FRED Film Radio - English Channel

We speak with Jacob Cordery, a student filmmaker, and Valeria Moreno and Nicole Ruf, directors of the 2025 Durham Film Festival, about the history of this student-led short film festival, which is supported by Durham University and the BFI (British Film Institute).

Valeria Moreno and Nicole Ruf discuss the history of this short-film festival, which aims to showcase new talent and emerging student filmmakers from across the world. They highlight the vital role of the British Film Institute in supporting the festival, providing advice and serving on the jury annually.

Jacob Cordery, a Durham-based student filmmaker who directed one of the films up for competition, ‘Tippy Toes” (UK, 2025), shares with us the process of making this film, inspired by a trip to Girona in Spain, but set in Durham. This 18-minute film is a nonlinear and complex love story between two students.

The interview was recorded minutes before the award ceremony, where Aleks Dimitrijevic, representing the BFI, announced the winning film, “The Field’, directed by Davis Homenuck (Canada, 2025). The runner-up was “Before You Leave”, directed by Louise Thomas (UK, 2024). The popular vote award went to “On Strings”, directed by Tom Lee (UK, 2025).

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At Taormina Film Festival, FRED Film Radio interviewed director Peter Gold and producer James Franco to talk about “Thena”, a movie presented at the 2025 edition.

“Thena” is very personal to Peter Gold, having grown up in the Bay Area and witnessed what happens on the streets of San Francisco. How important was it for him to translate those experiences into a cinematic narrative? “It was just a matter of being in touch with my raw emotion based on the script and finding a cast that felt like it represented the Bay Area community”, says the director. “And once you find the right cast with a script that really works, shooting on location in San Francisco and Palo Alto, I really felt like the story just came to life and felt very authentic”.

James Franco has an extensive experience in cinema. Which aspects of the story do he believe are most urgent or relevant for a contemporary audience? “What I found very interesting about this film is on one level it is an addiction story, and with that comes it can be very intense and sad”, says the producer. “But there was a new aspect that I had never seen in any movie before, which was to have the brother looking for his sister and trying to help her. I was really touched by this and it gave the story a whole new dimension and a new kind of depth”.

“Thena” is a film in which the visual component plays a leading role. “Fortunately, we had the same cinematographer of A Ciambra and A Chiara, Tim Curtin. He has a visual style that just really felt like it was the right thing for this movie”, says Peter Gold. “I also love movies like Fish Tank by Andrea Arnold. But Tim Curtin just really has that way of he’s always holding his own camera, feeling the world around him. We do these long takes, very close, with 85mm lenses, and it creates this sense of realism of finding the world as we’re shooting it, not doing traditional coverage. It was very much so finding it as we were shooting”.

A long career as an actor and director and a new role as a producer after “Kink” in 2013. Why is it so important for James Franco to work with young emerging directors? “I’ve been working in the film industry for 25 years. I think it is important to not give back. You just can get dried up. I truly believe you need to give back. Mentor, teach and pass on your experience to other people”, says the producer. “And in that way, you don’t dry up, you stay fresh and get inspired. But even more than that, you just stop thinking about yourself so much. This project was great because so many people I cared about were making it. So I could just be there to help in any way I could”.

The post “Thena” interview with director Peter Gold and producer James Franco appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

Burak Çevik presented his new film “Nothing In Its Place“, at the Milano Film Fest, in the Controcampo section. The film is a daring piece of filmmaking, about real facts that happened in Turkey before the coup of 1980. The style is slick, the action is staged as in a play but the direction uses filming techniques that are more typical for action movies. An interesting film and a strong political statement.

Burak Çevik has a massive use of long takes in his film “Nothing In Its Place“. the sense of this choice lies in the need for the audience to fee the importance of what they are watching, even if nothing seems to happen. People talking and followed around an apartment in very long sequence shots, to build momentum for the harsh development of the story. It is a bold choice but at the end an effective one

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Almost two years after premiering at the Rome International Film Fest, the 2023 edition, “Firebrand – L’Ultima regina is out in italian cinemas with Vertice 360.

Directed by Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz and starring Alicia Vikander as Katherine Parr, the sixth and final wife of Henry VIII, and Jude Law as the king , the film is based on the novel Queen’s Gambit (now “Firebrand“) by Elizabeth Fremantle.

“Firebrand“ explores Katherine Parr’s life, her role as queen, and her attempt to navigate the dangerous court of Henry VIII. She is portrayed as a passionate advocate for religious change and a loving stepmother to Henry’s children.

As also Wikipedia quotes, if it hadn’t been for Katherine Parr, there would be no Queen Elizabeth in the history of the world so the question of why we’ve almost never heard of her is consistent.

The answer to this question is simple for Karim Aïnouz: “Stories like Katherine Parr’s were always there and we just didn’t know because people with the power, the ones that write history, chose to not tell them”.

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German director Christian Petzold is in Cannes 78, premiering his new film, “Mirrors No.3” in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes.

With Paula Beer as his protagonist in the role of a woman surviving a car accident where her boyfriend dies and finding confort in a stranger’s motherly devotion, the film, because of the wind surrounding it, closes, unexpectedly, the element trilogy.

Petzold indeed started the trilogy in 2020 with Undine and continued it with “Afire“. Both the films had Paula Beer as their muse and it was her to notice the “wind” as essential in “Mirrors No.3“.

With a mix of tension, horror like tones and at the same time, feelings of acceptance and care, Mirrors n. 3 balance them all to tell a story of life and death, emotionally dying and coming back to life.

The post “Mirrors No. 3”, interview with director Christian Petzold appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

Japanese director Kei Ishikawa is at the 78th Cannes Film Festival with his new film “A pale view of hills“, screening in the Un certain Regard section.

The film is a big screen adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro novel of the same title. As it is Ishiguro’s 1982 debut novel, one of only two novels the author set in Japan, it remained un-adapted for the screen until today.

Ishiguro, who became a co-producer of the film, became also a mentor for Ishikawa, as he was “truly delighted” by the fact that his novel could be turned into a film by a Japanese director from the next generation.

“A pale view of hills“ tells the story of a young Japanese-British writer who plans to write a book based on her mother Etsuko’s post-war experiences in Nagasaki.

The film delves into the past of a nation and reflects on memories, on and on how the new generation is dealing with the past, 80 years after the war.

The post “A pale view of hills”, interview with director Kei Ishikawa appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason is back in Cannes with his new film “The Love that Remains“.

After “Godland“, which was set in the late 19th century and premiered in the Un Certain Regard section in 2022, Hlynur Pálmason decided to direct a more personal and intimate film, starting from what was close to him and around him.

“The Love that Remains” tells the story of a family over the course of a year, while mother and father are separating. The three children of the couple are played by Pálmason’s kids in real life.

With Saga Garðarsdóttir and Sverrir Gudnason in the role of the breaking up couple Anna and Magnus, “The Love that Remains” explores, to quote the director: “what happens to a family when they split, what happens to all the memories and moments they shared? What happens to the love that remains?”.

The post “The love that remains”, interview with director Hlynur Pálmason appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

Spanish director Óliver Laxe paid his fourth visit to the Cannes Film Festival with his fourth feature film, “Sirât”, this time in competition, where this superb work ended up winning the Jury Prize (as well as the Cannes Soundtrack Award, a special mention for the Prix des Cinémas Art et Essai, and the Palm Dog).

We met and talked about ravers, pure sound, trucks, shooting in the desert, the author as an archer. Laxe, who describes his film as “a communion of mutilated people”, but also people who have divested themselves of the idealised image of ourselves we wear as a mask and on the contrary, openly show their scars, also underlines that there is growth in the journey of his main character, Luis (played by Sergi López), even if this growth needs to be brought about by a crisis.

The director of “You All Are Captains” (2010), “Mimosas” (2016), and “Fire Will Come” (2019), also insists on the realistic, even slightly utopian aspect of “Sirât”, for the love he has for the people and the landscapes he films, for the hope placed in the imminent reset it invokes, and because it provokes something that hopefully takes the viewer beyond the material world…

“What I like in adventure tales, and it’s an artistic tradition, it is that these tales have a physical dimension and ametaphysical one. The hero faces challenges, external challenges, there is an external epic, but there is also an inside journey. That allows me to always have these two dimensions, but it is something really fragile : one is well rooted – it’s the narrative –, but with the images and with the sound, and with the dematerialisation of the narrative, the dematerialisation of the sound and of the landscape – we’re going from the moutains to the desert –, the parallel dimension becomes more ethereal… We’re going from the language to the end of the language.”

“A few people thought my film was dystopian, but really, most people can feel that I love what I’m shooting – I mean I have faith in humanity, so it’s not a dystopian film, even if you see the worst situations in it… Hopefully it is not an idealisation. Hopefully, we are really in a moment of change, and this film offers a taste of this future… Us human beings, we want to change, but it’s not easy, we don’t have the tools… But life will do the work for us: it will force us to change. This is realistic, not dystopian! These ravers, they don’t listen to the radio because they already know that the end is coming, that a reset is coming, and they want that to happen soon, because we need a reset, it’s the only way… I do think this is a very stimulating moment we are living. It was worse when we were trusting this myth of progress.”

“Art, when it really works, it transcends the author… There is nothing more disgusting than perceiving and understanding the intentions of the author…  [As a filmmaker], you commit a crime, but you try to erase the traces that are the intentions of the author.”

“I like when you push the viewer. I don’t know if I manage to do this, but there are, notoriously, filmmakers who make the viewer feel like beyond the material world, there is a certain world that vibrates, that is there, a manifestation that has rules, that speaks… but it’s a really fragile, in the sense that you cannot represent it, only capture it accidentally, almost.”

The post “Sirât”, an interview with director Óliver Laxe appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

After winning the Jury Prize of the International Competition of the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, for “Ahed’s Knee”, Israel-born, Paris-based director Nadav Lapid, also crowned with the Berlin Golden Bear in 2019 for “Synonyms”, is back on the Croisette with a striking cinematic gesture entitled “Yes”, viscerally and flamboyantly conveying his reaction to October 7 and his complicated sentiments about his native country through the highly eventful trajectory of a character whose name, Y, sounds like a question even though he’s past looking for answers.

We met the director as he was just coming out of the world premiere of his film at the 57th Directors’ Fortnight.

“The film is so many things together… There is something distinctive about a film which, on the one hand, looks as if it is related to the daily news, and on the other hand looks like a legend or a musical, so the mixture of the fact the film is, in a terrible way, happening right now, but also that it is going very far on the formal level, I think that generates strong reactions… It’s a film that demands that you choose a position not only about Israel and Gaza but, in a way, about cinema.”

“I live in Paris, but when something happens like the October 7 attacks, suddenly, you feel strange a tenderness for your country, feelings that you haven’t felt in a long time, and yet you know that it is going to commit the worst. How can you deal with both feelings? Of course, you can try to rationalise it, but I think the film doesn’t try to rationalise it. It is, in a way, everything at the same time, because only everything at the same time can convey what’s happening. It’s almost like: if you don’t understand Tel Aviv, you can’t understand Gaza, and maybe also vice versa.”

“There is one permanent condition in my life, it is that I always feel like I should understand what’s happening in Israel. [So after the attacks, I went there] to listen to people and the crazy thing is – it even says in the film – that it was as if, and there are great people there, but it was as if almost all of them were already at the service of the war: directors were directing for it, editors editing, cameramen shooting, and musicians composing or singing to soldiers. Even very avant-garde artists who never cared, were suddenly telling me, with tears in their eyes, how they were singing popular songs to soldiers… Everyone loves the soldiers, and they love everyone so, like in the film, it’s a love sanctified by blood, a love that will cost a lot of blood.”

“In my film, the mouth is always an important organ; there’s always a moment where the main character has a kind of crazy monologue, or tells synonyms. Y still uses his mouth, but in a totally different way… Losing faith in words is also a symptom of a collapse in a society.”

“There’s a lot of agitation but for the first time in a film of mine… [The main character]is someone who doesn’t have an opinion. He’s not interested by the idea of having an opinion actually, in fact he is super bored by politics. He just wants to dance. This is also why he doesn’t have any limits: its like he got rid of his opinion, in a way, but just stayed with the energy. Y can be criticised for many, many things, but I think that it’s hard to deny the fact that inside each one of us there is this Y. There’s something about him that goes beyond him being only a fable about the moral corruption of an artist, I think.People have a complex relationship with evil. We always ask how can people live like this – we say that about theGermans during the nazi regime, but they did, they lived with this, they kept living their lives.”

“Imagination or fiction can sometimes be such a prison; reality is so much more chaotic…, and all of this chaos can bring us closer to a feeling of truth… but not a kind of clear, well-built narrative… I always feel that in a way, our films are so poor and so tame compared to life. The hero of the moment was this actual moment, and in order to bring it to the screen, the actual moment, I had to gather everything and to push everything, because everything was at 20,000 dB.”

The post “Yes”, an interview with director Nadav Lapid appeared first on Fred Film Radio.

After successfully premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, “Sorry, Baby“, Eva Victor’s directorial debut is in Cannes 78 at the Quinzaine Des Cinéastes.

Produced by Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski, and Mark Ceryak of Pastel (Moonlight, Aftersun) and the winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Victor’s feature debut, based on her personal experience, depicts the healing journey of Literature professor Agnes (Victor), trying to survive trauma and going on with her life.

“Sorry, Baby” feels also like a cinematic letter to the people that feel stuck in life because of trauma and it is told with delicate but comedic and funny tones.

Eva Victor drives into her writing process and unveils the behind-the-scenes of this project she had never thought of directing herself in the first place. It was Barry Jenkins and his production company Pastel to lead her into the directorial debut’s direction.

The three most aching but beautiful scenes in the film are the ones with Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges and John Carroll Lynch, three actors that Eva Victor successfully relies on for her debut feature.

Distributed by A24 in the United States, “Sorry, Baby“ will soon be released in Italian cinema theaters by I Wonder Pictures.

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