Latest news with #AFantasticWoman
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sebastián Lelio Talks Musical Film ‘The Wave' About Chile's 2019 Feminist May Protests: 'It Was An Iconic Moment'
Sebastián Lelio's has touched down in Cannes this year with musical film The Wave (La Ola), inspired by the wave of feminist civil disobedience that swept Chile in the spring of 2018. The mass protests and university rallies, sparked by a collective desire to bring attention to widespread harassment and abuse against women in Chile, came to be known as the 'Feminist May'. More from Deadline Spike Lee Says 'Highest 2 Lowest' Is Potentially His Last Collaboration With Denzel Washington: "This Is It-Five" Breaking Baz @Cannes: Spike Lee Croons Rodgers & Hammerstein On The Beach But Tunes Out As Talk Turns To Him Making A Movie Musical His Next Project Lynne Ramsay On How Critics Are Misreading Her Buzzy Cannes Title 'Die My Love': "This Postpartum Thing Is Bulls***t" Daniela López stars in the film – which debuted in Cannes Premiere – as a music student who joins the cause, haunted by an incident with her voice teacher's assistant. She is joined in the cast by a raft of young Chilean acting talents including Paulina Cortés, Lola Bravo and Avril Aurora. The musical film marks Lelio's first film in his native Chile since his 2017 Oscar winner A Fantastic Woman, with feature credits in between including Gloria Bell and The Wonder. Deadline sat down with Lelio in LELIO: I happened to be in Chile during the Feminist May. I was very impressed by the marches that took place, the demonstrations. The female students would march with masks, some with their breasts exposed. It was a very iconic moment. I remember seeing a photo on a newspaper with all of them on the street and it very impressive, very powerful. After A Fantastic Woman, I was starting to think about what I could do again in Chile. The idea of using this movement as a background to explore these themes, using the language of a musical film started to take shape. I thought it was a great opportunity to use the musical to talk about things that for which words are insufficient, to mix politics and spectacle DEADLINE: The WaveEmilia Pérez LELIO: We are in a moment in the history of humanity, but also cinema, where things cannot be that innocent anymore. So, if you're going to work within a genre, it's almost your duty, not to necessarily subvert it, but to expand it, to make self-aware narratives. So, when you're working with the musical genre tradition, you need to think about the genre and why you're using it. You need to push boundaries, so it's not an exercise of nostalgia, which is what has been happening for the last 25 years, with some exceptions, but rather an act of now. DEADLINE: Emilia Pérez LELIO: It does step into musical territory, unapologetically. The thing is the tone. It is something more than just finding a way to express things through dance and movement, movement and singing. This is more of depiction of political cacophony. DEADLINE: LELIO: We're going through a backlash globally. It feels like a betrayal and revenge against all sorts of advances is being orchestrated in a very conscious way. I think the pendulum still has a few meters to go in that direction before things hopefully start to get more balanced again. Globally, it's a moment where you know the demands of society, women's demands, used to sound like commonsense three years ago, and now they sound like crazy things. That's what they are doing. It's just part of the never-ending cycle of the dance between the attempt to change things and the way in which power deals with that. DEADLINE: LELIO: Yes and no, or I would say maybe 'no' and 'yes'. The way in which these things tend to develop is that a certain amount of energy is accumulated, the conditions for negotiation manifest and then politics and power make the move. Usually the movement, I'm talking history here, not this particular movement, is appropriated by politics, and then there is a sort of arrangement. Things have the facade of change but do not necessarily really change. It's a slow process. DEADLINE: LELIO: We did a very big casting process. Some of the biggest numbers feature 400 people in total. The average age of the woman in the story is around 22, or something like that. They were all very young. It's basically the introduction of a whole generation of artists and performers. For the protagonist Julia, we saw hundreds and hundreds of faces. Daniela's just out of drama school. It's her first role. DEADLINE: LELIO: I found the first exercise I did in film school on a tape a few a while back. I was around 20, and it's about four women. I understood it has always been there as a genuine interest. It was never programmatic. And then, the world changed, and this dimension became more prominent. DEADLINE: ? LELIO. My first intuition was that we needed to find a correspondence between the subject we were talking about and the way in which we were going to generate the pieces of the film. It had to be coherent. I called three female writers so I could write it being a minority, I called people I really admire, some I knew more, some less, but they belong to different aspects of the feminist spectrum. It took five years to finish the script. The first year was like them talking. I would contribute a lot, but clearly, I wasn't the one that was going to have many, many, many, things to say… the film expresses ideas and points of view that I agree with, but it's also a sort of like political and spectacular device that gives space to many points of views. It's more of an analytical portrayal of a moment than my own little thesis. DEADLINE: How did your long-time collaborator composer Matthew Herbert fit into the process? LELIO: This is fifth film we do together, and Matthew had the same question on how to create coherence. He said, 'It can't be just my score or my composition for the numbers'. He suggested we set up some sort of music camp and we invited 17 women songwriters. That's where the music came from, and where Matthew took many, many things from, from that experience with two big camps. So there is a collaborative, co-creatiive approach, with the spirit of sharing power. DEADLINE: LELIO: For me, he one of the choreographers working today. I said to him, 'We don't have a musical tradition. These actresses are very young. They don't have experience. We've never done musical films in Latin America, in Chile, so you would have to work with that. We won't have, like, professional dancers.' He said professional dancers would ruin this film. He has this approach that everyone can dance. He found ways to make those people, those bodies, change with what they had. It's not really belonging to the highly professionalized style of a more traditional film. There is something a little more raw about the aesthetics of the dance. It's the same with the music, most of it is coming from street chants. DEADLINE: LELIO: It's a dance, we've danced before. They are very supportive, but at the same time understand you need some space to create something that has certain uniqueness.. This is our fourth film together, but first film I've shot in Chile since A Fantastic Woman. Working with them in Chile feels like home. Best of Deadline Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies In Order - See Tom Cruise's 30-Year Journey As Ethan Hunt Denzel Washington's Career In Pictures: From 'Carbon Copy' To 'The Equalizer 3'
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sebastián Lelio, Lukas Dhont, Jasmila Zbanić to Pitch New Projects to Investors at Cannes Market
An award-winning lineup of international auteurs, including Oscar-winner Sebastián Lelio (A Fantastic Woman) and Oscar nominees Lukas Dhont (Close) and Jasmila Zbanić (Quo Vadis, Aida?), will take part in the third Investors Circle at the Cannes film market next month, pitching their next projects to a small group of VIP investors. The Investors Circle lineup, announced today, also includes art house favorites Kornél Mundruczó (Pieces of a Woman), Marie Kreutzer (Corsage), Jessica Hausner (Little Joe), Hlynur Pálmason (Godland), Marcela Said (Los Perros), Giacomo Abbruzzese (Disco Boy) and Eliza Hittman (Never Rarely Sometimes Always). More from The Hollywood Reporter How London Became the New Hollywood Jirí Bartoska, Czech Actor and Longtime Karlovy Vary Film Festival President, Dies at 78 The Hollywood Reporter's Access Canada Summit to Launch During Toronto Film Festival The 10 filmmakers will present their upcoming projects to a small group of private investors at the Cannes market, the Marché du Film, on Sunday, May 18. The Investors Circle will feature 10 curated, never-before-seen feature film projects, presented by their directors and filmmakers in a private, invitation-only event for a select group of VIP investors. The projects, spanning various cinematic styles and languages, range in budget from 3 million euro to over 9 million euro ($3 million to $10 million). 'This year's projects reflect bold, original storytelling from some of today's most compelling auteur filmmakers,' said Aleksandra Zakharchenko, head of the Investors Circle. 'These are films with real cultural relevance and global potential — and they need thoughtful, long-term support. With the Investors Circle, we aim to champion these singular voices and help them move from vision to screen.' After just two editions, the Investors Circle is already bearing fruit, with several projects securing funding. Chie Hayakawa's Renoir, one of last year's Investors Circle pitches, was picked to screen in competition at this year's Cannes festival. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
Forbes
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Runway AI's Gen-4: How Can AI Montage Go Beyond Absurdity
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 09: (L-R) Jane Rosenthal and Cristobal Valenzuela speak onstage during the ... More 2024 AI Film Festival New York Panel at Metrograph on May 09, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by) The recent release of Runway AI's Gen-4 has ignited both excitement and existential questions about the future of cinema and media in general. With the company now valued at 3 billion following a $308 million funding round led by the private equity firm General Atlantic and backed by industry heavyweights like Nvidia and SoftBank, AI's march into Hollywood appears unstoppable. The film industry, alongside all creative sectors, from digital marketing to social media, stands at a technological crossroad. As artificial intelligence begins to reshape every aspect of visual storytelling and change the landscape of entertainment and digital commerce, we must assess its potentials and pitfalls. Major production companies are rapidly adopting AI video tools. Fabula, the acclaimed studio behind Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman and biopic Spencer, just announced a partnership with Runway AI to integrate AI across its production pipeline. Lionsgate signed a deal with Runway last fall to explore AI-powered filmmaking. Experimental directors like Harmony Korine have already debuted AI-assisted film at Venice last year. The broad applications of AI videos are already impressive, from pre-visualizing scenes for Amazon's House of David to creating advertisement for Puma. Yet beneath these flashy demonstrations lies a more fundamental question: can AI-generated content evolve beyond technical spectacle to deliver truly meaningful stories? Runway's Gen-4 represents significant progress in several areas: character consistency, scene coherence, and visual fidelity. An example Runway AI releases show two main characters stay consistent across different shots ranging from walking, running, petting a cow, lighting up a match, and maintain fidelity of the look of a steppe in gloomy weather. Yet these technical improvements don't address the core challenge: AI excels at generating individual moments but struggles with coherent and sustained storytelling. While it can create a stunning shot of giraffes and lions roam in the New York City, can it make audiences care about a city turned into a zoo? AI videos risk repeating the early mistakes of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), prioritizing visual gimmicks over in-depth messages. As barriers to creative production and film making disappear, we may face a flood of visually polished but emotionally hollow contents, derivative works optimized for algorithmic efficiency, or compelling synthetic media that lacks human touch. While AI videos can wow first-time viewers, can they make audiences want to watch them more? Can AI films ever produce classic pieces that draw generations of movie-goers? Current multi modal AI technologies center on innovations in film, media, and video games. A recent project spearheaded by researchers from Nvidia, Stanford and UCSD uses Test-Time-Training layers in machine learning models to generate 60-seconds animations of Tom and Jerry. To achieve this, the team trained the model on 81 cartoon footages between 1940 and 1948, which add up to about 7 hours. The model generates and connects multiple 3-second segments, each guided by storyboard annotating plots, settings, and camera movements. The technique highlights significant potential to scale video productions and animation series creations. A poster for Joseph Barbera and William Hanna's 1950 cartoon 'The Framed Cat'. (Photo by Movie ... More Poster) But the technology also reveal critical flaws that persist among AI video generators such as Sora, Kling, Runway, Pika, etc. One limitation is continuity error. For example, rooms, landscapes, and lighting shift unnaturally between 3-second segments. Physics defiance is another problem. For instance, in the earlier mentioned Tom and Jerry AI videos, Jerry's cheese float or morph into different sizes and textures at segment boundaries. Another issue is narrative disjointedness. As the segmentation of content is necessary for algorithms to effectively learn the contents, understand the prompt, and accurately generate videos, AI models struggle to show logical scene progression. These traces of what I call AI montage also appear in Runway AI's videos, the elephants walking across the Time Square is abruptly followed by a scene of a cheetah running across a bridge. One is set in cloudy weather while the next in a sunny day. The changes do not push the storyline forward nor do they convey any logic. The absurd, the fragmented, and the incongruous, are what AI video generators currently good at producing. For now, AI struggles to replicate the coherence of even a 5-minute cartoon, let alone a feature film. AI-generated videos show strength as a medium for critiquing both itself and the societies that produce it. Director Jia Zhangke's recent AI film made using Kling AI imagines a future run by robotic caretakers. The film provokes audiences to reflect on the crisis of aging populations, societal neglect, and the erosion of empathy in an era of breakneck competition, capitalism, and exploding automated technologies. Jia's film show robot companions taking the elderly for a walk or helping them harvest crops, in lieu of real sons and daughters. Such a theme is grounded in societal challenges today. The film critiques the substitution of human connection with automated machines and transactional relationships, and raises the concern over relentless stress and long hours in workplaces. Just as Charlie Chaplin used industrialization-era tools to critique industrialization in Modern Times, today's filmmakers can use AI to critique the conditions of its own existence. Consider how synthetic news anchors might expose media manipulation, or endlessly combinable streaming content could comment on algorithmic culture. Just like science fictions that critique environmental disasters, human greed, and inequality, the most compelling AI films will likely be those that embrace their own artificiality to engage with real social problems. Rather than fearing obsolescence, filmmakers might focus more intensely on what machines cannot replicate: the nuance of human emotions, complexities of human nature, the weight of lived experience, and the cultural resonance of authentic storytelling. History suggests that film and media have always adapted to technological upheaval, from silent to sound, black-and-white to color, celluloid to digital, each time emerging with new creative possibilities. The question is no longer whether AI will change filmmaking, but how filmmakers will harness it to tell stories that matter.
