FRED Film Radio - English Channel

In competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival 2026, Primetime is the narrative feature debut of documentary director Lance Oppenheim, a fever-dream thriller inspired by the true story of Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator, with Robert Pattinson transformed into a gonzo version of the star journalist. Skyler Gisondo, Merritt Wever and Bokeem Woodbine are part of the film’s supporting cast, playing people caught up inside Hansen’s operation as it turns justice into entertainment. In conversation, the three actors reflect on the moral weight of the material and on how closely the show’s 2006 world of hidden cameras and manufactured spectacle anticipated the one we live in now.

Asked how it felt, professionally and morally, to take part in a project where the line between reporter and performer keeps dissolving, Wever says the material itself put her at ease: “I wasn’t worried about it morally, because I’d read the article that it was based on, I’d read the script. I knew the kind of respect and care that Alex Winters, who plays Bill Conrad, was bringing to his role. There’s a line that gets repeated by Rob’s character very close to the end of the film, and I think if you make it through the film, watch what happened, experience the circus and watch Skyler’s performance, and hear that line repeated over and over, you understand where this film intends to land emotionally by the end”. Woodbine describes the film as an intersection of spectacle and compassion, crediting Oppenheim with pushing past the original show’s premise: “Lance takes it to another level. He goes deeper underneath the surface and manages to extract the truth in all the myriad of characters, because there are so many different personalities and energies in the project, so many different lenses with which we view this one kind of ugly subject. I was just grateful to have been able to try to bring some light to a slice of that pie, and I had no issue or qualms moralitywise, because I’m anti-predator, so that suited my role”. Gisondo, who plays Dan, describes him as the operation’s outsider, someone whose arc mirrors his own approach to the part: “Dan goes on this real journey where he comes into the operation just in awe of Chris and what he has, his own TV show, the cameras, and then he kind of grows disillusioned with the thing over the course of it. So I try to just be present, day to day, scene to scene, and reserve my own personal feelings, and just kind of always live through Dan”.

Asked how much the film speaks to a present in which media has, in a way, replaced justice, Wever points to the collision of institutions at its center: “One of the things this film has going for it is that it shows an alchemy between what happens when news, entertainment and law enforcement suddenly get tangled together, and when one of those entities suddenly starts to call the shots and run the show”. She recalls being old enough to remember the original show firsthand, and only realizing on set that the film was, for her, a period piece: “I didn’t realize, in a way, that I was part of making a period piece. I thought it was contemporary, and then I realized, oh no, it’s been twenty years. People keep asking us what we think about this, and I’m curious to hear what the younger generation thinks of this, who weren’t there for the show, so it’s not baked into their cultural or psychological experience”. For Wever, the timing matters too: the show predates a world where everyone carries the internet, and a camera, at all times: “Now you leave your house and you assume that anybody could pull out their phone and record you. And the other thing that’s happened is that people don’t just record each other, they record themselves now. […] It’s become this normalized drive to put anything about yourself on view for people”. That shift, she adds, has turned being on camera into something closer to a compulsion: “It’s interesting how being on camera is a new addiction, and people are self-possessed, as a self-possessed person, I can say this , because they think about how everything is going to look. Before, we would look in the mirror before we go out at night, but now it’s how you look at yourself on a video constantly”. Gisondo closes by recalling one of Chris Hansen’s own lines in the film, echoing what Wever had just said: “There used to be, you’d get dragged into the town square if you were a wrongdoer, a criminal or something. Now there’s a television in every house, and you’re on it, and so am I”. For him, the film has become something its makers couldn’t have planned for: “I think Merritt said it so well. It’s now a time capsule for a show that ended up serving as a blueprint for a really interesting time in our relationship to criminality and the prosecution of criminality as entertainment, as spectacle. I don’t think we realized at the time that the show was on the way that it would kind of reverberate for the next twenty years”.

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In competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, The Echo Chamber, directed by Andrea Pallaoro, stars Luca Marinelli and Alicia Vikander as a couple whose intimacy slowly curdles into dependency, confined largely within a single apartment. The screenplay was originally begun by Bernardo Bertolucci, before being reshaped by Pallaoro, along with screenwriters Ilaria Bernardini, and Ludovica Rampoldi into what the two actors describe as a deeply personal film about the marks people leave inside one another.

Asked what it meant to work on a script that carries Bertolucci’s fingerprints, Vikander ties the question directly to the film’s title: “This film is actually The Echo Chamber, and I mean the title is kind of referring to this drama between these few characters in a very small space, an apartment. There’s a lot of echoes throughout the film and within the space,  it’s not just music, it’s also objects, it’s memories, it’s dreams, it’s the behavior of these characters that have been trapped”. For her, having a screenwriter of Bertolucci’s stature originate the first version of the script was, in its own way, fitting: “That has obviously lingered over the entire shoot and making of this film, but then it’s also been fully inhabited. First by Andrea, then by us, to make it this personal film”. Marinelli agrees that echo is the movie’s central theme, but credits Pallaoro with carrying that inheritance: “We were so happy to be part of this movie because he’s an amazing artist, and I love his humanity, his human and artistic approach to actors and to stories. He put all his passion and all the respect for this huge echo that he was bringing on his shoulders, the echo of Bernardo Bertolucci”.

The film’s premise, that relationships leave residues inside the people who live them, struck Marinelli on a personal level: “I really like the idea that the film gave me, and I think it will make the audience think about the traces that we leave in somebody’s life once we connect, even for a brief amount of time. I don’t know if it’s something I never really thought about, and the film made me think about that”. For Vikander, that idea is inseparable from what it means to be a person, and from her own craft: “I think that is what creates a life and a person. We inhabit all the relationships and events, and that’s very much my work as an actor too. I use the tools of my imagination and also history and experiences, but then they morph into something new that hopefully will have an effect on other people”. Marinelli, half-joking about the sweat he was leaving in the room from having to speak English, brings the thought back to the film: “We always have to take care of what we’re leaving on the other person, on others, when we have the chance to think about it”.

Pallaoro has described The Echo Chamber as a love story inseparable from pain, and the two actors are asked whether a relationship built on that much codependence can ever work. For Vikander, the tension is simply part of being human: “We’re talking about the biggest emotions, and it’s kind of like yin and yang — it’s going to exist all the time, I think”. What defines the couple at the centre of the film, she explains, is how far that balance is pushed: “It’s when love and tenderness can become dependence, and when care suddenly can become control. It’s still the same fluctuations that I think any relationship should have, but maybe there’s a version, a wave of that spectrum, that could make people happier and more content — that’s my own personal view”. Those forces, she adds, never really disappear: “I think those powers will always exist, and that kind of is nature, but with these two characters in this particular film, they’re very much out to the extreme”.

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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:

Fernando Lima | film critic former artistic director of Mar Del Plata – Argentina

Jo-Ann Titmarsh | Next Best Picture

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Across The Bridge brings you the highlights and the best of Venice Production Bridge 2026 during 83rd Venice Film Festival.

In a daily podcast, Angelo Acerbi and Carolina Mancini explore the key events, discussions and issues shaping Venice Production Bridge 2026, with the help of guests and interviews, offering an insider’s perspective on one of the film industry’s most distinctive and effective film markets.

Discover all the latest industry news and developments presented at the Lido from September 3 to 9, 2026.

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During the Venice International Film Festival 2026 we spoke with Phuttiphong Aroonpheng, director of The Burning Giants, presented here in the Orizzonti section of the Festival. A haunting reflection on displacement, memory and the fragile relationship between people and the land they call home, blending environmental conflict with indigenous history, mythology and magical realism, the film explores how erased pasts continue to shape the present. Through ghosts, legends and haunted landscapes, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng turns forgotten histories into a powerful meditation on identity, belonging and resistance.

During our conversation for FRED Film Radio, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng explored the conflict between environmental conservation and the rights of indigenous communities who have inhabited forest areas for generations. For the director, in The Burning Giants the central tension lies in the radically different ways the same landscape can be perceived: as a protected natural space on one side, and as an ancestral home on the other. Although rooted in Thailand, this conflict has a broader and universal dimension, raising questions about who has the right to define, protect or inhabit a territory.

Mythology and folklore become essential tools through which Aroonpheng reframes this contemporary struggle. Drawing on sources such as the Ramayana and regional legends of ogres persecuted by royal armies, he creates in The Burning Giants a narrative in which displacement, violence and historical memory are filtered through fantasy. Rather than treating myth as an escape from reality, the director uses it to reveal continuities between ancient stories and present-day forms of exclusion and persecution. This approach is closely connected to Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s use of magical realism. Ghosts, lights, haunted places and fragmented memories embody a past that refuses to disappear, even when history attempts to erase it. For him, collective identity is shaped as much by what societies remember as by what they choose to forget. By allowing the fantastical to coexist with the real, The Burning Giants becomes a reflection on suppressed histories and on the enduring presence of those who have been displaced or excluded from official narratives.

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During the 83rd edition of the Venice International Film Festival we spoke with director Halkawt Mustafa and actress Avan Jamal for the film No paradise if you are killed by a woman, presented here in the Venice Open – Out of Competition section of the Festival. A compelling story where the director was inspired by the Kurdish women who stood against the darkness and chose to fight ISIS. Their courage has stayed with him since 2014, when he met women on the front line who were living with fear, loss and uncertainty, yet refused to give up.

During our conversation for FRED Film Radio, director Halkawt Mustafa explained how No paradise if you are killed by a woman is deeply rooted in reality. His experience as a war photographer and his encounters with Kurdish female fighters in 2014 became the emotional and visual foundation of the film, with many details directly inspired by what he witnessed. Mustafa explained that these women often faced an extreme choice: submit to the violence of the Caliphate or take up arms and resist. What struck him most was how ordinary many of them were: university students, mothers, young women who could have been members of his own family. This sense of authenticity also shaped the production itself and, determined not to recreate Mosul elsewhere, Mustafa insisted also on shooting in the city, despite the enormous practical and emotional difficulties involved. The film ultimately required nine years of work, a commitment he describes as exhausting but necessary in order to remain faithful to the reality he wanted to portray.

For Avan Jamal, the actress playing Vian in No paradise if you are killed by a woman, this character meant confronting a person marked by trauma, pain and survival, but also by an extraordinary capacity for love. Rather than defining her strength simply through the image of a woman carrying a weapon, Jamal was indeed interested in revealing the emotional force beneath that image. Seeing the film above all as a story about love and survival, and about how far people are willing to go for those they care about, even in the most violent circumstances. Playing Vian also meant reflecting on the real experiences of Kurdish female fighters and women in conflicts around the world, whose emancipation often emerges under extreme necessity. For Jamal, the character’s true power lies not only in resistance, but in her ability to preserve tenderness and humanity despite everything she has endured.

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During the Venice International Film Festival 2026 we spoke with Sabu, director of the film Arrested Memory, presented here in the Venice Open – Out of Competition section of the Festival. A layered story about memory, identity and the fragile process of rediscovering oneself after trauma… Blending darkness with Sabu’s distinctive dry humour, turning remembrance into a path toward healing, reconstruction and liberation.

During our interview for FRED Film Radio, the director Sabu explained how it was bringing together Japanese and Taiwanese cultural traditions while embracing the creative possibilities of working outside his usual environment. Shooting Arrested Memory in Taipei, where he was the only Japanese member of a predominantly Taiwanese crew alongside a Hong Kong cinematographer, placed him in an unfamiliar and stimulating position. Sabu describes this sense of nervousness as something he actively seeks: working in a new context allows him to feel like a beginner again and keeps his filmmaking instinct alive. He also expressed the desire to bring this approach to Italy in a future project.

Despite its apparent darkness, nonetheless the film Arrested Memory also retains the director Sabu’s characteristic use of humour. For him, comedy is most effective when it emerges from situations of extreme tension and seriousness: the more committed the characters are to the dramatic reality of a scene, the stronger its unexpected comic dimension can become. This is why he tends not to cast performers primarily associated with comedy, but actors capable of playing situations with complete seriousness. In this film, Ethan’s intense performance becomes precisely what allows the darker humour to emerge naturally, creating a contrast between emotional weight and moments of unexpected release.

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During the Venice International Film Festival 2026 we spoke with director Muayad Alayan and writer Rami Alayan for the film Conversation With The Sea, presented here at the Venice Spotlight section of the Festival. A story inspired by true personal family events set in Jerusalem where the city is a big protagonist as well, and where a mystery lays into the waves of the sea.

During our interview with FRED Film Radio, the director Muayad Alayan told us that Jerusalem is far more than a setting here in Conversation With The Sea: it is a recurring presence in his cinema, almost a character in itself, shaped by memory, history and the contradictions of everyday Palestinian life. In the film the city becomes indeed a space where personal memories coexist with systematic processes of erasure, displacement and occupation. Alayan describes his relationship with Jerusalem as deeply ambivalent, marked by both love and resentment, and this tension directly informs the emotional landscape of the film. Rather than approaching political realities through abstraction, his cinema focuses on ordinary people and on the intimate consequences of structural violence, and storytelling thus becomes a way of preserving experiences and identities that risk being erased, while cinema itself acts as a means of affirming Palestinian presence and existence.

The writer of the film Rami Alayan reflected on filmmaking as well, as an act that can appear fragile or even futile in times of political turmoil, yet precisely for this reason can become an expression of hope and resistance. Cinema, for him, offers the possibility of projecting Palestinian stories beyond physical and political borders, and creating a dialogue with audiences elsewhere. A central symbol in Conversation With The Sea is indeed water, and particularly the sea: simultaneously a border and an image of freedom, something that separates but also suggests the possibility of escape and liberation. At the same time, the sea carries associations with death, mourning and loss. This duality becomes essential to the Conversation With The Sea film visual and symbolic language, connecting memory, grief and the desire for freedom in a single recurring image.

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During the Venice Film Festival 2026 we spoke with director Lee Chang-dong and actors Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu on the film Possible Love, presented here in Competition at the Festival. A conversation that delves into the film’s thematic layers and the creative approaches behind its storytelling, offering insights into the director’s vision and the actors’ interpretations.

Lee Chang-dong discusses the thematic focus of Possible Love, emphasizing the significance of looking and of the gaze in the film. He explains how the film explores the conflict between labor and capital through the lens of documentary filmmaking, reflecting on how the camera becomes a tool to examine desire, envy, and societal judgment.

Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu, highlighted the contrast between the desires of their characters to find love and the awareness of social exploitation. Jeon Do-yeon character seeks to heal her family’s wounds and displays curiosity rather than desire towards the other class. Sul Kyung-gu character, instead, experiences rejection and inner pain, which he channels into his relationship with the documentary filmmaker. Both actors interpret their roles as struggles against societal power dynamics, embodying the tension between attraction and exploitation, and illustrating how personal and social conflicts intertwine in the film Possible Love.

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My Notes On Mars by Lili Horvát, opening the Giornate degli Autori, at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, is a film that explores love, science, space, and faith in others. In this interview we delve into the film’s themes and the creative choices behind it,  as an inspiring example of the merging between sci-fi metaphor and intimate human relationships.

Lili Horvát discusses how her film is primarily a love story about a long-term relationship, intertwined with a subtle science fiction layer used as a metaphor. The film reflects on how couples cope with change and personal growth over time, with the relationship between Sam and Margot echoing that between Earth and Mars. She talks about how Mars, once admired and distant, now becomes a terrain to be conquered and protected—a reflection of evolving human relationships and the idea of understanding and caring for each other despite differences. My Notes On Mars beautifully balances a romantic narrative with science fiction elements to portray the complexity of long-term bonds.

MacKenzie Davis explains how her character, Margot, undergoes a drastic and unexpected transformation during the film. She highlights the importance of the script in outlining this evolution and how she and Lili collaborated closely to distinguish the different phases of Margot’s personality. Davis speaks about the challenge of portraying this shift authentically, emphasizing Lili’s precise directing and her own commitment to embodying the character’s changes convincingly. Rupert Friend provides insight into his role as Sam, who must navigate his devotion amid Margot’s evolving persona. His character embodies the pure devotion and resilience that, according to him, reflect what true love entails—being able to accept and support change without losing connection. My Notes On Mars underscores how genuine love can transcend jealousy, frustration, and loneliness, offering a powerful message about the enduring nature of affection.

Lili Horvát reveals her deliberate use of science to facilitate storytelling rather than opting for a purely speculative approach. She explains her affinity for intelligent female characters, like Margot, and how science functions as a vehicle to explore themes of change and identity. Horvát highlights that the film’s scientific accuracy is vital for grounding its emotional core. MacKenzie Davis shares the uniqueness of working with Lily’s precise direction, especially regarding the numerous close-ups that underline Margot’s internal shifts. She describes how Lily’s keen eye challenged her to perform with honesty, relying on subtle movements and expressions instead of reliance on acting gimmicks. The collaborative nature of the shoot allowed for improvisation and real-time fine-tuning, making the final film a carefully crafted puzzle of performance and visuals.

Lili Horvát explains that they benefited from improvisation because shooting non in chronological order allowed them to react to footage and refine performances and visuals. Both actors appreciated the collaborative process, which involved fine-tuning the story puzzle through spontaneous ideas on set, resulting in a more authentic final product. The creative team’s trust and preparation fostered a space for experimentation, ultimately enhancing the film’s emotional and visual depth.

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