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22-05-2025
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Tarik Saleh on His Cannes Thriller ‘Eagles of the Republic' Forming a ‘Cairo Trilogy:' ‘It's About Men Trying to Defeat a City that Cannot Be Defeated' (EXCLUSIVE)
For a filmmaker making gripping thrillers dealing with religion and oppressive politics, Tarik Saleh is surprisingly funny and joyful. The filmmaker, who became Sweden's most prominent street artists before turning into one of the country's biggest star filmmaker, returns to the Cannes Film Festival with 'Eagles of the Republic,' three years after winning best screenplay with 'Boy From Heaven.' Saleh hit the ground running with his feature debut, 'The Nile Hilton Incident' which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2017. His sophomore feature, 'Boy From Heaven,' was an arthouse hit that traveled around the world and was chosen by Sweden as its Oscar entry. With 'Eagles of the Republic,' he's delivering his most ambitious film to date, reuniting with Fares Fares who stars as an Egyptian megastar coerced by the Egyptian government into starring in a propagandist film as President Al-Sissi. As he gets closer to the inner circle of power, he finds himself embroiled in dangerous conspiracies. Saleh, who produced the film through his own vehicle, Paraton, alongside Swedish banner Unlimited Stories and France's Memento, said he was compelled to make yet another film set in Cairo because he grew up in Sweden as 'a child of immigrants,' and through his work, he's 'been constantly trying to reclaim (his) own version of what Egypt is to me.' More from Variety 'The History of Sound' Review: Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor Star in a Gay Period Romance That's Like 'Brokeback Mountain' on Sedatives Neon Acquires North American Rights to Kleber Mendonça Filho's 'The Secret Agent' 'Homebound' Review: A Moving Friendship Drama Set Against a Politically Fractured India Besides having Cairo as a backdrop, Saleh said the common thread between 'The Nile Hilton Incident,' 'Boy From Heaven' and 'Eagles of the Republic' is that they're about 'men trying to defeat a city that cannot be defeated.' While the movie is a fiction, he admitted that he was inspired by an Egyptian TV series that was made about Al- Sissi played by a handsome actor who looked nothing like him. Ultimately, Saleh says he doesn't want to be labeled as a political filmmaker. 'I'm not an activist but I'm really fascinated by people in power,' he said. Since he knows 'people that work within the presidency in Egypt,' he was able to give the script enough texture to make the thriller gritty enough and filled with dark humor that ring true. In an interview with Variety at Cannes, Saleh talked about the making of 'Eagles of the Republic' and his aspirations, as well as what he'll do next, this time in France. How much of 'Eagles of the Republic' is based on reality and the way the Egyptian government works? Of course, there is a real story that inspired this film. In Egypt, the army has 30% of the country's economy and when (Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, Egypt's President) got elected, he said 'Let's get into media and film, too.' So the government basically took over the whole film industry and the television. They bought all the private television stations. And since they are owned by the army, they decided to do a television series about the President's rise to power. What they did was to cast this tall, handsome actor called Yaser Galal to play al-Sissi who's a very short guy and bold. It was absurd. I was watching this TV series, and there was zero irony, and of course, my first thought was, 'What if I got the call and was told I had direct this. What if my friend Fares had to play it? What would we do?' We couldn't say no because then we were banned. I thought that was a funny premise. How important is it for you to make films that are relevant, politically speaking? I think a lot of times art can predict what's going to happen. I was very nervous about 'A Boy From Heaven' that I would predict something for just selfish reasons, because I thought that if I was predicting something like this happens, then my film would become something all of a sudden. I had that issue for the premiere of 'Boy From Heaven' when the so-called 'Quran burning crisis' happened in Sweden. All of a sudden, it was in the news and I had a film out. It's exactly like what happened with 'Conclave' this year. So you don't want your movies to be political? What is politics? Politics is the relationship between power and people. So when you say 'a political film,' it might mean that it has an agenda, that it wants to convince you of a political view or of a way of looking at the world. My films are about human beings that are under the pressure of power systems. I'm very interested in power dynamics, but more like a spectator. I'm not an activist but I'm really fascinated by people in power. I actually know people that work within the presidency in Egypt. That's where I get a lot of my information. Oh, that's why 'Eagles of the Republic' feels very well documented! Some things in the movie are almost quoted from what people are saying and how they are. I'm fascinated with the technicality of how power operates. If you take 'Boy From Heaven,' the character I identify most with is Ibrahim, the state security officer, it's not the student. And in 'Eagles of the Republic,' I identify with Dr. Mansour. Because he's the real director of that film that is being made in 'Eagles of the Republic.' In many ways, it's also a film about the film industry in Egypt and the work of actors, in this case the local superstar George El-Nabawi. Yes, and usually Fares always asks me very difficult questions before we shoot, but this time, it's me who had a question. I asked him, 'Will we ever care about an actor and this one in particular?' Because I was thinking of Amber Heard during her trial, when she cried and everyone was ridiculing her. People said, 'Oh, it's not real. She's acting, right?' Because we think that actors are not displaying their real emotion. But Fares reassured me. He said to me, 'No, Tarik, we will care about him. I promise you we will care about him.' Fares pulled it off. He really makes George an endearing character. Fares made George human. I wrote him in a cynical way. That scene about Viagra at the pharmacy is very funny. Listen, that story happened to me. But without me asking for it. It's almost like a trilogy of movies set in Egypt. What keeps you luring you back to Egypt to tell stories? There are two reasons. The first reason was when you grow up as a child of immigrants, you are told stories by your parents about the home country that are almost fairytales — which is a paradox, because you wonder, 'Why are we here then if everything was great?' My father told me about Egypt, and I had these very vivid images of it. Then when I was 10 years old, for the first time, Anouar el-Sadate had just died, we could go back to Egypt. It was a shock. Almost the trauma of meeting the reality from all these fairytales that my father had built up around what Egypt was. And since then, I went to study art in Alexandria, and I started a magazine in Cairo. I've been constantly trying to reclaim my own version of what Egypt is to me. So I have very personal relationship to this place. Why is Cairo such an interesting backdrop for your films? In Arabic, Cairo means the conqueror. It's a very noir place. Every major city has a personality. Cairo is a place where people have come from all over Egypt and all over the Arab world to fulfill a dream but the problem is that you will not make it. It will bring you down to your knees. Cairo is a city which will ridicule you. It will cheat on you. It will sell you papyrus that is not real, and you will get stomach ache, but it will blow your mind and it will conquer you. The Cairo trilogy is really about men trying to defeat a city that cannot be defeated. Why did you want to shoot 'Eagles of the Republic' in 65 mm? That was the scale I wanted. It feels like cinema in that way. Ever since I saw 'Parasite,' I was dreaming of shooting on 65 mm in the back of my head. Then I saw 'Joker,' and it was the same feeling. It's wonderful for the way it treats the faces, it creates these beautiful textures. I was very fortunate to have had really great producers on this film. They gave me everything I asked for. I was a bit nervous before Cannes. I thought, I better get into main competition with this film because I have no one to blame. You worked with the Oscar-winning French music composer Alexandre Desplat on this film. How was that? It was a love affair. Love at first sight. Did you know he has Greek ancestry? He grew up watching Egyptian films, so right away he knew all the references, everything. So the first time he saw the film, he called me and he said, 'It's a film about a man selling his soul piece by piece.' I said, 'Oh, please write that music.' When we went to Paris to record the music, I started writing that night my new script. How hopeful are you that 'Eagles of the Republic' will find a good U.S. distributor who will campaign for it? I'm hopeful. I think that America is going through a difficult time. It's strange for me because I worked in America a lot, as you know. I think that there is a nervousness about, especially films dealing with Middle East and Arabic and so on. But I think that the difference with this film is that it doesn't deal with religion in the same way as the last one, ' A Boy From Heaven,' which really made people nervous. I could tell that people didn't know how to speak about it. I remember doing interviews with American journalists who were almost yelling at me, ''What is true?' And I was like, 'It's a fictional film!' Your last two films found an audience in theaters, and this one is even more accessible. Do you care how many people go see it in cinemas? For me, the relationship with the audience is key. A lot of directors say, 'I don't care. I just make these films for me…' But that's because they've never had an audience. The expectation of the audience is something you play with. I had a shock with 'Boy From Heaven' because Alexandre Mallet-Guy (the co-producer and French distributor) had bought it out of Berlin, he flew me to Paris and he said to me, 'Tarik, you made a really good film. If this doesn't reach 300,000 admissions in France I have not done my job.' That stunned me to see a distributor who takes responsibility. In the end, 'Boy From Heaven' passed 500,000 tickets. The cinema culture in France is almost sanctuary. I think that France has a lot to teach both America and the rest of Europe about how to engage audience and how to make the audience feel like it's an event, because I believe that cinema can actually save us. People are very pessimistic about the future of cinema but I believe it's very, very bright. Because our phones and these social media platforms, we have no way of escaping ourselves, there is this constant narcissistic feedback, and our lives are very shattered. What cinema offers us is this act of empathy where we, for two hours, live someone else's life and forget our own life for two hours. You're one of the leading filmmakers in Sweden. Do you think one day you'll make a movie there? I'm very close friends with Ali Abbasi and we were joking about the fact that he was invited to Egypt with 'Holy Spider,' and I was invited to Iran with 'Boy From Heaven.' But it happened back in the days, when Billy Wilder and and Elia Kazan or even someone like Milos Forman left Europe to go to America to find a platform to do films and to be free. I think that's going to happen now. We can only make those in Europe. We are European filmmakers in that sense that, as Billy Wilder was American filmmaker and he was talking about the horrors of what happened in Europe. More and more American filmmakers are actually now coming to Europe to make films. Yes, we've already seen the migration start to come here from the U.S.. In Europe, too, we have to start to protect our freedom, our artistic freedom of expression. We're also threatened by autocrats and fascists and people that wants to limit this. And now I sound like a political activist and a political filmmaker. You mentioned earlier you started writing your next film in France? There is a big chance I do something in France. A love story, then? There is always a love story somewhere. But I can say that it's still going to be a political thriller because I think that France has a lot of political thriller elements to talk about. To start with, it's a nuclear power. Best of Variety All the Godzilla Movies Ranked Final Oscar Predictions: International Feature – United Kingdom to Win Its First Statuette With 'The Zone of Interest' 'Game of Thrones' Filming Locations in Northern Ireland to Open as Tourist Attractions
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
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Kevin Spacey Tears Up, Quotes ‘Friend' Elton John in Fiery Speech at Cannes: ‘I'm Still Standing'
Kevin Spacey delivered a lengthy and fiery speech in Cannes on Tuesday evening, marking his first visit to the global film gathering in almost a decade and since being found not guilty on sexual assault charges. More from Variety 'Eagles of the Republic' Review: An Egyptian Movie Star Is Forced to Make a Propaganda Film in Tarik Saleh's Catchy but Muddled Age of Autocracy Thriller 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' Review: A Post-War Study of the Nazis' 'Angel of Death' Lacks Dimension 'Fuori' Review: Jailtime Revives a Middle-Aged Writer's Mojo in Mario Martone's Uninvolving Literary Biopic Spacey was speaking at a gala held by the Better World Fund, where he was presented with an 'engagement award,' given to him by the organization's president Manuel Collas de la Roche who said the actor embodied the 'powerful interaction between art and influence.' On stage after accepting the honor, Spacey spoke for almost seven minutes, during which he likened his own ousting from the film industry to the blacklisting of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, and got emotional as he praised his 'best friend' and manager Evan Lowenstein. Through Lowenstein, he said he had 'come out the other side of these last few challenging years not angry, not bitter, not resentful, but more present, more loving, more understanding and more forgiving than I ever have been in my life.' Spacey hailed the Better World Fund for taking 'risks' by inviting him. 'Who would have ever thought that honoring someone who has been exonerated in every single courtroom he's ever walked into would be thought of as a brave idea,' he said. He also compared the decision by the Better World Fund to invite him to Kirk Douglas' support for blacklisted writer Trumbo. 'Kirk Douglas took the risk and would later say: It's easy for us actors to play the hero on screen, we get to fight the bad guys and stand up for justice, but in real life, the choices are not always so clear. There are times when one has to stand up for principle. I have learned a lot from history. It very often repeats itself. The blacklist was a terrible time in our industry, but we must learn from it so that it never happens again.' Spacey added: 'And today we find ourselves once again at the intersection of uncertainty and fear in the film business and beyond.' He closed his speech by citing Elton John. 'As my friend Elton John once said, and the reason that this means so much to me, is because I'm still standing, I'm still standing.' The event also featured an auction with items including a designer cigar humidifier, a guitar signed by Kevin Costner and another guitar signed by Sting (the latter went for $28,000). At one point, Spacey was ushered on stage to urge the audience to pay attention during the auction. Spacey's surprise visit to Cannes — which was reported by Variety over the weekend — marks the first time the two-time Oscar winner has attended the festival since 2016, when he served as emcee for the amfAR gala. Spacey's career imploded the following year following multiple allegations of sexual impropriety. Since 2017, more than 30 men have accused Spacey of sexual assault or inappropriate behavior, leading to his exit from the Netflix series 'House of Cards.' Spacey was found not liable in a civil lawsuit in New York in 2022 and was acquitted in a criminal case in London the following year in one of the U.K.'s most high-profile #MeToo trials. The actor's visit to Cannes has been orchestrated by the producers of conspiracy thriller 'The Awakening,' in which Spacey stars. The British indie — about the uncovering of a sinister global cabal that controls the world (and is run by Spacey) — was the first movie that actor shot after being cleared of charges in the U.K. in 2023. It is being shopped by producers at this year's fest. 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
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21-05-2025
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‘Eagles of the Republic' Review: An Egyptian Movie Star Is Forced to Make a Propaganda Film in Tarik Saleh's Catchy but Muddled Age of Autocracy Thriller
'Eagles of the Republic' is a Cairo-set political thriller one can slot into the following category: movies about life under autocracy that feel different to watch — at least to Americans — than they would have six months ago. That's because they hit so much closer to home now. It might sound off-the-wall to describe 'Eagles of the Republic' as an 'entertaining' saga of repression, but the central character is a fictional Egyptian movie star, and for its first hour or so the film is vivid and funny as it invites us to revel in the perks and gossipy vanity of his charmed but flawed existence. George Fahmy (Fares Fares) is a veteran actor, known as the 'Pharoah of the Screen,' who carries himself like the legend he is. He's tall, with glittering dark eyes and a hawkish profile; he looks like Liam Neeson, with a hint of Harry Dean Stanton's hangdog melancholy. He's the number-one box-office star in Egypt, who acts in everything from prestige dramas to films with titles like 'The First Egyptian in Space.' He'll throw his weight around arguing with the country's Muslim censor board (who never met a movie they couldn't try to neuter), and his private life is a litany of scandalous privilege. He occupies a lavish apartment and has a mistress, Donya (Lyne Khoudri), who's half his age and looks like a fashion model. (She's an aspiring actor.) More from Variety 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' Review: A Post-War Study of the Nazis' 'Angel of Death' Lacks Dimension 'Fuori' Review: Jailtime Revives a Middle-Aged Writer's Mojo in Mario Martone's Uninvolving Literary Biopic Kevin Spacey Tears Up, Quotes 'Friend' Elton John in Fiery Speech at Cannes: 'I'm Still Standing' George takes what he wants, but there's a saddened undertow to him that's not hard to see. Hidden beneath baseball cap and sunglasses, he takes clandestine trips to the pharmacy to purchase Viagra. He is separated from his wife (Donia Massoud) and has a loving but increasingly awkward relationship with his son, Ramy (Suhaib Nashwan), who attends the American University in Cairo. (When the two have drinks and Ramy brings along the girl he's dating, he has to make sure his father doesn't hit on her.) Fares Fares is a forceful actor who dramatizes George's movie-star vanity from the inside out. And then, as he's gliding through life on his cloud of entitlement, he gets a call asking him to star in a movie commissioned by the Egyptian government. It will be a biopic about the country's president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who came to power in 2014 after having staged a military coup. That's when he toppled Mohamed Morsi, who in 2012 had become Egypt's first democratically elected leader. (Morsi's rise was propelled by the protest movements of the Arab Spring.) Sisi, who is still in power, became a textbook autocrat, presiding over a military dictatorship. 'Eagles of the Republic' is a saga of life under that regime. We see innocent people arrested for posting a 'treasonous' thought on Facebook, and characters perpetually refer to the 'they' who are hovering over everything — they meaning the regime. They are not to be messed with. Tarik Saleh, the film's writer-director, is of Swedish-Egyptian descent and is based in Sweden, which is why he was able to make 'Eagles of the Republic' as an open indictment of life under Sisi. This is the final film in Saleh's 'Cairo trilogy,' after the drug thriller 'The Nile Hilton Incident' (2017) and the Muslim clerical-school corruption drama 'Cairo Conspiracy' (2022), and for a while it's an absorbing tale. When George learns that he's being asked to star in a piece of state-actioned propaganda, a movie that will be entitled 'Will of the People,' he balks. He's no fan of Egypt's dictatorship — and besides, he says, how could a star of his look and stature be asked to play Sisi, who is short and bald? But the very fact that he'd raise these objections, in his usual high-maintenance way, indicates that he's a bit naïve. The Sisi regime isn't asking George to star in this movie; it's telling him. As he grudgingly submits to the assignment, getting into his khaki military costume bedecked with medals, we're pretty certain that we're going to see a parable of what happens when movie-star hubris runs into the buzzsaw of authoritarian mercilessness. For a while, that's just what it is. There's a man on the set named Dr. Mansour, played by Amr Waked (who's like a quieter Dennis Farina), and he's the official who's there to make sure everything comes out in a way that will be Sisi-approved. Early on he tells George, 'You're giving a bad performance,' and it's not because he's suddenly turned drama critic. George's enactment of Sisi's rise to power is too exaggerated, too cartoonish — and that's because it's George's way of not giving himself over fully to the role. It's his way of resisting. Then George gets invited to a formal dinner at the home of the minister of defense (Tamim Heikal). There's a group of government higher-ups there, who refer to themselves as 'eagles of the republic' — that is, they're there to survey and protect the nation. But they're really protecting Sisi and his corrupt rule. By this point George has figured out that he needs to play the game, and he knows how to do it. But when he meets the minister's imperious wife, the Sorbonne-educated, Western-oriented Suzanne (Zineb Triki), a danger bell goes off. He is soon having an affair with her, which seems a seriously dumb thing to do. We think we know, in our gut, where the movie is headed. But we don't. George gets asked to give a speech as a further demonstration of his loyalty, and he agrees. The speech happens right in front of Sisi, at a sunlit military parade to commemorate the soldiers who died fighting Israel in the Yom Kippur (a.k.a. Ramadan) War. George gives the speech. And that's when something happens. A spasm of violence. There has been a plot against Sisi, in the form of a half-baked military coup, and George is right in the thick of it. He has been used…somehow. The 'somehow' is what we want to know. But that's where the movie, to our surprise, falls completely apart. Just about everything that happens after the coup attempt is oblique, confusing, garbled, head-scratching. What happened to Saleh's filmmaking? Leading up to this moment, it was meticulous. Did he leave a bunch of scenes on the cutting-room floor? During the film's second half, we can piece together what happens (kind of), but not in a way that makes total sense, or that's at all dramatically satisfying. And yet the movie had been working out such a vital and relevant theme: the stakes of trying to placate a regime of ruthless power. 'Eagles of the Republic' loses the thread of its story, but even more disappointingly it leaves those stakes hanging. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
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21-05-2025
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‘A Pale View of Hills' Review: The Supple Ambiguities of Kazuo Ishiguro's Novel Stiffen and Seize Up in an Unsatisfying Adaptation
Kazuo Ishiguro's 1982 debut novel 'A Pale View of Hills' is an elegant, slippery examination of lives caught between identities both national and existential: Its tale-within-a-tale of two Japanese women living eerily overlapping lives in post-war Nagasaki, as related to the mixed-race daughter of one of them 30 years later, is rife with deliberate, subtly uncanny inconsistencies that speak of immigrant trauma and disassociation. Such lithe literary conceits turn to heavier twists in Kei Ishikawa's ambitious but ungainly adaptation, which mostly follows the letter of Ishiguro's work, but misses its haunting, haunted spirit. Attractively and accessibly presented, this bilingual Japanese-British production aims squarely for crossover arthouse appeal, and with the Ishiguro imprimatur — the Nobel laureate takes an executive producer credit — should secure broader global distribution than any of Ishikawa's previous work. Viewers unfamiliar with the novel, however, may be left perplexed by key development in this dual-timeline period piece, which strands proceedings somewhere between ghost story and elusive, unreliable memory piece; even those more au fait with the material may well query some of Ishikawa's storytelling choices. On more prosaic fronts, too, the film is patchy, with multiple subplots drifting erratically in and out of view, and an uneven quartet of central performances. More from Variety 'Eagles of the Republic' Review: An Egyptian Movie Star Is Forced to Make a Propaganda Film in Tarik Saleh's Catchy but Muddled Age of Autocracy Thriller 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' Review: A Post-War Study of the Nazis' 'Angel of Death' Lacks Dimension 'Fuori' Review: Jailtime Revives a Middle-Aged Writer's Mojo in Mario Martone's Uninvolving Literary Biopic Ishiguro's novel was narrated firsthand by the character who bridges both its timelines. The melancholic Etsuko appears in 1952 Nagasaki as a timid, dutiful housewife (played by 'Our Little Sister' star Suzu Hirose) pregnant with her first child, and 30 years later, in Britain's genteel home counties, as a solitary widow (played by Yoh Yoshida) preparing to move from a house filled with pained memories. In between there has been a second marriage, a second pregnancy, a seismic emigration and more than one bereavement. Our access to Etsuko's inner life is limited, however, as her story is filtered through the perspective of her younger daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko), an aspiring journalist who has grown up entirely in Britain. Visiting her mother in 1982 with the intention of writing a family memoir of sorts, Niki struggles to square her westernized upbringing with a Japanese history and heritage that her mother is loath to talk about. Etsuko's reticence is partly rooted in grief: The elephant in the room between them is the recent suicide of Keiko, Etsuko's Japanese-born elder daughter and Niki's half-sister, who never adjusted, culturally or psychologically, to her new environment after emigrating with her mother and British stepfather. Keiko is never directly seen on screen, though there may be an analog of sorts for her childhood self in the film's 1950s-set section, where the young Etsuko — lonely and brusquely neglected by her workaholic husband Jiro (Kouhei Matsushita) — befriends single mother Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido, recently seen in FX's 'Shōgun' series) and her sullen, withdrawn pre-teen daughter Mariko. Sachiko is a glamorous, modern-minded social outcast, marginalized both for her rejection of Japanese patriarchy and the scars of her and Mariko's radiation exposure following the 1945 Nagasaki bombings. (The stigma of the latter is such that Etsuko maintains a lie to Jiro that she was not in Nagasaki at the time.) But she's planning her escape, having attached herself to an American soldier willing to sweep her and Mariko back to the States. As the two women bond, the meek Etsuko begins to wonder if this life of traditional domestic servitude is really what she was made for. Though we are never party to her early years of motherhood, nor the transition between her first and second husbands, the mirroring between these unseen, imminent life changes and Sachiko's situation grows ever clearer — as the women themselves even begin to resemble each other in costume and comportment. Is Sachiko merely a model for Etsuko to emulate, a phantom projection of what her future could be, or the older Etsuko's distanced reflection of her past? DP Piotr Niemyjski's heightened depiction of midcentury Nagasaki — sometimes a postcard vision of serene pastels, sometimes luridly bathed in saturated sunset hues — suggests some embellishment of reality, but Ishikawa never finds a narratively satisfying way to present ambiguities that can shimmer more nebulously on the page, building to a reveal that feels overwrought and rug-pulling. Back in Blighty, shot in drabber tones outside a flash of red maple foliage in Etsuko's lovingly maintained Japanese-style garden, the drama is more straightforward, but stilted and inert nonetheless. The script musters scant interest in Niki's career ambitions and romantic complications, and her halting conversations with her mother keep chasing a climactic point of mutual understanding that never arrives — a poignant impasse, perhaps, but a difficult one to structure a film around. There's more interest in the past, and in Hirose and Nikaido's delicate performances as two women living parallel lives in full view of each other. But 'A Pale View of Hills' commendably resists nostalgia, as it brittly sympathizes with immigrant identities unsettled in any place or any era. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
Yahoo
21-05-2025
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Bulova Documentary Puts a Spotlight on Brand's Backing of Veterans, Women's Rights and Other Social Initiatives
As New York watch company Bulova celebrates its 150th anniversary, managing director Michael Benavente can point to many milestones and achievements the brand can be proud of, but there is one that stands out. Speaking following Variety and Golden Globes' screening of Michael Culyba's documentary 'America Telling Time: 150 Years of Bulova' presented by Bulova, Benavente told an audience on Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival that the sequence that made the most emotional impact on him and other audience members he'd chatted with was the one featuring the work done with the Veterans Watchmaker Initiative, which the company supports. More from Variety 'A Pale View of Hills' Review: The Supple Ambiguities of Kazuo Ishiguro's Novel Stiffen and Seize Up in an Unsatisfying Adaptation 'Eagles of the Republic' Review: An Egyptian Movie Star Is Forced to Make a Propaganda Film in Tarik Saleh's Catchy but Muddled Age of Autocracy Thriller 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' Review: A Post-War Study of the Nazis' 'Angel of Death' Lacks Dimension The non-profit runs a tuition-free school that allows disabled veterans to learn watchmaking skills and offers them a dedicated job placement. In the film, veterans, some of whom had been homeless, explained how it had restored their sense of self-worth, as well as giving them a means to earn a living, despite their physical or mental challenges. For some it had literally been a life saver, as they had been contemplating suicide. Benavente explained that the Veterans Watchmaker Initiative was set up by Sam Cannan, who was a sniper for a SWAT team in Baltimore. 'He got shot off a three-story building while there was an active shooter, and he fell, and by the grace of God, there was an awning that broke his fall. But immediately he was disabled from the Baltimore Police Department,' Benavente explained. After attending the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking, Cannan went on to 'have a very illustrious career as a watchmaker. He goes to live in Switzerland for many years, and this project that you saw today is really a work of love for him to give back, because he was in the same place as these guys. So you can see he's very emotional and he's super passionate about it and he's a great guy, and so we're just happy to be able to be with him and support,' Benavente said. Among other not-for-profit initiatives the company supports that are covered in the film are the Latin Grammys; the Maestro Cares Foundation, co-founded by singer Marc Anthony; and the We Are Family Foundation, which was co-founded by singer-songwriter Nile Rodgers. Both Anthony and Rodgers are brand ambassadors for Bulova, have designed watches for the company, and feature prominently in the film. Anthony's wife Nadia Ferreira, the Paraguayan model and social influencer, also attended the Cannes screening. The film is broken into themed chapters, rather than following a series of milestones chronologically, and the one that stood out for Culyba was Bulova's impact on women's rights. In the 1970s, for example, the company ran a series of groundbreaking ads in support of equal pay for women. 'I would say that was another exciting part of discovery while I was making the film,' Culyba said. 'I wasn't necessarily aware of their advertising campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, and that ad is so brave and bold of a company at that time to really take a social and political stand. 'At the time, Bulava really embraced women's rights, and it's a message that I think a lot of people, a lot of women, obviously, and men, can feel still today, through the brand it, it's still there.' 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
