lead actress: in praise of the six-year-old Marta Kozlova, he says “I worked with her as if she were an adult actress … at the moment of shooting she was six-years-old but worked as a real adult actress, absolutely mature.”

Anna’s War: Ukraine, 1941: a Jewish girl regains consciousness under a layer of black earth. Close-ups of milky-white body parts reveal she is in a mass grave. The images are of great beauty despite all their horror. Director Alexey Fedorchenko (Silent Souls, 2010; Angels of Revolution, 2014) modestly, empathically tells the true story of six-year-old Anna, who views the war from her hiding place in a building taken over by the Nazis. The guard dog outside imprisons her. The threat of discovery is constant. Her ingenuity, the items left behind by the slowly alternating visitors and the treasures she discovers in the adjacent rooms help her survive, simultaneously creating some absurdist, theatrical moments. This ode to children’s resilience and ingenuity hinges on the phenomenal child actress Marta Kozlova. (Text of the synopsis taken from the official website of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.)

The post Alexey Fedorchenko – Anna’s War #IFFR2018 appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Eddie Martin, director of the documentary Have You Seen the Listers?.

Director Eddie Martin presented his documentary, Have You Seen the Listers?, at the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it had its international premiere. The film is about Australian artist Anthony Lister – his family life and his art life. Martin explains that in Australia, art is not an easy career path to take and that Lister somehow challenges the status quo in Australia. “When it comes to the arts,” he explains in this interview, “we can be a little conservative, we’re not so progressive.” Here, Martin talks about meeting Lister and his impression of the artist as well as the man. He also tells us that he was not only surprised to find that “he’d been documenting his and his family’s life over a couple of decades” but also that he was surprised to find that he filmed the bad times as well as the good times. He tells us that he believes that “once you start to have your eyes open to recording these things … you’re more open to looking at things the way you probably previously wouldn’t – like there’s beauty in everything.”

Have You Seen the Listers?: He grew up on a diet of television and noodles, says Australian graffiti artist Anthony Lister. His father only did martial arts and had no time for the family. When the city of Brisbane organised a competition to spruce up the control boxes for traffic lights, Lister submitted a plan. He landed the commission, and the madcap sprayer turned into a world-famous artist. ‘Brizzy Banksy’ was the headline in one local paper. The unique element of this biopic is that Lister always had a camera with him, so viewers get to see the high and low points first hand. He married his first great love, had children, moved to New York and became even more famous. The tragedy is that he developed the same obsession for work that once drove his father out of the house. Then came drugs and divorce and he didn’t see his three children anymore. (Text of the synopsis from the official website of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.)

The post Eddie Martin – Have You Seen the Listers? #IFFR2018 appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Ikeda Akira, director of the film Ambiguous Places.

Having previously won a Hivos Tiger Award with his film Anatomy of a Paper Clip, director Ikeda Akira returned to the International Film Festival Rotterdam where he presented his latest film, Ambiguous Places. In this interview, the director tells us about the dream influence of this film, and the way in which he makes sense of his dream informed not only the style of the movie, but also the structure. The world of Ambiguous Places, as the title suggests, is very ambiguous and strange: “there’s no clear synopsis and there appear so many strange things,” he explains. “In the world of the film, there are no ordinary things and all the people in the film accept that.” Ikeda Akira also talks about the sense of humour of his film, the way in which he likes to work with actors to include them in the overall bizarre vision of the aforementioned strange (and dreamy) world of the movie, and more.

Ambiguous Places: Tiger Award winner Ikeda Akira (Anatomy of a Paper Clip) returns with his third feature, which amuses and bewilders in equal measure. Konoko, a young woman, wakes up on the beach and finds an insect stuck to her head. As she walks around searching for a barber to help her get rid of it, she faces unexpected obstacles in what at first appears to be an ordinary, quiet village. Comprised of a series of dream-like episodes, this unabashedly offbeat comedy balances otherworldly strangeness with decidedly Japanese scenes. The skilled cast commit themselves to the unusually deadpan humour, bringing extended pauses and empty stares to each line, often delivered with near-robotic repetition. Amid the surrealist absurdity of individual moments – a doctor is forced into marriage for failing to save a human-sized insect from illness – the social and familial pressures that pervade Japanese society surface in surprisingly poignant ways. (Text from the official website of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.)

The post Ikeda Akira – Ambiguous Places #IFFR2018 appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Malene Choi Jensen, director of the film The Return.

Director Malene Choi Jensen presented her film, The Return, at the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it had its world premiere in the main programme of the Brigth Future strand. The film talks about children from Korea who were adopted and brought up in other countries returning to their native land to discover things about their past and the life they might have had. It is a very interesting concept, especially because, as Choi Jensen tells us, she believes “the notion [of adoption] actually came from Korea,” and originates from the aftermath of the Korean War. She herself has a personal connection with this subject and has gone back to South Korea with the same purpose in mind, and has had to experience the same frustrations that Karoline, the film’s main character, experiences, as she is unable to find out any information about her original parents – which prompts the question of why she persists. The director describes the film as a hybrid, mixing fantasy and fiction. This approach somehow reflects the subject of The Return: “Being adopted has something to do with what is real and what is unreal because a lot of your story is made up by other,” Choi Jensen explains in this interview. “But it was also a way to shoot the film on a very short budget … the framework is fiction … but within the film, we also have scenes that are documentary.”

The Return: A strange country, yet it feels like coming home. On her first visit to South Korea since her adoption in Denmark, thirty-something Karoline discovers she is not the only one who wants to know where her roots are. In The Return, she is supported by fellow adoptees from Europe and the United States who, just like her, are trying to fill the black holes of their childhood. Chastening for some, frustrating for others. Karoline is in the latter camp. She knows where she was born and has a name, but more is needed to find her birth mother. Malene Choi Jensen based her film on her own experience, portraying it so naturally that her feature debut could almost be a full-blooded documentary. Amidst editing that is occasionally abrupt, the long scenes with open-hearted conversations stand out. An emotional high point is a tender, cautious reunion between a mother and son, with Karoline as silent witness. The painful desperation about identity is casually caught in evasive glances. (Text of the synopsis taken from the official website of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.)

The post Malene Choi Jensen – The Return #IFFR2018 appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Travis Beard, director of the documentary RocKabul.

Director Travis Beard presented his documentary, RocKabul, at the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands, where it had its world premiere. RocKabul is a film about the first and only metal band in Afghanistan. Beard lived in Kabul, where among other things, he ran a lively music scene; he defines the years between 2009 and 2011 as the “golden years,” and this is the time during which he came across the District Unknown, “a bunch of young boys who were aspiring to be a metal band … but they really couldn’t play.” From 2011 to 2014, there was a spike in attacks as the western forces withdrew from the country, and Afghanistan spiralled into mayhem and chaos. This inevitably affected the music scene that was beginning to flourish there, resembling something like one would imagine London during the 70’s punk movement. RocKabul is, in fact, not only about the music but also, somewhat inevitably, about the politics and the aforementioned mayhem. As Beard says in this interview: “for them, for the boys in the band and for their followers, [metal] was a way to let out their frustrations, to talk about the daily … mayhem they lived in,” in a setting where “there’s always potential for attack.”

RocKabul: Afghanistan’s first heavy metal band is District Unknown, a group who taught themselves to play with more enthusiasm than musicality. Discovered in 2009 by musician and filmmaker Travis Beard, he followed them with his camera from early on and coached them in developing their career. However, musical progress is not the only challenge they face: rock music is seen as satanic by religious fanatics in Afghanistan and its practitioners are targeted. The documentary therefore mainly plays out in Kabul’s underground music scene, i.e. cramped practice pads and living rooms, but also at the unique Sound Central music festival. District Unknown are now famous far beyond their country’s borders, but their popularity also increases the danger for the band’s members, who – just like every other inhabitant of Kabul – have to deal with daily bombings and firefights. Is their love of country, band and family stronger than the call of a more normal life abroad?

The post Travis Beard – RocKabul #IFFR2018 appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Donal Foreman, director of the documentary The Image You Missed.

Director Donal Foreman presented his latest film, The Image You Missed, at the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam where it had its world premiere. The film sees Foreman exploring the archive of his father, American documentary filmmaker Arthur MacCaig, who made many films about the conflict in Northern Ireland over a thirty year period. In this interview he tells us that he hardly knew his father growing up, but when he died ten years ago, he came into possession of his film archive, which included approximately one hundred hours of footage: “I had a feeling that there was a film here, that there was something to be done with this material.” The Image You Missed was also a film Foreman claims he needed to make; he calls it “a personal journey and a way to challenge myself as a filmmaker.” The director had, in fact, never made an essay documentary before. The voice over of The Image You Missed is in the form of a letter that Foreman addresses to his father, “a dialogue with him, or a ghost of him, or a fiction of him I have invented,” he tells us. In this interview, he also talks about the differences between his filmmaking style and that of his father, whether his father subconsciously influenced Foreman’s decision to become a filmmaker despite his absence, the potential for manipulation of an image, and more.

The Image You Missed: “An American in Paris making films about Ireland” – this is how Donal Foreman describes his father, Arthur MacCaig, in The Image You Missed, Foreman’s fascinating film essay about his father – someone he had little contact with. During his career, Irish-American MacCaig (1948-2008) made films about the conflict in Northern Ireland and left behind a visual archive spanning thirty years – images Foreman uses to find out what he has in common with his father. Both make films, both emigrated to another country, albeit in opposite directions: from America to Europe and vice versa. But it’s the differences that stand out: Foreman moved back to Dublin, while MacCaig had preferred to film in divided Belfast. The main difference lies in their approach to images and what these say. Foreman, for example, analyses what is missing from the films MacCaig made. And although he has respect for his father’s political convictions, he does not share them.

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