film profile], which revisits a terrible news story in a dreamlike, cubist fashion, was at last released in Italian cinemas yesterday, 27 May, via I Wonder Pictures. We spoke with the director about his approach towards telling the particularly harrowing story of Fortuna Loffredo - a little girl who died after being thrown from the eighth floor of a block of flats on the outskirts of Naples - and bringing to light a horrendous pattern of child abuse.
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Cineuropa: Why did you set yourself the challenge of speaking about âthe unspeakableâ, as you yourself have described it, in your first feature film?
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Everyone loves Mads Mikkelsen, and for proof of that fact, just spend a few minutes on social media. Or just revisit the recent acclaim for
Another Round, the Danish star’s 2020 drama (about four teachers striving to get themselves out of a middle-aged rut via alcohol) that just won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. It’s the latest in a string of triumphs for the 55-year-old Copenhagen native, who over the past fifteen years has moved freely between daring and unconventional dramas abroad, and franchise tentpoles here in the States. Whether dealing drugs in Nicolas Winding Refn’s
Who is Joel Coen?
After McDormand won the Best Actress Oscar for her leading role of Mildred in Three Billboards. , she had once shared how she took up the role only after much push from her husband Joel Coen. She was hesitant as she felt too old for the character. Finally my husband said, Just shut up and do it, McDormand shared in a September 2018 film panel.
Frances McDormand wins Best Actress for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri with director Joel Coen during the 90th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center on March 4, 2018, in Hollywood, California (Getty Images)
From Where They Stood shines a light on secretly taken photos to help us remember
From Where They Stood by Christophe Cognet
For some fifteen years now,
Christophe Cognet has been working on pictures taken in secret and at risk of death by deportees in Nazi camps. And after the drawings and watercolours of
Parce que j’étais peintre (revealed in the Cinema XXI section of Rome Film Fest 2013), it is these very photos which form the focus of Cognet’s second documentary feature
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In Dachau, Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, a number of deportees managed to take clandestine photos of their surrounds. Given the great efforts that these women and men went to in order to pass these images on to us, we owe it to them to take a look, and this is the subject-matter explored by the filmmaker, which he has also set out in a book by the name of