{"id":923169,"date":"2026-10-10T15:12:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T15:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/923169\/"},"modified":"2026-10-10T15:12:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T15:12:09","slug":"guy-nattiv-carrie-coon-on-finding-empathy-in-drama-the-liberation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/923169\/","title":{"rendered":"Guy Nattiv & Carrie Coon On Finding Empathy In Drama ‘The Liberation’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWriter-director Guy Nattiv<\/a> and actress Carrie Coon<\/a> joined Deadline\u2019s Contenders London<\/a> event today where the pair discussed making The Liberation<\/a>, a very personal story inspired by real events from Nattiv\u2019s own grandmother.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film, which Bleecker Street<\/a> is releasing in in the U.S. in January, is set in the early 1980s where Rita, a depressed New Jersey bank worker and Holocaust survivor (Coon), is lured into an all-female woodland commune by a charismatic leader (Lily James), while her daughters attempt a rescue.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI was only eight when my family took me to seminars to see my grandmother and participate with her in those meetings,\u201d said Nattiv. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what it meant. It was like dancing with people in the dark. I heard horrific stories from people, and my grandmother crying, it was so weird to me. But no one told me what it was exactly, and I didn\u2019t know until I became a teenager when my family had basically broken in front of my eyes, and my grandmother left my grandfather, left our family, and just joined this. Now, we know it was a cult but at the time we didn\u2019t know what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNattiv said that when he was older and was processing these events as a film student, he started asking a lot of questions but didn\u2019t get a lot of answers. It was a decade ago that he decided to take his camera and visit the cult after his grandmother had passed away. \u201cI asked questions and I got answers\u2026ish.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe entered the process with \u201ca lot of empathy\u201d and found that the cult \u201ctried to free her\u201d from her trauma of being a Holocaust survivor. \u201cShe had the courage to do something very uncommon: To leave your family, say goodbye to your daughters and your husband and go into the unknown and try to save yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCoon admitted she was \u201cabsolutely fascinated by the story\u201d and said she watched \u201chours and hours\u201d of footage from Yad Vashem and from Shoah Foundation testimonies, \u201cparticularly women from Poland,\u201d to help her research for the role of Rita.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s something very specific about the way the recounting of those unspeakable things is held in the body,\u201d said Coon. \u201cAnd also, the stories themselves, the myriad forms of trauma that were inflicted upon people. But then also that they were resilient enough to survive was also very fascinating and people had a find a way to survive and Rita had a very particular idea about what that looked like for herself\u2026who are we to say what is required for someone to move on?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCoon continued that it was helpful for her to view the story as \u201ca love story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat I became very fascinated by with reading is the idea that these social rules we are living by are tacit agreements,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing written down. We wake up in the morning and we\u2019re a wife and a mother and we follow all of these rules. But it\u2019s all made up. We could essentially walk away from our lives at any time, but we don\u2019t do it. And we did [in this film]. I just find that brave and shocking.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCheck back on Monday for the panel video.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Writer-director Guy Nattiv and actress Carrie Coon joined Deadline\u2019s Contenders London event today where the pair discussed making…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":923170,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,174782,48219,490721,134,490738,344,490739],"class_list":["post-923169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bleecker-street","tag-carrie-coon","tag-contenders-london","tag-entertainment","tag-guy-nattiv","tag-movies","tag-the-liberation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=923169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/923170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}