FRED Film Radio - English Channel

PODCAST| Nicolò Comotti interviews Marie Kreutzer, director of the film The Ground Beneath My Feet.

Marie Kreutzer has her latest feature The Ground Beneath My Feet in competition at the 69th edition of the Berlinale. Starring Valerie Pachner as Lola, a very successful business consultant, The Ground Beneath My Feet is an insightful and moving study on a too-often overlooked subject.

The Ground Beneath My Feet: Lola is almost thirty. A successful management consultant, she is constantly on the move between the companies she is tasked with restructuring. Her chic apartment in Vienna is more of a mailbox and a launderette than a home. A hundred working hours a week is not uncommon in addition to five sessions at the gym, expensive dinners with clients and nights spent in sterile hotels. Her career, which she is advancing with cleverness, efficiency and ruthless cunning, appears to be unstoppable. She applies a similarly disciplined approach when it comes to managing her private life. This means that nobody is allowed to know about the existence of her older sister Conny, who has been suffering from mental illness for a long time and who never leaves her apartment. But when Conny attempts to commit suicide, Lola searches for a way to be there for her. Marie Kreutzer’s portrait of the jet-setting Lola reveals that there is sometimes just a thin line separating polar opposites such as order and chaos, rise and fall – even for someone who thrives in a society fixated on achievement.

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PODCAST| Nicolò Comotti interviews Yaron Shani, director of the film Chained.

Yaron Shani is at the Berlinale with Chained, the second film of his Love trilogy. Chained is a darkly ironic and extremely veritable look on a man’s life that with kafka-esque rhythm will completely fall into ruin. Chained stars Eran Rain, Stav Almagor and Stav Patai and is in Panorama’s official selection.

Chained: Rashi has been in the police force for sixteen years and is a strict and relentless advocate of law and order. This is something experienced by a handful of young people who appear to be dealing drugs in the park in the afternoons when Rashi orders two of them to strip naked. The next day it transpires that the father of one of the boys is a high-ranking secret service official. Rashi is promptly accused of sexual harassment and suspended from duty. His world is thrown into disarray and not only his own future, but also that of his small family is called into question. Rashi and his partner Avigail have long been trying to have a child together. Avigail’s 13-year-old daughter Yasmin does not make the situation any easier. She is in the throes of puberty, dreams of a career as a model and always stubbornly tries to impose her will. Things are really heating up for Rashi. Yaron Shani employs a cast of non-professional actors to create this profile of an outwardly strong man whose questionable idealism leads to disaster. A drama about love and the bid to win control that features intense and utterly authentic dialogue.

To discover more about the film, click here.

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PODCAST| Nicolò Comotti interviews Rita Azevedo Gomes, director of the film A Portuguesa.

Rita Azevedo Gomes is here at the 69th edition of the Berlinale with her latest film A Portuguesa – The Portuguese Woman. A Portuguesa is a contemplative work where time, history and language fuse with each other and invite the viewers to go beyond what is represented on screen. A Portuguesa is in Forum’s official selection and stars Clara Riedenstein, Marcello Urgeghe, Ingrid Caven, Rita Durão, Pierre Léon.

A Portuguesa: His home is war. Her home is Portugal. Yet the young, newly married wife of Lord von Ketten is determined to make her husband’s family abode, an inhospitable castle on a cliff in northern Italy, into her home. When he sets off to battle with his men and tries to send her back to her parents, she decides to stay. Over the eleven long years he stays away, she insists to her relatives on their rare visits that this is where she belongs, even as they see the house as her mausoleum and lament her loneliness. And she does indeed carve out a life for herself here. She reads, sings, plays music, dances, swims and rides in the forest. She also rears a young wolf to which she is closer than to her two sons – or at least that’s what’s suggested by this adaptation of Robert Musil’s novella The Portuguese Woman, which is set in the Middle Ages and features magnificent costumes and opulent images captured by the elegant, gliding camerawork. The animals are positioned in conspicuous fashion, as if they stem from somewhere else, just like the figure of Ingrid Caven in a shoulder-less evening gown cooing songs or reciting Walther von der Vogelweide in the courtyard. Tandaradei!

To discover more about the film, click here.

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PODCAST| Nicolò Comotti interviews Carlos Conceição, director of the film Serpentário.

Carlos Conceição joins us to discuss his debut long feature Serpentário, in Berlinale’s Forum selection. In Serpentário, a young man drifts through an emptied-out African landscape in search of the ghost of his mother – a glittering journey between past and future that borrows from different film genres along the way. Serpentário‘s visual prowess is startling and mesmerising; Conceição’s debut is permeated by his original and capable voice able to deliver a film of rare beauty.

Serpentário: The opening titles say Carlos Conceição was born in Africa and left for Europe in his teens, his mother stayed behind. She said she wanted to adopt a bird that would live for 150 years, but only if he would take care of it when she died. The landscape the young man flies over afterwards can only be Africa too, mountains and great plains, antelope herds, earth the colour of an impossible clay. A woman speaks to him in voiceover when he lands, imploring him to come find her without delay and thus a journey begins. There will be roads, cities, boats and all manner of shimmering landscapes, although the path isn’t linear but governed by gleeful digression, folding back on itself, snaking through past, present and future and wandering off into different genres, as the size and texture of the image shifts and piano or violin replace synths. We see the man as a ruff-wearing colonialist, a gun-slinging cowboy, an astronaut in a retro spaceship, or just a hipster in jeans and sunglasses, but otherwise little changes, even as the end is nigh. He keeps on moving, the same playful, melancholy thoughts in voiceover, the same solitude, the rushing of the wind, the voices of birds.

To discover more about the film, click here.

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PODCAST | Katy Scoggin, director and cinematographer.

Katy Scoggin has been at Berlinale many times as a festival goer or as part of a film team. This year she is one of the Berlinale Talents and she is so thrilled to take part as a director for the first time. A big step for her!

Flood is her cinematic, decade-long search to understand her evangelical family. It begins with her failed attempt to thaw her relationship to her young-earth creationist father in a fiction short. When he charges that her film caricatures his beliefs, she turns her camera around on them. As divisive family drama takes over her script-writing, she finds herself slipping into her movie as a protagonist. But will her filmmaking teach her to love across her deepest divides?

To discover more about Flood, clik here.

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PODCAST | Gonzalo Ladines, director and screenwriter.

Gonzalo Ladines is a Peruvian filmmaker who has been involved in 4 feature films as writer, director and / or producer.

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PODCAST | Guy Nemesh, director and editor.

Guy Nemesh is one of the Talents of this year’s edition of Berlinale Talents. He shares with FRED’s listeners his background and experiences.

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PODCAST | Simone Smith, film editor.

Editor Simone Smith from Toronto, Canada, comes to Berlinale Talents for the Editing Studio. Find out more about Simone here.

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PODCAST | Christopher Makoto Yogi, director.

Christopher Makoto Yogi is a writer, director, and artist from Hawaii and living in NYC. His first feature film, August at Akiko’s, premiered at Rotterdam in 2018 and will be released theatrically in 2019. His second feature, I Was a Simple Man, is currently in development. His works can be seen at www.nahwave.com and at www.augustatakikos.com.

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

The Berlinale Talents turns 17 and as for every teenager, it’s time to think about the future once the critical time of adolescence has passed. Florian Weghorn is back on FRED to talk about this year’s talent, taking place from February 9th to the 14th with its 250 up-and-coming film professionals from 77 countries. It’s not the first time that the number of women (141) overcomes the number of men and it’s a good sign that things will get better eventually in the whole gender quotes’ discussion surrounding festivals, film funds and awards. This year’s theme is “Mistakes” as the talents participating are navigating towards, through and beyond their errors, past and future failures to learn how to appreciate their mistakes and how to fail better in order to finally learn the filmmaking craft. A total of 20 renowned alumni are returning as guests, including the Golden Bear winner Adina Pintilie and the directors David Lowery, Guy Nattiv, Teona Strugar Mitevska, and many more. Among the “famous guests” meeting the talents: the recipient of this year’s Honorary Golden Bear, Charlotte Rampling, the Competition directors André Téchiné and Nadav Lapid and Roberto Saviano, whose novel was the basis of Claudio Giovannesi’s Competition entry La paranza dei bambini (Piranhas).

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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