PODCAST | Rowan Stol interviews James Vaughan, director of the film Friends and Strangers.

To listen to the interview, click on the ► icon on the right, just above the picture

FRED FM speaks to director James Vaughan, whose film Friends and Strangers has its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2021, and is competing in the Tiger Competition section. We discuss how Friends and Strangers contains references to broader social issues, as they manifest within the lives of the two millennial protagonists. James Vaughan elaborates on some deliberate, and some coincidental features that both make up the scenic environments in the film, as well as contribute to the many invisible factors that are of influence on the characters’ experience of life.

Friends and Strangers: a comedy-drama that explores displacement, disconnection and ennui in contemporary Australia through the eyes of two upper-middle class millennials. Boldly framed and delicately layered, the film presents several sketches from life as experienced by Alice and Ray, two twenty-something drifters born into privilege but seemingly incapable of navigating the featureless ocean of casual employment, limp romances and half-arsed entrepreneurial schemes. Gingerly abandoning teenage daydreams of careers as successful creatives, both are grasping for a way to channel their advantages into something meaningful. But in a society built on simulated images, words, ideologies, choices… Where can the authentic be found? This frustrated, suspended search for the unfindable, and the misadventures that follow, cuts to the heart of Friends and Strangers. (From the website)

To discover more about the film, click here.