FRED Film Radio - English Channel

PODCAST | Bénédicte Prot interviews Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, co-directors of the film Diamantino.

A lovely talk with the two very imaginative creators of Diamantino on working together and on how their first feature together, whilst presenting itself as effervescently fantastic, actually emerges from a reality which is already quite wild. Abrantes & Schmidt describe the completely innocent being they chose as the main protagonist as ‘a modern-day Candide’ and underline the fact that being such an empty slate, devoid of any preconceived notion, he is also able to embrace ambiguity. They also tell us more about the support of their producers and about the post-production.

Diamantino: In Diamantino, Abrantes & Schmidt surround the completely innocent hero of the title, who happens to be a Ronaldo-like Portuguese football superstar secretly imagining himself bouncing with sparkly puppies when he plays, with two Cinderella-type greedy, heartless, tax-fraudulent sisters, as well as shameless, harassment-prone medias, xenophobic ad-campaign managers, the 24/7 surveillance of drone-equipped lesbian tax-controllers, a fake teenage African (re)’-fugee’, and the agents of a dangerous cloning experiment… 2018 Grand Prize of the Cannes Critics’ Week.

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PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Luis Ortega, director of the film El Angel.

Carlos Robledo Puch is the longest-serving prisoner in the history of Argentina. Luis Ortega brings to the 71st Festival De Cannes in the Un Certain Regard Section, El Angel, a film based on Puch’s life and his “criminal” adolescence. Ortega comments on Carlos Robledo Puch’s declaration that he would have wanted Quentin Tarantino to direct a film about his life. Ortega also admits that there are many autobiographic elements from his own childhood to the story so the film is only based on Robledo Puch’s figure. El Angel is a mix of comedy and noir, two genres whose elements are notably mixed and balanced in the film.

El Angel: Buenos Aires, 1971. Carlitos is a seventeen-year-old youth. As a young boy, he coveted other people’s things, but it wasn’t until his early adolescence that his true calling—to be a thief—manifested itself. When he meets Ramon at his new school, Carlitos is immediately drawn to him. Together they will embark on a journey of discoveries, love and crime. Killing is just a random offshoot of the violence, which continues to escalate until Carlitos is finally apprehended. Because of his angelic appearance, the press dubs Carlitos “The Angel of Death.” Altogether, he is believed to have committed over forty thefts and eleven homicides. Today, after more than forty-five years in jail, Carlos Robledo Puch is the longest-serving prisoner in the history of Argentina.

For the page of the film on the Festival website, click here.

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PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Wang Bing, director of the film Dead Souls.

FRED’s own Chiara Nicoletti meets Chinese documentary director Wang Bing, who is back after winning at the last Locarno Film Festival with Mrs Fang, to talk about Dead Souls, the 8h 16′ long documentary, special screening at the 71 st Festival de Cannes, that Bing realized on the survivors of the camps of 1957. The director discusses the impact of this documentary in his country. Wang Bing also comments on the critics’ response to the length of the film and its being too long preventing people from going to watch a film. What’s the role of documentary filmmakers today? Wang Bing answers in depth.

Dead Souls: In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as “ultra-rightists” in the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the Jiabiangou and Mingshui reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.

For the page of the film on the Festival website, click here.

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PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Tomasz Kot and Joanna Kulig, actors of the film Cold War.

Tomasz Kot and Joanna Kulig are the absolute protagonists of a love story set in the Cold War’s Poland of the 1950’s that is inspired by director Pawel Pawlikowski’s own parents. The actors talk about working on a big set with an Oscar winning director. Joanna Kulig has been compared, with her performance in black and white, to Jeanne Moreau. As she’s flattered by the comparison, she reveals that Pawlikowski wanted her to get inspiration from Lauren Bacall for every move and every scene. He would constantly tell her to think about Lauren Bacall. For Tomasz Kot, Cold War was the first experience in a big film. The director cast him because he didn’t look like an actor of our time and therefore he was perfect to play a person living in the 50’s. Pawel Pawlikowski just won Best Director at the 71st Festival de Cannes.

Cold War is a passionate love story between two people of different backgrounds and temperaments, who are fatally mismatched and yet fatefully condemned to each other. Set against the background of the Cold War in the 1950s in Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia and Paris, the film depicts an impossible love story in impossible times.

For the page of the film on the Festival website, click here.

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PODCAST | Bénédicte Prot interviews Adilkhan Yerzhanov, director of the film The Gentle Indifference of the World.

A lovely talk with Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov about the anecdote at the origin of this poetic yet harsh tale, where love and innocence meet a world where money reigns supreme, adding an element of uncertainty to the love story. He also tells us about his visual dramaturgy, his view of systems and regimes as something primarily located inside the people themselves, and his desire to infuse The Gentle Indifference of the World (the title of which is a quote from Albert Camus) with the subtle absurdity of a certain European literature.

The Gentle Indifference of the World: As Saltanat must leave her idyllic life in the country and fend for her family’s welfare in the morally tainted city where money rules over human relationships, she meets Kuandyk, a man of similar innocence and love for European litterature.

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PODCAST | Bénédicte Prot interviews Adele Haenel, actress of the film The Trouble With You (En liberté!), by Pierre Salvadori.

Adele Haenel underlines the joy and exhilaration of the part she plays in the unbridled comedy The Trouble With You (all the more since it is an unusual one in her career lined with strong and serious dramas such as The Unknown Girl by the Dardenne brothers or the more recent 120bpm), but also the scary element in trying herself at a new genre, a challenge she couldn’t pass on. She describes her reaction to the script, the work on set, the conditions that allowed the comedy to suceed so brilliantly, and the devices (theatrical, situational…) its universal humour rests on. Haenel also points out the political aspect of comedy, the freedom and distance it brings and the rebellion this contains.

The Trouble With You (En liberté!): Pierre Salvadori’s The Trouble With You had the Croisette splitting their sides laughing. We enter this comedy through a door smashed by unbridled B movie cops, and through a bedtime story told by a hero policeman’s widow, Yvonne (Adele Haenel), still working as a police detective station), a tale which will be recurrent throughout the film, although in a different version every time, according to Yvonne’s mood, since she has just found out, whilst interrogating a S&M vinyle-hooded fellow speaking through a vocoder, that her late husband (Vincent Elbaz) was actually a dirty cop. In her desire to make amends with the innocent guy he sent to jail (Pio Marmai), she befriends him unbeknownst to her colleague, friend, and secret love interest (Damien Bonnard), only to discover that he has become an endearing maniac whom his own girlfriend (Audrey Tautou) doesn’t quite recognize. A fantastically well staged and interpreted succession of priceless dialogues and situations ensues, supported by a very cleverly developed discourse on narration itself.

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PODCAST | Angelo Acerbi interviews Rogelio Sosa, Matilde Hernández Guinea and Fabiana Hernández, actors of the film Comprame Un Revolver.

Rogelio Sosa, musician and first time actor, as well as Matilde and Fabiana Hernández, the two daughters of the director, here actresses, talk with us about the difficulties of making a film so tense and tough: for Rogelio being his first film the challenge was doubled, for the girls it was the experience of having their dad as the director.

Comprame Un Revolver:  In a timeless México where women are disappearing, a girl called Huck wears a mask to hide her gender. She helps her dad, a tormented addict, to take care of an abandoned baseball camp where the narcos gather to play. The father tries to protect her as he can. With the help of her friends, a group of lost boys who have the power of camouflaging themselves in the windy desert, Huck has to fight to overcome her reality and to defeat the local capo.

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PODCAST | Angelo Acerbi interviews Julio Hernández Cordón, director of the film Comprame Un Revolver.

Julio Hernández Cordón, director of Comprame Un Revolver, talks with us about the motivations behind the film, about his worries for contemporary Mexico and the need of violence that pervades it. He also chose to work with his two young daughters as actresses, which presented  another totally different struggle, more tiring and challenging.

Comprame Un Revolver:  In a timeless México where women are disappearing, a girl called Huck wears a mask to hide her gender. She helps her dad, a tormented addict, to take care of an abandoned baseball camp where the narcos gather to play. The father tries to protect her as he can. With the help of her friends, a group of lost boys who have the power of camouflaging themselves in the windy desert, Huck has to fight to overcome her reality and to defeat the local capo.

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PODCAST | Angelo Acerbi interviews Etienne Kallos, director of the film The Harvesters.

Etienne Kallos is a passionate director. He loves his films but most of all he loves the actors, that he employed to tell a story of a family.  However, The Harvesters is not just the story of a family,  but of a region of the world, where belonging to the land is the most important thing, and where religion is a tool employed to accept the harshness of life and to find reasons to continue.

The Harvesters: South Africa, Free State region, isolated stronghold to the Afrikaans white ethnic minority culture. In this conservative farming territory obsessed with strength and masculinity, Janno is different, secretive, emotionally frail. One day his mother, fiercely religious, brings home Pieter, a hardened street orphan she wants to save, and asks Janno to make this stranger into his brother. The two boys start a fight for power, heritage and parental love.

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PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Dina Emam, producer of the film Yo Meddine.

Born from Egyptian parents but living and breathing in New York City, first time feature film producer Dina Eman meets FRED’s Chiara Nicoletti to describe her journey into production with Yo Meddine by A.B. Shawky, in competition at the 71st Festival De Cannes. It was the story about a friendship, about certain freaks being cast out of society that convinced Dina that A. B Shawky’s idea was the one she could produce to turn it into a film. In this very moment in history, the lesson we could learn from Yo Meddine is that “we should all look at people like Obama, the little boy in the film, looks at Beshay and everyone he meets along his way”. No more outsiders, only people.

Yo Meddine: Beshay – a man cured of leprosy – has never left the leper colony in the Egyptian desert where he has lived since childhood. Following the death of his wife, he finally decides to go in search of his roots. With his meagre possessions strapped to a donkey cart, he sets out. Quickly joined by Obama, the Nubian orphan he has taken under his wing, Beshay will cross Egypt and confront the world with all its sorrows, its hardships and moments of grace, in his quest for a family, a place to belong, a little humanity…

For the page of the film on the Festival website, click here.

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