FRED’s Angelo Acerbi interviews Laurie Anderson, who presented her film HEART OF A DOG in competition at the 72nd Venice Film Festival.
Using the story of her dog Lolabelle, Laurie Anderson unravels on screen her philosophy of life. “I did not know I had one, actually” she told us. But here it is. And the way she tells it is so beautiful, as it is listening her telling us how this movie came to life
HEART OF A DOG:Heart of a Dog is a personal essay film that explores themes of love, death and language. The director’s voice is a constant presence as stories of her dog Lolabelle, her mother, childhood fantasies, political and philosophical theories unfurl in a seamless song like stream. The visual language spans animation, eight millimeter films from the artist’s childhood, layered imagery and high speed text animation.
The director’s signature music runs throughout the film in works for solo violin, quartets, songs, and ambient electronics. The center of Heart of a Dog is a visual and poetic meditation on the bardo, the forty nine day period after death in which identity is shredded and the consciousness prepares to enter another life form.
A Story About A Story envisions her ordeal in the hospital when she broke her back as a child and how the story became her way to understand the relationship of real events, authority, and faulty memory on the creation of stories. Theories on sleep, imagination and disorientation are framed as questions about time and identity. Is it a pilgrimage? Which way do we go?
Barbara Allen with her film "House Music: A Cultural Evolution" paints a clear picture of the birth of a genre that is still rocking the dancefloors, and that in Chicago found a second prolific home to develop and evolve.
Kesmat El Sayed, one of the speakers on a panel on Arab Cinema, held in the frame of the World Cinema Fund days at the Berlinale 2025, is a producer from Egypt, based in Germany, who explains the difficult work …
Emma Barboni, film commissioner of the Emilia Romagna Film Commission, tells us about the production of the film "Paternal Leave" by Alissa Jung, presented in the Generation section of the Berlinale, and also about the new funds available for film …
Gemma Lynch is the Head of Production of Sardinia film Commission. She has been at the European film Market bringing a huge delegation of professionals from the region to navigate inside the European Film Market to be known and to …