FRED Film Radio - English Channel

Daniel Dencik – director – Gold Coast

Daniel Dencik crafts a visually beautiful and poignant film about one of the less known pages of Danish colonial history, with the help of the original letters of Frederick Wulff, Danish officer and botanist who was sent by the king to Guinea to follow the development of a coffe plantation on the Gold Coast. Based on these real words, the film develops an intense storyline with an attentive and precise aesthetics, that gives it an additional intriguing quality.

GOLD COAST: In 1836, the king of Denmark orders the botanist Wulff to set sail for the Gold Coast in equatorial Africa, where a Danish colonial camp is located. The mission’s goal is to establish a number of plantations there. What he leaves behind at home is the great love of his live; what awaits him is the unknown.

To Wulff, a scientist who looks at nature in a visionary way, it is the beginning of an adventure with unexpected and dramatic consequences, in which he will clash with the local populations, threatened by the slave trade, but also the conspiracies and the plotting that act in the shadow of power.

Gold Coast Trailer from Haslund / Dencik Entertainment on Vimeo.

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Henri Steinmetz – director – We Are Fine

Using his background as a painter and an artist, Henri Steinmetz gives us a film of sheer beauty and glamorous looks, with seven episodes that involve the daily life of a gourp of kids, four boys and a girl, who spend the summer together as a family, kind of disfunctional one actually. A dream-like film, with no references and connections with contemporary reality but sensually involving and mesmerizing.

WE ARE FINE: The lives of Tubbie, Tim, Jojo, Birdie, and Marie took an unexpected twist, as if their summer vacation never ended. The five youths are a tightknit group of friends, wandering around like stray dogs in an anonymous city that pays them no heed, experiencing moments of unexpected bliss in the suffocating heat of an endless summer. But soon this game of hide-and-seek with reality, this escape from the world will start revealing its consequences, undermining the group’s unity.

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Paul Katis – director – Kilo Two Bravos

Paul Katis constructed an astonishing first feature, the story of a group of British soldiers in the War in Afghanistan. There is no room for imagination or fictionalisation of the events that are precisely reported in the film.

Straight to the point, dry and pressing, at a high pace and never compromising, KILO TWO BRAVO is a war movie with a completely new perspective, and an intensity that will keep the audience glued to their seats: reality can be more terrifying than any fiction.

KILO TWO BRAVO: Afghanistan, Kajaki region. The paratrooper squad Kilo Two Bravo is on a mission to neutralize a Taliban road bloc. The platoon is exploring a dry riverbed that turned into a gorge, when the soldiers are ambushed by the remnants of a distant war: the landmines left by the Soviets during their invasion in the early 1980s are buried all around them, making it impossible for the troop to move out of fear of triggering a bloodshed.

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Scott Graham – director – Iona

FRED’s Chiara Nicoletti is joined again by Scott Graham, at the Torino Film Festival to present, in Festa Mobile, his second feature film IONA. After winning the Torino Film festival in 2012, Graham focuses again on a female protagonist who goes back to her native village with her son, to escape a reality she can’t face anymore.

Her scottish village, IONA, who she is named after, may be the worst place possible to escape since she is, maybe unconsciously forced to come to terms with all the things she left unsolved. Eventually IONA will find her release at a painful cost.

IONA: Iona left the island where she was born and the Christian community that raised her when she was fifteen years old. Now that she has a son of her own that age, she returns to her hometown, finding peace of mind in physical labor. While Iona shies away from her former community’s displays of spirituality, they seem to intrigue her teenage son Bull. Something serious drove mother and son to seek refuge on that island, something they cannot seem to forget despite being protected by the waters surrounding them.

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Adam Cork / Alecky Blythe – screenwriter / music composer – London Road

FRED’s Chiara Nicoletti is joined by Adam Cork and Alecky Blythe,, respectively music composer and scriptwriter of the musical LONDON ROAD and its transposition on the big screen, directed by Rufus Norris.

The film, based on the true events of the killings of 5 prostitutes in London Road in the county of Suffolk, was first a musical, staged in 2011 at the National Theatre of London. This musical noir, written in verbatim style, focuses on the residents of London Road and on how much these happenings have affected their life.

LONDON ROAD: In 2006, the apparent tranquility of the rural town of Ipswich is shattered when the bodies of five women are found. This unprecedented, gory crime sows panic in the small community, which is already shaken by its long fight against the spread of prostitution. It is a true shock to the residents, who deal with it by joining forces to discover the truth. Based on a true story which was successfully staged as a musical at the National Theatre.

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Stefano Galli – director – Lamerica

Stefano Galli is an Italian photoographer who moved to Los Angeles some years ago. In his search for the true America as perceived by Europeans, fruit of the dreams and fantasies shaped by movies, he went on a trip – which in fact were two trips – through the United States.

From coast to coast, Stefano met with average joes and created a puzzle that composed the core of the American population. No narrative, just people. People telling us about themselves and their lands.

LAMERICA: A visual narrative into the heart of the United States with the filmmaker from Torino Stefano Galli. His only companion throughout the journey: a 16mm camera. From Florida to California, passing through Texas, Ohio, Minnesota, Montana, coming across a series unique characters met by chance along the way and captured on film with their expressions and mannerisms.

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Goyo Anchou – director – Heterophobia

Through HETEROPHOBIA, Goyo Anchou creates a compelling and astounding, even quite demanding, film that looks like an underground movie of the seventies – but if it is much more than that.

You have to absorb many layers of information, from the off voice poetry to the live action to the colors and post production effects that create a dense and intense manifesto of free love and manly love, but against any form of machismo. He has assertive ideals and ideas, that he clearly tells us in this interview.

HERETOPHOBIA: Mariano is a young gay man who is attracted to a heterosexual friend, who rapes and then abandons him. For Mariano, this is the beginning of a slow descent into hell, a sentimental journey with dramatic consequences. The hate and repulsion around him make his condition even more unbearable: initially afflicted by painful guilty feelings, he is soon pervaded by a strong desire for redemption, with a messianic aftermath. In a roller coaster of emotions which plunge him into a parallel, horrific and psychedelic universe, dominated by rage and a desire for revenge, Mariano senses that only castration can save him. But, at the end of this personal Calvary, he understands that there is only one solution: to take part in the revolution against the patriarchy which underpins our society.

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Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck – co.director – God Bless the Child

GOD BLESS THE CHILD is a stunning film for its style , apparent simplicity and its strength at the same time. Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck, one of the two directors, tells us about how they took this challenge and how they managed to get through the shooting , with five children, three of them under five years old, where acting was a big game with loose rules.

GOD BLESS THE CHILD: Rebecca is a mother who suffers from depression. She is so distant and unstable that she abandons her five children, in search of what seems like yet another escape from reality. Thirteen-year-old Harper has to take Rebecca’s place as a mother and care for her four younger siblings, one of whom is only twelve months old. During a long summer day, Rebecca’s five children share chaos, intimate moments, uncertainties, adventures and games. Through their eyes, the world becomes a fantasy place, where everything takes on a new and unexpected aura.

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Christina Rosendahl – director – The Idealist

With an enormous quantity of footage from the danish television of the 50’s, Christina Rosendahl creates with THE IDEALIST a dry and direct version of the classic filma about an investigative reporter, and also depicts the character of a real idealist who inevitably ends by slamming his face and ideals against sheer reality.

The secret pact made between the supposedly anti-nuclear Denmark of the 50’s and the US governement about storing hydrogen bombs in Greenland , causing by accident a massive contamination of the area, is told with almost documentaristic simplicity.

THE IDEALIST: On January 21, 1968, an American B-52 bomber, loaded with nuclear warheads, crashes amid the glaciers of Greenland. The American and Danish authorities who monitor the area declare that the situation is under control and after eight months of remediation announce the emergency is over.

Eighteen years later, the journalist Poul Brink, zealous and determined, accidentally gets word of some mysterious testimony regarding the plane crash. The suspicion soon starts to grow in him that this is a case of a political cover-up and Brink sets off on a solitary journey in search of the truth.

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Robert Machoian – director – God Bless the Child

One of the directors of GOD BLESS THE CHILD, Robert Machoian talks about the choice of making such a beautiful and complex movie, and how shooting with small kids was a challenge, a sometimes unnerving situation, but also a very rewarding choice in the end.

GOD BLESS THE CHILD: Rebecca is a mother who suffers from depression. She is so distant and unstable that she abandons her five children, in search of what seems like yet another escape from reality. Thirteen-year-old Harper has to take Rebecca’s place as a mother and care for her four younger siblings, one of whom is only twelve months old. During a long summer day, Rebecca’s five children share chaos, intimate moments, uncertainties, adventures and games. Through their eyes, the world becomes a fantasy place, where everything takes on a new and unexpected aura.

The post Robert Machoian – God Bless the Child #TFF33 appeared first on Fred Film Radio.