Global News Podcast - The Happy Pod: Meet Italy's Tom Cruise and Blake Lively

Episode Date: December 7, 2024

We're at an Italian film festival with a difference, for actors who become the voice of Hollywood stars and achieve fame in their own right. Also: California's canine mayor; and why diplomacy can work better in a sauna.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If Hitler isn't defeated, it's the end of the free world. Purple Heart Warriors. Listen now by searching for dramas wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This is the Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. This is the HappyPod from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson and in this edition meet Italy's Tom Cruise and Blake Lively. Dubbing an actor means empathising with the character. It's almost like she's become a family member. I really feel like she's a friend of mine.

At the awards were actors who become the voice of some of the world's biggest film stars, California's canine mare. The dogs love it. They know, I can just tell them, hey, we're going to work. And they know what that means and they jump around and bark. Diplomacy, Finnish style, in a sauna, and a woman who's helped reunite hundreds of families has finally found her own. I found out that he was my friend. He has been in my friend list for three years. We start with a film award ceremony that is all the glitz and glamour you might

expect but without an on-screen star in sight. While many of us are used to watching films and TV series from around the world with subtitles, Italy has long favoured dubbing. The voiceover artists take on particular Hollywood stars becoming celebrities in their own right. Earlier this month they were recognised at the Voices in the Shadows festival in Genoa. Isabella Joule sent us this report from the red carpet. In a 13th century palace in northern Italy, a crowd applauds Roberto Chevalier, a white-haired man in his 70s beams on stage as he's presented with an award.

He's been crowned this year's star of the dubbing industry. To Italians, his face isn't necessarily one they'd recognise, but his voice is famous. This is the Italian Tom Cruise. Roberto Chevalier has voiced Tom Cruise in most of his films, including Mission Impossible and Top Gun. I'm Roberto Chevalier, the voice of Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Andy Garcia... I'm the voice of Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Andy Garcia and a lot of others. Dubbing an actor means empathizing with the character, how it's acted and expressed both visually and vocally.

You need to make your interpretation faithful to what you see and hear. Tiziana Vaurino is the festival's director. It's a sector that's recognized as being especially strong. Italians are known as the masters of dubbing. It's because our dubbers are, above all, great artists. They are great actors in their own right, proper professionals. Many countries dub films rather than using subtitles, and in Italy this dates back to the 1930s.

Low literacy rates along with the fascist regime's laws on censorship meant that all foreign language films had to be dubbed into Italian. But despite societal changes in the decades that followed, dubbing has stuck around. I'm Roberto Pedicini. I'm known as the Italian voice of Javier Bardem and Jim Carrey. The actor I love dubbing the most is Bardem, because in every film he manages to be totally different. He works a lot on character, he's physically different, his voice is different. Not only do dubbers have to be good actors, they also need to stick as closely as they can to the style of the original voice.

In my opinion acting and dubbing are different because I don't have the freedom to laugh, to cry or to get angry when I want. What's important is to just do it in a natural way." Matching up the voiceover with the lip movement can be difficult, as different languages work at varying speeds. And then there's the challenge of capturing the specific style of the character. Jim Carrey is very articulate, very nervous, he always has a voice that speaks a lot. Voice actor Roberto Pedicini describing how difficult voicing an actor like Jim Carrey is. His comic timing, the way he speaks and projects his voice is so particular. And then there's the task of portraying complex characters.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Martha, my stalker. Say hello to Martha. Don't make fun of me by calling me that! I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Immediately! and complex characters. Benedetta Ponticelli won the award for best female voice for TV for her portrayal of the stalker Martha in the hit series Baby Reindeer. It was so hard because Jessica Ganning is a brilliant actress and the character, Martha, is very complex. You both love and hate her. She makes you laugh and cry all at the same time. Francesca Manicone is the voice of Blake Lively, the star of Gossip Girl and, most recently, the film It Ends With Us. Her quirky laugh that you just heard has become synonymous with Blake Lively in Italy.

It's almost like she's become a family member. I really feel like she's a friend of mine. I mean, obviously she isn't in real life, but I've got to know her. The way that she looks at things, her behaviours, her poses, her facial expressions." The talent and passion in this industry is clear. But is dubbing really better than subtitling? It's a question I asked Roberto Pedicini, Italy's Javier Bardem and Jim Carrey. When you watch a film or a series and you watch it in your own language, it connects with you and provokes an emotional reaction. If instead you hear it in another language and read subtitles, you're less captivated because you don't hear the language of your

emotions. And that report was by Isabella Jewell. As politics in the US continues to be a divisive topic, one mountain town in California has experienced more than a decade of political stability after making a bold decision with the choice of mayor. Idlewild in the San Jacinto mountains outside Los Angeles voted in, wait for it, a golden retriever named Max back in 2012 and members of his family have ruled ever since. The current mayor is Maximus Mighty Dog Muller III, also known as Mayor Max, and his owners, Phyllis and Glenn Muller, serve as his co-chiefs and his policy advisors. Now Max is pushing a new initiative that extends outside his borders, the Mayor Max Peace on

Earth Initiative. Stephanie Prentice spoke to Phyllis. When I pull into town I already have people waiting for me and sometimes it's hundreds. And if I were the mayor and I said, hey I'm the mayor of Idlewild and I'm going to be downtown at two o'clock every day, come talk to me. I don't know if anybody would come. But when you say the mayor is a dog, it's interesting. And so he could meet thousands of people in one day. We also created Mayor Max's Peace on Earth Initiative. And that is an initiative that we implement globally to the best of our ability to help everyone in the world

understand what they themselves can do to create peace help everyone in the world understand what they themselves can do to create peace on earth that the active role that they can take and you mentioned that you get such a good reception wherever you go, can you describe it to me? Are people just overjoyed to see you? They are and when I pull into town I hear people cheering and I look over and the people in the car next to me are clapping and waving their hands and taking pictures and videoing us. It's constant and I love it and the mayor's love it, the dogs love it, they know I can just tell them hey we're going to work and they know what that means and they jump around and bark. You mentioned that amazing global initiative. Are there any other bits of

policy that you've pushed through? What we do is what a dog can do. They can attend events, they can uplift the spirits. Even Mayor Max II was so well trained that he could lie on a hospital bed with a dying patient and give them comfort and joy in death. And so I don't even talk about it too much, because sometimes it'll actually make me cry. But the value of uplifting spirits, giving people who've lost hope the will to live, but a family in town whose child has brain cancer and the family had run out of money to pay the hospital bills. And so we create a fundraiser and raise over $10,000 in one day.

And we do all kinds of work like that. I mean, every day there are things going on. My main policy and everything is I encourage people to use only positive energy in all their communications and don't take the bait on hate. As we know, a week is a long time in politics and you guys have been in charge for more than a decade. Have you come up against any issues and how did you overcome them? I was attacked for being for insisting that my dog is non-political, non-partisan. And so there were three political groups that attacked me for not taking a side. And I had to explain it to them. You're asking me to take a side. I do have a side, but I represent the mayor.

And so I'm not going to verbalize my side. But I am going to tell you that the mayor loves you unconditionally. He will always love you. And he but he is a dog and he doesn't understand sides. He just loves everybody. He can't wait to see everybody. And I think that no matter what issue inside we might be on, I think we need to have respect and love for everyone. Phyllis Muller. With high stakes negotiations, long working hours and the unpredictability of world events,

foreign diplomacy can be a very stressful job. But those representing Finland on the world stage have a unique and quintessentially Finnish way of relaxing. The sauna. All their embassies and consulates are equipped with one, and it seems they can be useful places for informal, shall we say, less heated chats about world events. The BBC's Matt Charley met Marcus Hippie at the Finnish Embassy in London. And then usually you would shower before going to the sauna, so I suggest that's what we do.

Yeah, well. Welcome to our embassy sauna. So we have, at the moment, it's quite mild when it comes to the Finnish standards. I think it's roughly 60 degrees over here at the moment. Saunas is such an integral part of the Finnish culture. If you look at what Finnish people have been doing over centuries, we have been emigrating to other countries, we have been collaborating in peacekeeping missions and so forth,

and we've always taken sauna culture and saunas with us. What do you use it for in the embassy? Obviously it's for staff use. A great asset for our staff members who may be missing Finland and kind of like missing their own saunas. Saunas. We do run the London Diplomatic Sauna Society at these premises.

So we meet people, we talk about things. It's a great way of networking and talking about everything. So do you have politicians in here? Yeah, we've had politicians. Not naming any people, because obviously it's confidential. So the first rule of London Diplomatic Sauna Society is you don't talk about London Diplomatic Sauna Society. Well, presumably it's a bit of a novelty, because the sort of diplomatic circuit can be what, working breakfast, maybe lunch, maybe a drinks reception.

You can offer something different. Absolutely. This is a great way of doing diplomacy differently, and it's been noted that we have a long history of sauna diplomacy in different environments. For example, we have all these stories from the 1960s and 1970s. The Soviet Union tried to constantly challenge Finland's neutrality between the East and the West, for example, and our then president, Urho Kekkonen invited the Soviet leader Nikita Rushov to sauna once and they stayed according to the story They stayed in a sauna until five o'clock in the morning some drink was taken In the end after that Moscow declared that they were willing to support Finland's integration and collaboration with the West. So

It's been said I don't remember who said this but it's been said, I don't remember who said this, but it's been said that the heat of a sauna does melt away your political or any other differences. It's easy to talk about things. I suppose there's something so informal, if you are having a conversation, normally it's politicians sitting across a table from each other in their suits, with their entourages and all that. Sitting, as you and I are, in our swimming chugs in the heat, it just creates a different environment and it's much more, I suppose, leveling. That is so true. That's a really good observation. I mean, you are experiencing this yourself at the moment. It's very hard to be formal when we're both like actually getting wet.

We literally met five minutes ago. We're barely wearing anything. We're wearing swimming trunks. And the point is that when you throw water to the stones, this space feels hotter, but actually you can also breathe better because this creates an oxygen flow. So actually it's really good for you. Maybe one more hour. Do you know what? It's absolutely lovely.

It's really good to do in a sauna. Sauna. It's very nice. Marcus, thanks so much, haven't we? Marcus Hippie at the Finnish Embassy Sauna here in London. Coming up in this podcast... Find out about the marriage between two alpacas in China. I'm Katie Watson in the Cook Islands, where we're taking a deep dive into the Pacific. This small island nation has grand ambitions to mine its seabed for metals used in green technology.

But a community that's defined by its ocean has found itself at the centre of a global debate. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts. And now to an inspiring story about a Georgian journalist called Tamuna Mozzarezza. Tamuna reunited hundreds of families after uncovering a baby trafficking scandal. She began her campaign after realizing she was adopted and earlier this year learnt the name of her biological father only to realize they'd been friends on Facebook for years. The Happy Pods' Holly Gibbs has this report.

The sound of Tamuna Musarezza meeting her biological father for the first time after eight years of searching. In 2016, Tamuna was clearing out her mother's house after she died and found a birth certificate with her name but a different birth date. She began to suspect she was adopted and set up a Facebook group called I'm Searching in the hope of finding her birth parents. Instead, she uncovered a baby trafficking scandal that had affected tens of thousands

of people. Her group now has 260,000 members and earlier this year Tamuna featured in a BBC documentary about her success in reuniting hundreds of families including twins Anno and Amy and their mother. From today my life has great meaning. It is a great happiness that I have found my children. Tamuna learnt nothing about her own family until this summer, when a member of her Facebook group contacted her with a possible name for her birth mother. That woman's niece then

came forward and a DNA test confirmed they were cousins. Unlike those she'd helped, Tamuna was not part of the baby trafficking scandal and her birth mother didn't want to meet her, but did give her the name of her biological father. My father didn't know about me. He didn't even know that biological mother was pregnant. Gergen Korova had a brief relationship with a woman 40 years ago and had no idea that she'd given birth.

When Tomuna searched for him on Facebook, it turned out he was already in her friends list following her work reuniting other families. I found out that he was my friend. He has been in my friend list for three years. I couldn't even imagine that this was happening to me. They soon arranged to meet in his hometown in Western Georgia, about 160 miles from where

she lives in Tbilisi. Gergen invited his entire family, introducing Tamuna to a large group of new relatives, half siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. After reuniting so many other families, Tamuna has now found hers. Do you remember when I said that I would found my family? I did. Tamuna mozzarella. A groundbreaking report by the WWF, that's the World Wide Fund for Nature, has revealed the discovery over the last ten years of 742 new species of animals and plants in Africa's Congo Basin. The area spans six countries, Cameroon, the

Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of Congo. It's home to incredible animals like forest elephants and rare plants. But for the indigenous communities who've lived there for generations, some of these so-called new discoveries are part of their everyday lives. Audrey Brown presents our sister podcast BBC Focus on Africa and she told Oliver Conway more about this part of the world. The Congo Basin absorbs carbon emissions, 600 million tons of it. That is practically all

the carbon emissions that come from American transportation. So essentially, we need the Congo basin. The species that have been discovered are found in a new report called New Life in the Congo Basin, a decade of species discoveries from 2013 to 2023. They've captured it all. And essentially, it's not so much the discovery because those species have been there. It's the identification and has become more broadly known through dissemination that we know it now. So there are things like more than 400 different plants,

140 invertebrates, 96 fish species, 22 amphibians, 42 reptiles, two new bird species and 10 mammals. Some of these species are sort of canaries in the coal mine. If they go, we are in danger of going. We're calling them discoveries but as you pointed out they've already been there all this time and were known to the local indigenous communities. Now that there's a wider knowledge of these things, what will change? I think I should leave that to Jaap van der Waarde, who's the head of conservation for the Congo Basin, because he speaks about it with such passion. And in this case, we were talking about the Baka people who know and love these animals, birds and plants because it is their home. Here's Yap.

For the local communities and certainly the indigenous people, they have known them forever and they probably know also if they have a use, if it's an animal, they might eat it. But some certain plants, they might know medicinal use of these plants. We know nothing about that. And it's just now that pieces are being written down, they get a name and once they have a name, they exist. How under threat is the Congo Basin and can anything be done to keep it safe? There's still deforestation, there's poaching, mining and all of these activities are bringing about climate change. And the people of the forest are under threat as well, because their

stewardship of this precious beautiful area is undermined by governments that are destroying their homes and their claim to the forest. So mining companies are destroying the environment. It is so rich and so diverse that people only see profit. Audrey Brown and you can hear more about that story in BBC Focus on Africa wherever you get your podcasts. Around the world we consume millions of tonnes of coconuts every year but the husks and shells are often dumped or burnt emitting greenhouse gases. Now though some of that waste in the

Philippines is being combined with recycled polyester to produce a greener alternative to polystyrene or styrofoam to keep food cool. The coconut coolers are already being used by a few hundred fishing boats and a version is going on sale in the United States. Craig Langren has been talking to one of those behind the idea. Coconuts are an amazing material and there's still so much more to learn. That's David Kotler who runs a company called Nutshell Coolers, making cool boxes with a difference for fresh fish, fruit and vegetables.

It was when David was living in the Philippines and studying for a master's in product design that inspiration struck. It wasn't exactly a coconut that fell out of a tree and hit us on the head, but it was sort of like the next best thing. He'd worked with local fishermen before, and he'd noticed that much of their catch was often spoiled before it even reached the shore. He already knew that he wanted to design something that could keep the fisherman's fish cooler for longer. My co-founder, Kamara, and I were in this really rural area and we just passed like the 10th pile of coconut husks on our walk home and we just sort of looked at this pile and

said maybe we should like take a closer look at all this material that's just sort of sitting here. We had drank our fair share of coconuts over the months beforehand so we knew that there was something about coconuts that was keeping that nut fresh in the tropics. The something was in fact the husk. Cut a coconut open sideways, there's the hard shell, and then outside of that there's a few inches of kind of scratchy hairy coconut fibers. And it's those fibers that we work with. So basically inside every fiber are these little trapped air pockets serving as a barrier between, you know, the baking tropical sun on one side and the cool

flesh of the coconut on the other. If you look under a microscope, the trapped air in the coconut fiber actually resembles the sort of closed cell architecture that scientists have reinvented with plastic foams to do the exact same thing. In order to make the cool boxes, the coconut husk is combined with some other materials and processed at a local factory. We start with these long sinewy fibres and the first step is to turn that into a pretty strong mat. We layer several of these mats together so that the fibers are kind of cross-linked and then we use a combination of heat and

pressure to sort of activate and stick a lot of these fibers together. It's really important that these tough fibers are also soft and malleable when they're all put together inside of one of the coolers. The resulting product is a stackable orange box that can be used to keep fish cool while the fishermen are out at sea, even under the baking tropical sun. The coolers are collapsible when not in use and now even come in different shapes and sizes for fruits, vegetables and basically anything that needs to be kept cool. David buys the coconut husks which would otherwise be thrown away from local farmers in the Philippines. We're basically taking straight from the trash pile to make our sort of advanced

materials and that's great for our prices but it's also great for the farmers because they get a little bit of extra income from their waste material and it's also great for the environment. And you can hear more about innovative ways of using waste coconut shells on people fixing the world. That's wherever you get your podcasts. At this time of year, many children around the world will be taking part in end-of-year performances, usually singing, dancing or in some countries perhaps appearing in a nativity play. But a kindergarten in eastern China had a somewhat

unconventional event. Our China media analyst Kerry Allen told us more. Rather than being a nativity or a Christmas performance, which wouldn't really be expected anyway given China's an atheist state, it decided to host a wedding. And it was a wedding between two alpacas. Parents and students at the school in Suqian, in East China's Jiangsu province, were asked to bring a wedding present,

and many turned out dressed in red, as the color is a symbol of good luck, fortune, and celebration. They then watched two alpacas walk down the aisle to be married. The event featured a banquet and some of the children put on dance performances for their mums, dads and grandparents. It was a somewhat unconventional way to end the year,

but it's obviously had many people in China talking. Social media users have said that they think it was an unforgettable way for students to end 2024. Despite being a bit out there in terms of end of year performances, some have embraced the fact that it's been a way of bringing families together in celebration. Marriage rates have been falling in China in recent years and it's been seen as a way of teaching young Chinese the importance of love, family and of course having a bit of fun. Let's hope they've alpact for their honeymoon. And that's it from the HappyPod for now. But with the end of the year fast approaching, we'd love to hear about the things that have made you happiest or most inspired you in 2024.

It can be something personal to you and your family, a story from your community or around the world. Just send us an email or a voice note to globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk. And if you have any unusual resolutions or life changes planned for next year, we'd love to hear about those too. This edition was mixed by Masood Ibrahim Heal. The producers were Holly Gibbs and Rachel Bulkley. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Valerie Sanderson. Until next time, bye bye. Pacific. This small island nation has grand ambitions to mine its seabed for metals used in green technology. But a community that's defined by its ocean has found itself at the centre of a global debate.

Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.