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During the Venice Film Festival 2026 we spoke with director Yves Montmayeur and producer Taku Kato for the documentary feature  Twist & Shoot Mister Suzuki, presented here in the Venice Open – Out of Competition section of the festival. Here, we explore the life and cinematic influence of Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki, highlighting his rebellious spirit and unique style and sheding a light on his unconventional approach and his impact on artists worldwide

During our interview on FRED Film Radio, the director of Twist & Shoot Mister Suzuki Yves Montmayeur explains that his initial idea was to create a traditional documentary about Suzuki, but that he quickly realized that to truly honor his spirit, he needed to embrace his transgressive style also. He then incorporated fictional sequences to reflect Suzuki’s disruptive approach, ensuring that his film would remain faithful to the unconventional methods of this master of cinema. Suzuki’s love for playfulness and humor was also central to his approach, aiming to evoke his personality authentically.

The producer of the film, Taku Kato, adds also that Suzuki’s rebellious attitude extended way beyond Japan, inspiring artists across various disciplines, including manga, music, and film, both domestically and internationally. The documentary Twist & Shoot Mister Suzuki indeed emphasizes Suzuki’s aesthetic, often described as stylish and cool, which continues to influence artists today.

The filmmakers also discuss Suzuki’s lasting legacy, which they describe as a style that transcends traditional filmmaking, likened to a poetic or musical sensibility. Montmayeur notes that Suzuki’s influence is akin to that of legendary directors like Fellini or Wong Kar-wai, who are also seen as multi-disciplinary artists. He highlights that Suzuki’s aesthetic represents a method of beauty that resonates beyond cinema, inspiring poets, musicians, and visual artists. As Suzuki’s reputation grows, the documentary Twist & Shoot Mister Suzuki stands as a testament to his enduring legacy and the power of his rebellious aesthetic.

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In competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, Company, directed by Casey Affleck, is a haunting fable told across three interconnected time periods, in which a mysterious young woman arriving at a 1975 Christmas gathering begins a chain of nested stories about grief, forgiveness and the unseen burdens people carry. Emily Alyn Lind and Catherine Caylee Cowan, actresses and, for Cowan, also a co-producer on the film, talk about the ensemble’s Russian-doll structure, a last-minute casting call that upended Lind’s plans, and the trust required to let Affleck direct scenes actors could not always see or hear each other in.

Asked about telling a story within a story, Cowan describes an ensemble built on the way stories are handed down across generations: “It’s definitely an ensemble and it feels like each character builds off of the other. And in a way that’s kind of how stories have been passed down by generations. Someone tells it and then they retell it. And we’re telling a story that’s from our perspective, from the female’s perspective”. Without giving too much away, she describes the effect that structure creates: “There is this Russian doll effect in the storytelling process. And there are some beautiful lines that accompany visuals that will be more powerful because there’s a lot of people just sitting in chairs and talking, but there’s also visual accompaniment”. Asked how she would describe the film itself, after co-star Scott McNairy called the script bizarre at the press conference, Cowan reframes it: “For me it was a meditation on forgiveness and grief, and how our relationships with the people in our lives can sometimes be very complicated and painful for each other, and the things that we want can be complicated, but time heals all wounds”. The shoot itself, she adds, mirrored that scale, spanning decades of story and a fractured schedule: “It is a period drama, but it goes from 1975 all the way back to the medieval section, so it spans generations and decades. […] We only had a few days of filming for those sections and they were also disconnected from the first part. We kind of went backwards when we were filming it”.

Asked whether Affleck, himself an actor, gives his cast room to find the scene, both actresses agree: “He’s really in there. Yeah, he’s definitely in there. He likes to craft it down to the period, but it’s somehow not annoying and it’s so helpful because respecting someone as an actor is another level. There is something inherently nice about the fact that he is an actor and he gets it”. Cowan illustrates that trust with the shooting of Alice’s cabin scenes, built around a real fire: “We drilled a hole into the roof for the smoke to go through because Casey really wanted it to be a real fire”. With her scene partner pulled out between takes for the heat, she found herself acting to a mark on the wall instead: “I would just do it to a point on the wall with Casey doing it. And so I didn’t actually have anything to respond to. So, I was completely reliant on Casey not only acting with me but directing me”.

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Kamel Laaridhi, the director of  The H@llow Man, discusses his latest film at Venice Critics Week, where it was showcased. The film explores themes of memory, technology, and societal control through a thought-provoking narrative set in a near future. This interview offers insight into his creative choices and the philosophical questions embedded within the film.

Laaridhi explains that although The H@llow Man is set in a future world, it is fundamentally a story about today’s society. He chose to incorporate hypnotherapy as a key element because he envisions a future where biochips in the brain could be manipulated or controlled. The film’s narrative deliberately blurs the line between past, present, and future to evoke a sense of uncertainty and to challenge viewers’ expectations of science fiction. He wanted the audience to feel suspended in a world that feels both familiar and unsettling, emphasizing that the real focus is on current societal fears about technology and control.

A striking aspect of  The H@llow Man is the use of poetry as a tool for resistance. Laaridhi highlights that poetry, often dismissed as a lesser art form, becomes a vital means of expression and defiance in her film. He believes that poetry can serve as a counterbalance to technological domination, offering a space for human emotion and individual voice. The film’s ending features a well-known poem, reinforcing his idea that art and poetry remain powerful in resisting oppressive systems. For him, poetry embodies the enduring human spirit amid technological evolution.

Visually, Laaridhi aimed to create an ethereal, almost otherworldly atmosphere that aligns with the film’s themes. He draws inspiration from video art of the 1970s and the surrealist works, emphasizing montage techniques that create a sense of distance and reflection. His approach involved using specific framing and editing styles to immerse viewers gradually into the film’s world, encouraging them to question the rationality of what they see. These aesthetic decisions serve to deepen the film’s philosophical core, making The H@llow Man a compelling blend of visual poetry and speculative storytelling.

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Mykyta Gibalenko, the director of the film Camouflage, and actor Arthur Aliiev discuss their latest project, which was selected for the Giornata degli Autori at the Venice Film Festival. The film is a semi-autobiographical story that explores themes of migration, identity, and collective memory through the lens of personal and historical upheaval. This conversation sheds light on how Gibalenko’s own experiences and research shaped a film that aims to resonate universally.

Gibalenko explains that the story draws heavily from her own life, particularly her migration from Ukraine to Germany in 2013 and her involvement in the German theatre scene. She emphasizes that her personal experiences serve as a starting point, but the film expands into a broader narrative about collective migration and the impact of war on identity. The film’s core revolves around Vitali, a character navigating his roots amid the chaos of conflict, illustrating how individual stories are intertwined with collective histories.

Creating an ensemble cast was a deliberate choice to reflect diverse experiences of migration and war. Gibalenko highlights the challenge of maintaining a balance between the main character’s personal journey and the parallel stories of other characters. He notes that careful editing and a focus on each character’s unique experience allowed the film to portray a layered, collective picture, pointing out that the film’s title symbolizes the theme of identity and the ways people adapt or hide their true selves in unfamiliar environments.

Arthur Aliiev discusses how his character Vitaly’s stutter was a conscious choice to emphasize themes of self-acceptance and language as a marker of identity. He explains that Vitaly’s difficulty in speaking reflects broader issues of social pressure and the struggle to find one’s voice. The film explores how language and speech relate to personal roots, with Vitali’s lessening stutter in German symbolizing a desire to reinvent oneself in a new context. Both Gibalenko and Aliiev agree that the film ultimately advocates for embracing one’s true self amid external pressures.

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In competition for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2026, Naza, shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, is built from the testimony of twenty-four Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers describing their part in what the film’s own synopsis calls Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor previously co-directed the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, about the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta, together with Basel and Hamdan Ballal, their Palestinian co-directors.Here, they talk about persuading soldiers to speak, the range of guilt and detachment among their subjects, and why they insist that what the film documents is not an accident but a system.

How hard was it to get twenty-four intelligence officers and soldiers to describe, in his words, “their participation in this genocide of Israel on the Palestinian people”?. Abraham pushes back gently on the framing of persuasion itself: “In the world of investigative journalism, I’m not sure I would use the word convincing. It’s more about you want to approach people to ask the question, and you build a kind of connection with someone, or you build trust over time. It’s a process”.

Their willingness to talk, he says, varied widely: “For some of them it was easier to say yes. Some of them felt a certain sense that they have committed a crime, and they want to talk about it and to share it with more Israelis, with people all over the world. Others it was harder for them to say yes”. What mattered most, he adds, was the specificity of the questions: “The question that interested us from the very start is to get them to describe in as much detail as possible this system of killing, and how it looked like. What tools did they use? […] Sometimes when you ask, and when you are persistent, then you find the answers”.

Asked how the film handles the different degrees of guilt on display among its subjects, Szor says that was never the primary focus: “There’s many different levels of guilt, or awareness, or really a range of emotions that you can see from those officers and soldiers. I must say that when we made the film, it was less of our interest — the main thing that we’re interested in is describing the system, the mass killing system”. The psychology of participation, she says, is still present in the film, and connects directly to the choice of also showing ordinary life at home: “I think we point most of the time our look to people watching TV, mainstream media in Israel, not reporting the result, or using this language of a terror attack”. For Szor, the underlying question stayed the same throughout: “Those were the questions that we were more asking ourselves: how is this system operating?”.

Asked whether the attention around No Other Land, from Berlin to the Oscars, made this film easier or harder to make, Abraham describes a hope that went largely unanswered: “We had real hope that the film No Other Land , that won the Oscar and is about a community called Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, all of us also with Basel and Hamdan Ballal, our Palestinian co-directors, we really hoped the film would have an impact on the ground, and unfortunately it did not have a major impact. Just this week, two villages in that community were completely destroyed by the Israeli military occupation”.

That same attention, he says, is part of why they made a second film at all: “We won the Oscar and we made a lot of connections, and in that sense I think that is part of why we wanted to make another film, because we have a certain power now because of the first film, we knew people might pay more attention to the second film that we make. So we thought that this is the most important topic to discuss: what is happening in Gaza”. A spotlight, he concludes, that carries its own weight: “You have a spotlight sometimes on you, and that can come with certain complications, and at the same time it comes with a certain responsibility to speak and to do”.

Szor returns to two points the directors had already stressed at the press conference: that what the film documents is still happening, and that it is systemic. “It was important for us to say that it’s still ongoing, it’s not some sort of reflection. And I think generally also in No Other Land, we were interested in the system, not in some sort of a crime that a soldier is doing”. She gives a concrete example from the film itself: “When looking at how they were doing the bombing in Gaza, we see that the system is built to bomb civilian houses. It was important for us to show that this is not something that happens by accident, but it’s a policy and a system”.

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During the Venice Film Festival 2026 we spoke with director Xavier Tera, talking about his debut film The Color of the Sun, which was presented in the Orizzonti section of the Festival. The film explores life in Okinawa, Japan, through a poetic and observational lens, reflecting Tera’s background in photography, with an approach emphasizing subtlety and a restrained visual style, and aiming to immerse viewers in the everyday realities of adolescents in a complex geopolitical landscape.

During our interview on FRED Film Radio, director of The Color of the Sun Xavier Tera explains that his experience as a photographer deeply influenced the film’s aesthetic. He describes his intention to keep camera movements minimal, favoring a fixed, contemplative style that allows the audience to focus on the characters’ internal worlds. The film’s imagery, especially the luminous scenes of Okinawa, in the Japanese landscapes, draws from Tera’s previous photographic work, capturing the region’s unique light and atmosphere. While the director emphasizes that he did not set out to make a political film with The Color of the Sun, he acknowledges that Okinawa’s history and geopolitical issues inevitably shape the narrative. The film subtly touches on the island’s colonial past, its relationship with Japan, and the presence of American military bases. Tera points out that Okinawa’s ongoing struggles with cultural identity and social issues, such as high poverty and crime rates linked to the military presence, are woven into the fabric of the characters’ lives, believing that even in a personal story, political realities cannot be entirely ignored.

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The post “Salon de Beleza”, interview with director Nathalia Acevedo and actors Sam Lowyck and Erwan Kepoa appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

In competition at the Venice Film Festival 2026, Woman Unknown follows Marie, a young nanny about to marry the wealthy widower she works for, whose wartime affair with a German soldier threatens to unravel the new life she has built for herself amid post-war anarchy.

Director May El-Toukhy, the only woman directing a competition title this year, and lead actress Mathilde Arcel discuss the history of the so-called horizontal collaborators behind the film, the physical work of playing a woman holding her fear in, and the decision to keep the story’s violence subtle rather than explicit.

El-Toukhy traces the film back to a specific historical interest: “What came first was the interest in the so-called horizontal collaborators. That was the starting point, and then me and my co-writer Maren Louise Käehne worked backwards from that point”. That research led her to the liberation weeks that followed the German occupation, a moment of celebration shadowed by violence against these women: “We became interested in the post-war time, the liberation weeks, where there was euphoria and joy because the occupation had ended, but at the same time these women were incredibly afraid to be hunted down.

Many of them were hunted down, humiliated in the street, assaulted, spat on, pissed on, and cut”. Trying to understand how that violence became possible pushed her toward a wider, and still current, idea: “The female body is seen as part of the national territory, and almost something that’s owned by the nation because of reproduction. That’s something universal — it’s still very true today in every war zone where women’s bodies are violated during or after a war. But I became interested in what that looks like within the parameter of a private setting”.

For Arcel, building Marie started with research into real accounts of women who lived through the same experience: “It became very important, first of all, to research a lot and to read as many excerpts of diaries from these women that I could find, or anonymous interviews, so I could get to understand these women as well as possible”. Just as important, she says, was imagining who Marie was before the war reduced her to a single secret: “It was also really important for me to try to invent for myself what kind of life Marie had before the war. What kind of woman was she? Because she wasn’t only shaped by this single event, this intimate relation with a German soldier.

The world would probably shape her in that image if they knew that about her, but for her, she had a lot of dreams and hopes for the future before all of this happened”. That interior life translated into a very physical approach on set: “The emotion very present in the movie is a lot of fear, and fear is a very physical emotion. I worked a lot with breath,  for instance, holding my breath in a whole scene, because Marie is holding all of these emotions in and trying not to show anything, because she’ll lose everything if her secret gets out”.

Asked about a film that conveys violence against the female body without ever showing it explicitly, El-Toukhy describes the research behind those scenes: “There’s a lot in the scenes we did on the female body and violation of the female body, or what we put our bodies through, without spoiling the film. We were really thorough with these scenes. I read a lot of scientific material about how you would investigate the female body at that time, and what remedies you could use to relieve pain, and how little care there was for women in pain”. A neglect, she notes, that has not entirely disappeared.

Asked about a line late in the film, in which Marie’s future husband dismisses one of her wishes by saying it only happens in fairy tales, El-Toukhy ties it back to the real testimonies she read: “When you read the accounts and testimonies of these women, many of them had really difficult lives after the war, after the stigma they experienced in post-war, the assaults, it was something that never left them. So it felt right to stay true to the tragedy of it all”.

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Durante la Mostra del cinema di Venezia 2026 abbiamo parlato con il regista Tsai Ming-liang, che ha presentato a Venezia il suo nuovo film Dust, un’opera che si inserisce nella sezione Venice Open – Fuori Concorso. L’intervista per FRED Film Radio si concentra sulle tematiche profonde del film, sul suo approccio lento e meditativo e sull’importanza del suono e delle immagini nel suo cinema, condividendo anche alcuni dettagli sul suo progetto a lungo termine dedicato al monaco camminatore e collegandosi anche alla filosofia di impermanenza e transitorietà che permea anche questa serie di opere.

Tsai Ming-liang ha spiegato ai microfoni di FRED Film Radio che il titolo Dust deriva anche dal Sutra del Diamante, che ricorda come tutto sia effimero e come la nostra esistenza non è composta da altro se non particelle di polvere. Per il regista, il cinema, dopotutto, ha sempre avuto il compito di preservare momenti che altrimenti svanirebbero nel tempo. La sua opera si caratterizza infatti per un ritmo molto lento e riflessivo, pensato per permettere allo spettatore di immergersi completamente in un mondo che si muove con un suo proprio tempo. Questa lentezza, secondo il regista, è il modo migliore per catturare la fugacità della vita e il movimento incessante del mondo.

Un altro elemento centrale in tutto il cinema di Tsai Ming-liang e di questo suo Dust è anche l’attenzione ai dettagli sonori, che diventano parte integrante della narrazione: qui il suono delle campane di San Sebastian, città in cui il film è ambientato, assume un ruolo fondamentale, creando un’atmosfera di meditazione e di connessione con il luogo. Il regista sottolinea infatti come il suono di Dust, insieme alle immagini delle sculture spagnole e al rumore del mare, contribuisca a rendere l’esperienza cinematografica più intensa e sensoriale.

Guardando a tutto questo progetto del “monaco camminatore”, il regista Tsai Ming-liang racconta anche di come questa cinematografia sia diventata quasi un rituale che si è evoluto nel tempo, rappresentando un modo di vivere e di pensare la spiritualità. Dust è quindi un vero invito a riflettere sulla transitorietà e sulla bellezza del presente, facendo emergere anche la gioia di questo autore nel condividere queste opere con il pubblico e di partecipare ai Festival, unita al suo desiderio di continuare a esplorare questi temi.

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Global Critics Venice Voice, hosted by internationally renowned film critic Rita Di Santo, is the daily podcast of the Venice International Film Festival 2026, produced by FRED Film Radio directly from the Lido di Venezia.

Each episode takes listeners inside the Festival with exclusive and thoughtful conversations with leading international film critics, and in-depth analysis of the year’s most anticipated films.

Rita Di Santo and her guests bring to life the unique atmosphere of Venice, offering a rare insider’s view of the stories, talent, and cinematic moments that make the Mostra one of the world’s most celebrated cultural events.

In this episode of Global Critics Venice Voice Rita Di Santo hosts:

Barbara Lorey de Lacharrière – France

Benjamin Scott | Mundo Peliculas – Cile

Vladimir Chernyshev | L’Officiel Ukraine, Druk.press – Ukraine

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