Latest news with #BrLab
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
BrLab Unveils New Dates, Co-Pro Forum and Regional Spread Ahead of 15th Anniversary Edition (EXCLUSIVE)
As BrLab prepares to mark its 15th anniversary in 2026, one of Latin America's most influential development labs for film projects is announcing a bold set of changes designed to expand its international reach, enhance its programming and deepen its support for emerging filmmakers. Rafael Sampaio, BrLab's founder and director, met up with Variety in Cannes to discuss four key updates that reflect the platform's evolving role as both a creative hub and a strategic launchpad for cinema from Brazil, Latin America and the wider Ibero-American region. More from Variety Guillermo Galoe Unpacks His Insider's Vision of a Family Riven by Its Shanty Town's Demolition in Critics' Week's 'Sleepless City' New York Erotic Tale 'Drunken Noodles' Sells to Taiwan, France and Germany for M-Appeal (EXCLUSIVE) Rebel Wilson Escalates Battle With 'The Deb' Producers in 'Bizarre Outburst of Jealousy' After Cannes Yacht Party Founded in 2011, BrLab has grown into a vital force in the development of independent cinema, offering workshops, labs and mentorships for projects from over 15 countries. Supported by institutions such as Programa Ibermedia, Projeto Paradiso and Spcine, and now also by Petrobras as a multi-year sponsor, the lab receives more than 400 submissions annually, carefully curated by a professional selection committee. The results speak for themselves. As of 2025, 62 feature films that participated in BrLab's various sections have been produced and released, with 17 more currently in post-production and another 10 funded for production through 2026. By next year, the number of completed projects linked to BrLab is expected to reach nearly 90. Many of these films have gone on to premiere at prestigious international festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, San Sebastián and Locarno. Among recent standouts are 'The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,' which is part of the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes 2025; 'Levante' by Lila Halla (Brazil), which screened in the 2023's Critics' Week; 'Légua' by Filipa Reis and João Guerra (Portugal), presented at Directors' Fortnight the same year; 'Los Tiburones' by Lucía Garibaldi (Uruguay), which premiered at Sundance; 'Las Heiresses' by Marcelo Martinessi (Paraguay), which bowed at the Berlinale; and 'Los Reyes del Mundo' by Laura Mora (Colombia), winner of the Concha de Oro at San Sebastián 2022. 'The Wolf Behind the Door' by Fernando Coimbra, featured in BrLab's very first edition in 2011, was later selected for Toronto and San Sebastián. Now, as it looks ahead to the future, BrLab is implementing four major changes that promise to strengthen its impact even further. New Dates: Moving to April Starting in 2026, BrLab will shift from its traditional October slot to a new window in the first half of the year. The 15th edition is scheduled for April 7–13, 2026. The move avoids competition with the saturated fall festival calendar and provides participating projects with more time to polish their work before premiering later in the year. According to Sampaio, the timing also enhances the value of BrLab's Rough Cut Lab, allowing it to act as a more effective mid-year intervention. 'This change creates a more useful rhythm for project development,' he said. 'We want our selected teams to take full advantage of the international circuit, and April positions them well to do that.' BrLab CoPro: A New Co-Production Forum BrLab is also launching BrLab CoPro, a curated boutique co-production forum aimed at catalyzing new international partnerships. The platform will bring together producers and projects interested in forging co-productions with Brazil and other Latin American territories, in response to a regional landscape where cross-border collaboration is increasingly essential for financing and distribution. This new space marks a significant deepening of BrLab's role as a connector, not just of talent, but also of institutions and industries that can bring films to life. Audience Design Workshop Goes Regional Since 2017, BrLab's Audience Design Workshop has provided specialized training to Brazilian filmmakers on how to identify, understand and reach their target audiences. In 2025, the workshop will expand to include participants from across Latin America, Portugal and Spain, opening a new regional dialogue around the challenges of distribution and audience engagement. 'The idea is to strengthen regional circulation and create sustainable connections,' said Sampaio, who himself first encountered audience design methodology through TorinoFilmLab. 'Too often, films from one Latin American country don't even reach audiences in the next one. We hope to help change that.' Reinforcing Institutional Support and Regional Collaboration BrLab's evolution has been made possible through robust institutional backing. Longstanding supporters such as Programa Ibermedia, Projeto Paradiso and Spcine have been joined by Petrobras, which is now backing the lab through a multi-year sponsorship. This growing coalition reflects BrLab's increasing importance as a development engine not only for Brazilian cinema but for a broader Ibero-American creative ecosystem. With nearly 90 completed films supported by 2026 and a growing list of international accolades, BrLab stands as both a model and a catalyst for regional cinema. As it prepares its 15th edition, the lab is reaffirming its core mission: to empower emerging voices, facilitate meaningful collaboration and help shape the future of global cinema, one project at a time. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Wes Anderson Mocks Trump's Movie Tariffs at Cannes: ‘Can You Hold Up the Movie in Customs? It Doesn't Ship That Way'
Wes Anderson skewered Donald Trump's proposed tariff on movies shot abroad at a Cannes press conference for his new film 'The Phoenician Scheme,' questioning how it will work. 'Can you hold up the movie in customs? It doesn't ship that way,' the director said, evoking a chorus of laughter. More from Variety Wes Anderson Powers Satyajit Ray's 'Aranyer Din Ratri' Rescue for Cannes Classics BrLab Unveils New Dates, Co-Pro Forum and Regional Spread Ahead of 15th Anniversary Edition (EXCLUSIVE) Dakota Johnson Says Studio Bosses Don't Take Risks and 'It's a Constant Fight,' Recalls Being Shocked at Her Movie Premieres: 'That Is Not What I Thought We Were Making' 'The Phoenician Scheme,' which features a sprawling cast of Anderson regulars, shot in partly Germany. When asked about the tariffs, Anderson initially replied: 'I thought you said he was giving us a plug or something. Did Trump see it?' But he then went on to mock the idea: 'The tariff is interesting because I've never heard of a 100% tariff before. I'm not an expert in that area of economics, but I feel that means he's saying he's going to take all the money. And then what do we what do we get? So it's complicated to me. Can you hold up the movie in customs? It doesn't ship that way.' The film is a droll three-hander, starring Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera and breakout Mia Threapleton, who is the daughter of Kate Winslet. Del Toro plays business magnate Zsa-zsa Korda, one of the richest men in Europe and subject of repeated assassination attempts, while Threapleton portrays his estranged daughter, a smoking and alcohol-swilling nun named Sister Liesel. Like Threapleton, Cera is a newcomer to the Anderson troop, playing a duplicitous tutor named Bjorn Lund. Speaking about the inception of the idea for the film, Anderson said he and co-writer Roman Coppola were at first intending to pen something 'very dark' about a business magnate who is 'not really concerned with how the big decisions he has empowered himself to make for the world are affecting populations of workforces and landscapes.' Anderson added that there was 'the darkness of a certain kind of capitalist that we were building this on, but it took us somewhere else. We need a psychiatrist's couch to really answer it properly, and even then I don't know. But it's in the DNA, somehow.' He then revealed his next film, which he said he's co-writing with Coppola and Richard Ayoade, who plays a heavily armed Marxist revolutionary in 'The Phoenician Scheme.' 'The next film is also pretty dark,' he said. 'Actually, can I announce our project? Roman and Richard and I are working on a script together for a movie, and I think it does have a darkness. I'm not going to say anything about it, but I mean I'm at a press conference. I have to announce something.' He also teased future collaborations with both Cera and Bill Murray, the latter who wasn't part of the panel but was seated in the front row. Anderson shook hands with each of them to confirm their involvement. 'Let's shake on it,' Anderson said to Cera. 'Sometimes people say yes and they don't really mean it later … I'm just saying, let's get this on the record.' Added Benedict Cumberbatch: 'Watching him discover Michael is like God discovering water. It seems like a really natural, obvious element to have in his arsenal as a filmmaker. It was really a perfect partnership.' Later on, when a journalist asked about sequels to any of his films, Anderson said to Murray: 'You know, we'll do 'The Life Aquatic 2.' Shall we?' Rounding out the 'Phoenician Scheme' cast is Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Riz Ahmed, Scarlett Johansson, Mathieu Amalric, Rupert Friend and Hope Davis, all of whom have starred in at least one previous Anderson feature. 'The Phoenician Scheme' will have a limited theatrical release from Focus Features starting May 30. The film will expand wider June 6. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Slauson Rec' Review: A Documentary About Shia LaBeouf's Acting Class — and His Anger Issues — Is More Appalling Than Fascinating
'Slauson Rec,' a documentary starring Shia LaBeouf and his mental trauma, is not a good movie. But it's a timely artifact of one of the things movies are now up against — a pathological and vampiristic celebrity culture that sucks all the air out of the room. In 2018, LaBeouf posted a video on Twitter announcing the formation of a free weekly theater workshop that would meet every Saturday at the Slauson Recreation Center in South Central Los Angeles. Hundreds of people showed up for it, lured by the magnet of LaBeouf's name. One of them was Leo Lewis O'Neil, a young man who wasn't interested in being an actor but who volunteered to record the workshop on camera. Over the next three years, he shot hundreds of hours of footage of LaBeouf and his followers doing their experimental theater thing, writing and rehearsing several 'plays' they presented in a nightclub and, ultimately, in a dusty parking lot. The movie O'Neil has put together out of this footage, which premiered last night at Cannes, is by any real-world standard a slovenly and undisciplined piece of work. 'Slauson Rec' is two-and-a-half hours long, and it's little more than an endless dispiriting diary-like ramble. Yet it also functions as a vérité exploitation film, since the only thing in it that's actually interesting is watching Shia LaBeouf parade himself as a kind of acting guru and mentor, only to descend into an increasingly furious and abusive and unhinged place that leaves us with the profound question, 'What in the fuck's name is going on here?' More from Variety Wes Anderson Mocks Trump's Movie Tariffs at Cannes: 'Can You Hold Up the Movie in Customs? It Doesn't Ship That Way' Wes Anderson Powers Satyajit Ray's 'Aranyer Din Ratri' Rescue for Cannes Classics BrLab Unveils New Dates, Co-Pro Forum and Regional Spread Ahead of 15th Anniversary Edition (EXCLUSIVE) Let's be clear: Shia LaBeouf is not just someone in deep need of anger-management therapy. He's an extraordinarily gifted actor (I was reminded of this just a couple of weeks ago, when I reviewed his forceful performance in the David Mamet film 'Henry Johnson'), and he's also the definition of a charismatic person. In 'Slauson Rec,' whether he's being supportive or hellacious, you can't take your eyes off him. He's got a stare of burning intensity and a hyper-articulate blunt showmanship that grows out of that quality. (He also has a penchant for sporting facial hair that looks like it came out of a costume shop.) In the documentary, he is always on, always making everything about him, with the underlying conviction that he's the most arresting person in the room. Early on, we give him the benefit of the doubt, since he seems to be employing his charisma in a generous way (volunteering his time to inspire a bunch of people in South Central). His volatile acting-coach showmanship feels like it's part of a tradition, stretching all the way back to Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler and incorporating the exhibitionistic ethos of the let-it-all-hang-out, acting-as-self-actualization thing that defined the experimental theater movements of the late '60s and '70s. The Slauson Rec theater experiment, as LaBeouf explains it, is an attempt to gather people together and give them a club, a community, an artistic laboratory, a family. And in the eagerness of the participants to go along with whatever LaBeouf says, we feel the desperate hunger they have to belong. LaBeouf isn't just showing them how to act. He's giving them hope. From the start, though, you may wonder what, exactly, he's out to accomplish creatively. He talks a good game, like a theatrical cult leader, but he has the participants doing 'devised theater,' which after a while seems to come down to a kind of ritual group body-tapping and choreographed aerobics. It looks like they're doing an elaborate series of warm-up exercises, which is fine in the early weeks, when they're just getting to know each other. But once they've been at this for months, it starts to become clear that LaBeouf doesn't really have a plan. He's just throwing stuff against the wall, using his heady psychodramatic acting-coach jargon and tough-love 'I'm doing this for you!' personality to turn anything and everything into an 'encounter session.' And given that these are not professional actors, or even (in most cases) people who aspire to be, LaBeouf's words to them, full of deadly serious jabber about empathy and ego, are pumped up with an intensity that feels overdone and inappropriate. And that's before he starts blowing his fuse. Once the pandemic hits, the Slauson Recreation Center tosses the group out (at this point, they've melted down to about 50 people), and they wind up rehearsing with masks under the hot L.A. sun in an anonymous dusty parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence, with two tables under a red tent. The place becomes their sunlit prison (and ours). They've already put on one 'play,' which looks, from what we see of it, like a glorified hip-hop open-mic night. Now they're writing and rehearsing a follow-up, some sort of multimedia action-theater piece entitled '5711 Avalon,' though the film never gives us a halfway coherent idea of what it is. Yet the more sketchy and aimless the Slauson Rec troupe becomes, the more LaBeouf seizes onto the notion that the members are not living up to what they're supposed to be doing. They're disappointing him (but only because he cares so much). He targets one member, a 22-year-old kid named Zeke, who seems like the sweetest guy, and LaBeouf starts to torment him like a drill sergeant who has picked out his patsy. 'Don't play that fuckin' James Dean shit with me, dude,' he says. He also says things like, 'I love you if you make my life better. If you make my life worse, I don't love you. That's how I'm built' and 'This is really the last of the refinements! You really need to pay attention to this shit' and 'I said giggle! What fuckin' version of what the fuck I said is what the fuck you did?' LaBeouf declares in the movie that he's an alcoholic, and he talks, at one point, about how he's always beating himself up in his own brain. But that's not exactly reassuring. He's got his shirt off a lot, baring the wall of chest tattoos he got to make the movie 'The Tax Collector,' and we start to notice that he's shouting all the time, as if the fate of the world were hanging on how effectively he can get this ragtag bunch of people to act. Yet we can't even tell the difference between if they're doing it well or doing it badly. And that's part of what's so destabilizing about LaBeouf's rants, his tantrums, his meltdowns. It's not just that he's being abusive toward these people (at several points physically). It's that the whole damn spectacle of it starts to feel pointless. The 'point,' of course, is that we're getting to watch a well-known star in a state of breakdown. And the tabloid perversity of 'Slauson Rec' is that even when he's acting out, being a total dick to these hapless people who have put their trust in him, the movie is busy turning his self-destruction into theater. Just when we think his abuse of poor Zeke can't get any worse, LaBeouf turns his attention to Sarah, a troupe member whose mother is sick. He starts to berate her, and after her mother has died he informs her that he wants her to stop playing the role in their play she's been playing, because he has decided that she's 'not right for the part.' In this meaningless shambolic parking-lot-theater mess? That he would say that is worse than harsh — to our eyes, it's sadistic. And it just makes us think: Why are we even watching this? I would wager that the commercial prospects for 'Slauson Rec' will fall somewhere between dim and zero. The filmmaking, which just drags on (with helpful titles like 'Day 56,' followed by 'Day 57'), saps the energy right out of you. Yet the movie has the clueless arrogance to present itself as a redemption narrative — not for the members of the Slauson Rec troupe, but for Shia LaBeouf. After he is hit with a legal accusation of domestic abuse, he simply abandons the troupe. He doesn't show up one day, and that's it, it's over. But the film ends on an interview with LaBeouf, conducted more recently, where he sits in a chair in the tasteful home he shares with Mia Goth and their child, and he goes back over the Slauson Rec experiment and admits that he'd gone off the deep end. He admits that his behavior was untenable, and that he had a 'God complex.' He now feels bad about all of it. LaBeouf delivers this confession with an eloquent conviction that's a little uncanny. But listening to it, you realize that one thing hasn't changed, and that it may be the most unnerving thing about him: He's still acting. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
