Latest news with #GreatPurge
Yahoo
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cannes Competition Drama ‘Two Prosecutors' Nabbed by Janus Films
Janus Films has picked up the North American rights to Sergei Loznitsa's Cannes competition drama Two Prosecutors. The Ukrainian director's Soviet-era thriller set during Stalin's Great Purge in 1937 earned the François Chalais Prize in Cannes. Two Prosecutors centers on a law school grad who tries as a young prosecutor takes on corruption in the Soviet system and winds up facing the consequences. More from The Hollywood Reporter Ezra Miller Signals "Tentative" Hollywood Return After Surviving Personal "Abyss" NATPE Honors Europe: Meet the TV Execs Managing the Streaming Transition - and War in Ukraine Dakota Johnson, Adria Arjona and Kyle Marvin Star in Trailer for Michael Angelo Covino's 'Splitsville' The drama is based on the novella by Soviet scientist and political prisoner Georgy Demidov and stars Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, Anatoli Beliy, Andris Keišs and Vytautas Kaniušonis. 'Impeccably directed and impressively acted, this slow-burn story of political injustice is filled to the brim with atmosphere — specifically the stifling, claustrophobic atmosphere of the U.S.S.R. at the height of Stalin's Great Purge,' The Hollywood Reporter film critic Jordan Mintzer said of the historical drama in his Cannes festival review. Director Loznitsa in a statement said of the North American distribution deal: 'I am proud to entrust my latest film to Janus and excited to work with them for the first time. They have all my confidence to give the film the impactful North American launch it deserves.' 'With Two Prosecutors, Sergei has meticulously crafted a haunting and taut thriller rooted in the horrors of the past, yet chillingly resonant with the political realities of today. We're proud to release this vital film and to be back in business with Kevin, Said, and the entire team at SBS Productions,' Janus Films said in its own statement. The distributor earlier picked up other Cannes 2025 titles like the Special Jury Prize winner Resurrection from director Bi Gan; another historical drama, Magellan, helmed by Lav Diaz; and director Hlynur Palmason's The Love That Remains. Two Prosecutors is produced by Kevin Chneiweiss. Regina Bouchehri, Gunnar Dedio, Birgit Rasch, Loznitsa, Maria Choustova, Alise Gelze, Vlad Radulescu, Uljana Kim, Viola Fügen, Michael Weber and Cécile Tollu-Polonowski are co-producers. Recent Janus Films releases include Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Oscar winner Drive My Car, and this year Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia, David Cronenberg's thriller The Shrouds and Jia Zhangke's Caught By The Tides. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Wes Anderson's Movies Ranked From Worst to Best 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT
Atlantic
24-06-2025
- General
- Atlantic
How Did Design Become the Solution to Everything?
On the first day of a required class for freshman design majors at Carnegie Mellon, my professor stood in front of a lecture hall of earnest, nervous undergraduates and asked, 'Who here thinks that design can change the world?' Several hands shot up, including mine. After a few seconds of silence, he advanced to the next slide of his presentation: a poster by the designer Frank Chimero that read, Design won't save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck. My professor wasn't the first person to deliver such discouraging news. In 1971, the design educator Victor Papanek began his best-selling book, Design for the Real World, with a similar message. 'There are professions more harmful than industrial design,' he wrote, but 'very few.' By designing and popularizing products that 'pollute the air we breathe'—including cars, which are responsible for 'murder on a mass-production basis'—he argued, 'designers have become a dangerous breed.' But design was capable of inflicting such harm, he wrote, only because it had so much potential, and therefore also the capacity for immense good. For Papanek, it was 'the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environment (and, by extension, society and himself).' Many working designers today echo Papanek's ambivalence about the profession. In her fascinating, rigorously researched new book, The Invention of Design, the designer and educator Maggie Gram shows how the field transcended its humble origins as the mere art of decoration and became a more ambitious, and more conflicted, discipline. Designers are responsible for more things than ever before: hardware, software, services, infrastructure. Many designers aren't just trying to beautify the world; they want to make it a better place. In the process, they have tackled societal issues such as racial injustice and economic inequality, with mixed results. Design works best when it knows what it can achieve and what it can't; the history of design is full of utopian projects that failed to make a difference. Gram's book is critical of the hubris and techno-optimism that have led design thinking astray, but it is also hopeful, imagining how the discipline might eventually live up to its stated ideals. In the 19th century, designers were typically commercial artists who worked to make everyday objects more attractive to consumers. But Gram's book shows how, over the course of the 20th century, practitioners such as Eva Zeisel helped shape a new way of thinking about the profession. Born in 1906 to a highly educated Hungarian Jewish family, Zeisel became, at 18, the youngest woman to join the potters' guild of Budapest. Her first job was to make prototypes of pots to be mass-produced at a factory—a skill that brought her to Berlin and then the Soviet Union. But her career there was cut short by Stalin's Great Purge, and Zeisel moved to New York in 1938, where she taught at the Pratt Institute and designed dinnerware that was exhibited and sold at the Museum of Modern Art. Her work married Old World craftsmanship with industrial-manufacturing practices, and showed that popular modernist styles, which were often seen as rigid and circumscribed, could be executed with what Zeisel called 'real elegance.' Zeisel was one of many European émigrés who shaped American design culture. In 1919, the German architect Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art school where first-year students were given a foundation in color, form, and fundamental aesthetic principles. The school was initially funded by the German state of Thuringia, but when the government began shifting to the right in the 1920s, the Bauhaus had to find a different business model. It began to partner with companies to sell its own products, which made the curriculum more explicitly pre-professional. As Gram writes, the Bauhaus began 'using machines to mass-produce objects that worked,' including chairs, lamps, and other household items. When the school eventually closed and Gropius fled Nazi Germany for America, he brought the Bauhaus's ideas to Harvard's design school as a professor. Gropius's approach to industrial design—epitomized by the famous dictum 'Form follows function'—was enormously influential; the Bauhaus's synthesis of art, technology, and practicality shaped America's understanding of design over the following decades. In a 2003 interview, Steve Jobs, then the CEO of Apple, remarked that 'most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like.' But, as he argued, 'it's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.' Jobs's reframing marked the culmination of a decades-long cultural shift. By the end of the 20th century, design students were typically categorized into one of two buckets: industrial designers who made physical, mass-produced products, and graphic designers who communicated information with visuals. But following the rapid rise of the technology sector during the early 21st century, many design students gravitated toward careers in that industry, where they worked on intangible products such as interfaces and software systems. As Gram writes, designers need more than just craftsmanship skills; they should 'be students of human culture.' Here, the field benefited from another kind of émigré: social scientists who, faced with a declining academic-job market, entered the tech industry instead. One contributor was Lucy Suchman, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1984 with a Ph.D. in anthropology, then took a job at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center as a researcher. In an influential study, Suchman placed two successful computer scientists in a room to see whether they could, as Gram writes, use 'a brand-new, feature-rich Xerox photocopier' without issues. They couldn't. It turned out, as Gram observes dryly, that learning how to use an unfamiliar machine 'is never as simple as technologists want it to be.' Other tech companies also hired social scientists, who became a new kind of design professional: user researchers. In theory, they were meant to instill a more 'human-centered' approach to technology. In practice, however, they were pressured to solve problems quickly and prioritize profit over the ideal experience. Eventually, some designers and design educators grew to feel that the 'problems worth solving,' as Gram writes, were the 'wicked problems' of society—a term coined by the design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973 to include issues such as crumbling public infrastructure, education inequality, and poverty. Teachers encouraged their students to apply design to things that really mattered—not just the creation of mass-produced consumer goods. And companies such as Ideo, a design consultancy founded in 1991 in Palo Alto, helped turn design from a specialist skill into a general-purpose one, selling the concept of 'design thinking' to corporate America. Design thinking, as Ideo's CEO, Tim Brown, wrote in 2008, 'uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible.' While Ideo employed design thinking to invent user-friendly insulin pens and an updated PalmPilot, the company also suggested that its approach to identifying issues and brainstorming solutions could be applied to all kinds of problems—including the 'wicked' ones plaguing corporations, educational institutions, health care, and government. Corporate America fell in love with the idea, and Gram describes how design thinking became an almost 'spiritual movement,' with Brown's 2009 book, Change by Design, as its bible. Its influence extended around the world: In 2006, an advertising agency in Bogotá, Colombia, was asked by the government to research, prototype, and launch an ad campaign imploring a group of Marxist-Leninist guerrilla fighters to demobilize. But design thinking often disappointed its disciples. Take Gram's example of Gainesville, Florida, where in the 2010s, about a third of the city's residents lived below the poverty line. In 2013, the city's mayor asked Anthony Lyons, the director of a newly formed economic-development committee, to turn the city's prospects around. Lyons looked to Silicon Valley for inspiration and hired Ideo for a two-month, $200,000 project to research how Gainesville could become a more 'competitive' city. Lyons soon became city manager, and quickly implemented Ideo's suggestions—including creating a new logo, establishing trainings for city employees in design thinking, and renaming the Department of Planning and Development the Department of Doing. These sorts of changes, Gram writes, had a 'tenuous relationship' to the real challenges facing Gainesville, one of the most racially unequal places in the country. Black residents had lower high-school-graduation rates and higher unemployment rates than white residents, and Ideo's more surface-level solutions could do little to address that reality. Lyons's eagerness to redesign Gainesville to be 'the most user friendly city in the world,' as Ideo advocated, ignored the expertise of existing city employees. There was low morale and high turnover, and when Lyons himself resigned after a few years, a resident told a local university's newspaper, 'Gainesville is not a Silicon Valley startup.' The trouble, as The Gainesville Sun 's editorial board wrote, was that Lyons, despite being an 'agent of change' in the city, failed to 'build consensus.' He didn't have a design problem to solve; he had a political problem. The concept of design, as the French philosopher Bruno Latour observed in a 2008 lecture, has had an 'extraordinary career.' No longer is design about making objects more beautiful and useful; instead, he suggested, 'design is one of the terms that has replaced the word 'revolution'!' That might be the problem. 'Our contemporary idea of design,' Gram writes, is often used to convince ourselves 'that positive social change could be achieved without politics and government action; that problem solving could be both generative and profitable.' But most ambitious changes on the societal level require political consensus, and what's profitable for some may not be beneficial for all. Design may be a distraction from the real work. The solution, though, isn't to stop trying to change the world. What could a more beautiful, user-friendly, accessible, and egalitarian society look like? When it comes to making the world a better place, Gram writes, 'design can contribute to that project, and it should.' In 2000, the designer Sylvia Harris helped revise the U.S. census to be more accessible and comprehensible, leading to a 2 percent higher participation rate compared with the 1990 census. This meant that more Americans, especially those from marginalized and undercounted communities, were represented. In her work, Harris exemplified a different path for the profession: one that seeks to understand the needs of the community being served and emphasizes participatory design. Designers' instincts for aesthetics, utility, and usability can play a crucial role in addressing society's 'wicked problems.' But they can't solve them alone.
New Statesman
04-06-2025
- Business
- New Statesman
The lost futures of Stereolab
Photo by Joe Dilworth Nikolai Kondratiev was born in Russia in 1892. An influential theorist of the New Economic Policy under Lenin, in the 1920s he pioneered the idea that would define his posthumous reputation. Capitalist economies, he argued, underwent predictable cycles of about 50 years' growth followed by stagnation. In 1938, Kondratiev fell out of favour and was executed under Stalin's Great Purge. But after his death, his theory found acclaim in the West, memorialised as 'supercycles', or the Kondratiev wave. One small ripple from this theoretical legacy came in the summer of 1994, on the fringes of the British Top 40 singles chart. A basic schooling on the Kondratiev wave could be found in the lyrics of 'Ping Pong' by the avant-pop band Stereolab, a catchy, three-minute single sung in French-accented English, and built around sultry electric organ and sparkling, understated guitars. The release peaked at 45, mounting no threat to that week's imperial Wet Wet Wet chart-topper. From the vantage of the mid 2020s, perhaps Nineties guitar bands require their own theory of stagnation and growth. After long absences, this summer sees a new album by Pulp and the live return of Oasis (the latter a group impelled by very different economic theories). At a quieter volume in the public consciousness, we now have a largely unexpected new album by Stereolab, the long-running project of onetime romantic partners Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier. Stereolab burst from the ruins of Eighties indie. Ilford-born Gane – a teenage devotee of experimental bands like Throbbing Gristle – was the guitarist in McCarthy, a badge-wearing socialist outfit whose verbose and accusatory songs included 'We Are All Bourgeois Now' and 'Should the Bible Be Banned'. At a 1988 Paris show, Gane met, and quickly began a relationship with, a McCarthy fan: Lætitia Sadier. Born in 1968, Sadier grew up in the eastern suburbs of Paris, interrupted by long stays in the US following her father's corporate job. Sadier briefly joined McCarthy before the band split in 1990. The pair then moved to south London, signed on to the dole, and plotted an entirely new project. By the Nineties, rock had amassed so much past that would-be musicians could pick a spot in virtually any niche of its history, and burrow there for a whole career. Stereolab's early releases were in thrall to the Seventies Düsseldorf duo Neu! and their propulsive, defiantly minimalist 4/4 beat. A rotating cast of musicians came and went around an unchanging nucleus of Gane, Sadier and the Australian guitarist Mary Hansen, whose bright, volleying harmonies with Sadier were the emotional centre of the band's sound. What set them apart was their politics. Gane wrote – and largely produced – the music, leaving lyrics entirely to Sadier. Delivered in a conversational but strident voice, Sadier sounded like a compelling sociology lecturer suddenly taking flight. On the single 'French Disko', which was performed on late-night TV's The Word, Sadier called for acts of 'rebellious solidarity' before a chorus of 'La Résistance!' But her lyrics tended towards affirmation rather than polemic. There was 'Ping Pong', with its Kondratiev chorus, and the playful 'Wow and Flutter', which does not on first listen sound as though it is questioning the supremacy of the IBM and US imperialism, but somehow pulls it off. In interviews, her political declarations were measured and playful, pondering to Melody Maker in 1993 what exactly to do about 'people like John Major' come the revolution. ('Do we kill them? Do we brainwash them? Do we get them to mop the streets?… That's a hell of a responsibility.') Through punk, the postwar Situationist International – a revolutionary Marxist alliance of artists and intellectuals – for a time held an outsized influence on pop music. You could detect their influence in Stereolab's fusing of anti-capitalist lyrics to the sounds of American consumerism, with their sincere adoption of Sixties bubblegum pop, easy listening and elevator Muzak. In the Eighties and Nineties, leftist bands as varying as the Style Council and the Manic Street Preachers practised entryism, smuggling leftist ideals through catchy pop. That was not Stereolab. 'I would go so far as to say we were avoiding going overground,' Sadier told the New York Times in 2019. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Instead, Stereolab protected their independence – releasing on their own Duophonic imprint – and got better. Between 1996 and 1999, Stereolab came good on the critic Simon Reynolds's declaration of the band as part of the 'post-rock' wave – meaning guitar bands who had been energised by the arrival of hip-hop and dance music. Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Dots and Loops and the sprawling Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, released consecutively, were among the finest alternative albums of the 1990s, coming at the exact moment Britpop ran out of road. Suddenly, this DIY indie project encompassed glitchy German techno, rhythmic Brazilian jazz, sleek and severe 20th-century minimalism and a collagist approach that beat hip-hop samplers at their own game (later, rap producers including J Dilla, Tyler, The Creator, and Pharrell Williams would sample and praise specifically this era of the band). Playful and psychedelic, Stereolab almost resolved political music's central dilemma – that anyone buying the object probably agrees with you already – by flooding their work with what the critic Mark Sinker dubbed 'portals', meaning references to counter-cultural history from filmmaker Stan Brakhage to synth pioneer Wendy Carlos. This couldn't last. Cobra and Phases… received a cruel, attention-seeking 0/10 review from the NME, terming them 'culturally pointless'. It was a harbinger of more than just a casually cruel media culture, proving 2000s indie rock and its skinny-jeans-wearing acolytes would revive just about anything but an interest in politics. And far worse, Stereolab were struck by tragedy. In 2002, Mary Hansen was killed in a traffic accident aged 36. Gane and Sadier separated, and a grief-stricken band lost their zeal. Stereolab's hiatus in 2009 barely caused a ripple. Instant Holograms on Metal Film is the first new Stereolab studio album since 2008's Chemical Chords. After reforming for what appeared to be a slightly awkward, financially necessitated reunion in 2019, something seemed to stick: Stereolab have toured whenever possible since. The first sounds on Instant Holograms are one minute of silvery, arpeggiated synthesizers, introducing the record like some long-lost Eighties television ident. 'Aerial Troubles', the first full-length song on the album, opens with Sadier's declaration – her voice deeper and richer – that 'the numbing is not/it is not working any more'. This is an album uniquely concerned with consumption, greed ('an unfillable hole, insatiable') and 'dying modernity'. Stereolab are back, and they've never sounded so disappointed. On first listen, it surprises that the bubblegum colours Stereolab painted in during the Nineties have been drained to a slightly more parched canvas. On repeat listens, this is to the album's benefit. If Instant Holograms is largely a retread of former Stereolab sounds – and it is – what is different and manages to convince, is its more downcast mood. 'Ego skyscraper, erect and collapsible', mourns Sadier on the mid-tempo, gently exploratory 'Immortal Hands', 'nihilistic and vulgar'. More than any other Stereolab release, Instant Holograms does not leave the subject of life under capitalism. The strange romantic songs or surreal asides that were once part of the band's coalition are this time absent. This could all be a bit much, but what separates Sadier from a bad case of what we might call the 'Ian Browns' (specifically the one-time Stone Roses frontman's dire Covid-sceptic barkings about 'masonic lockdowns' and '5G radiation') is the glacial, cool manner in which she delivers them. It is also the way that the music appears to offer solutions, glimpses of possibility. Take that track: what begins as a downcast plea suddenly fizzes into mutant disco, bursting bright with horns and recalling their most expansive material on the classic Dots and Loops. Ditto the track 'Vermona F Transistor', in which – against a lovely, woozy Tim Gane guitar line – Sadier's phrases begin to suddenly drown in bubbling, electronic vocal effects, rendering them absurd, suggesting their own slipperiness. Stereolab broke out at a time when – even for experimentally minded Marxists – the mood was playful and the forecast optimistic. Putting it mildly, this is not the case today. Instant Holograms will not command much of the same audience as Oasis's return, but the continuing appeal of both is more similar than either would admit: those listening to Stereolab will be hoping to set the clock back to half-past-the-Nineties as much as those in bucket hats at Heaton Park. But on the final song 'If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt 2', Sadier closes with a rebuke to the numbing that featured earlier in the album, emphasising the 'power to choose' and the 'courage to heal'. On Instant Holograms, Stereolab find new ways to explore and analyse the disappointing world around them. Useful lessons, some might say. 'Instant Holograms on Metal Film' by Stereolab is out now on Warp Records [See also: Lorde's Brat moment] Related
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Two Prosecutors' Review: Sergei Loznitsa Explores the Stifling Climate of Stalin-Era Russia in a Legal Drama That Burns Slowly but Brightly
You don't need to wield a hammer and sickle to feel the weight of Soviet tyranny hanging over Two Prosecutors, a solemn Stalin-era drama from Sergei Loznitsa that doubles as a metaphor for the kind of oppression tormenting Russia right now. Impeccably directed and impressively acted, this slow-burn story of political injustice is filled to the brim with atmosphere — specifically the stifling, claustrophobic atmosphere of the U.S.S.R. at the height of Stalin's Great Purge. For those familiar with that period, nothing in the movie, which was adapted from a 1969 book by physicist and gulag survivor Georgy Demidov, may seem surprising. But this Cannes competition entry is more about the journey than the destination, revealing what it was like to live at a time when personal freedom was all but extinguished by rampant authoritarianism. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' Review: Tom Cruise Delivers but the Convoluted Eighth Entry Takes Its Sweet Time Getting There Nude and "Voluminous" Cannes Red Carpet Looks From Past Years That Would Violate New Dress Code David Lynch's Son Intros 'Welcome to Lynchland' Doc in Cannes: "This Festival Meant a Lot to My Dad" The first shot of the film is of a prison door opening and closing, and it's a clear prelude to the rest of what happens in Loznitsa's meticulously crafted narrative. Lensed by Oleg Mutu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) in the box-like 1:1.33 format, the movie was photographed in color but may as well have been made in black-and-white, so much does it depict a world without warmth or hope. Loznitsa is certainly no stranger to such backdrops, exploring the bleaker sides of both Russia and his native Ukraine in a body of work that has seamlessly shifted between fiction (My Joy, In the Fog, Donbass) and documentary (Maidan, The Event, Babi Yar. Context). Two Prosecutors is perhaps his most austere film to date — controlled as tightly as the NKVD (Stalin's secret police of the 1930s and 40s) controlled the Soviet people. It's not always an easy sit, creeping along as it moves from one suffocating situation to another. But it gradually builds into a powerful statement on Russian tyranny both then and now. A slow-burn opening shows prisoners being assembled in a courtyard. The year is 1937 and the men all look like they've been through hell. (Indeed, in the next scene one of them falls off a scaffolding and drops dead, his body quickly hauled away.) The oldest among them (Ivgeny Terletsky) is sent alone to a cell, where he's tasked with burning the letters of fellow inmates. In what will be the first of many acts of courage against the powers-that-be, he decides to save one letter in which a prisoner claims he's been unfairly jailed and asks for legal counsel. The sequence is telling, underscoring the sheer impossibility of justice within a system that has been designed to quash resistance at all levels, from the very bottom to the top. This is the trajectory the film itself takes, gradually following the effects of that one authority-defying act from the bowels of a provincial prison all the way to one of the highest offices in Moscow. Our guide through the crushing bureaucracy is a bold young prosecutor named Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov), who receives the smuggled letter and shows up at the prison to deal with the situation. He faces hostility every step of the way, from an array of brutish guards to a dismissive warden (Vytautas Kaniusonis) who keeps trying to get rid of him, and finally to the U.S.S.R's general prosecutor (Anatoli Beliy), who receives him in his office after the longest wait of all time. What's fascinating about Two Prosecutors is that nobody directly turns down Kornev, nor do they ever let him know what they're really thinking. This is a world where everyone is so afraid that the slightest word or act could land them in jail, or possibly Siberia, that they're constantly holding their tongues as they try to strategize their way through the system. New to the game of 4D Soviet chess under Stalin's reign of terror, Kornev is the only person to truly speak his mind, and it's no surprise what winds up happening to him as a result. The irony is that Kornev thinks he's saving the very Marxist revolution that the U.S.S.R. is meant to embody. The inmate who wrote the letter, Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), is an old Bolshevik worker who was part of the 1917 uprising and has spent years in prison being tortured without reason. By trying to take a revolutionary hero's case to the highest echelons of power, Kornev foolishly believes he's fighting corruption in the regime he's meant to serve. The compelling Kuznetsov portrays the prosecutor as a wise and stubborn lawyer who's also the last person to be in on the joke that was Communism under Stalin. This is most apparent in a late sequence — and probably the highlight of the movie — in which Kornev takes the train back from Moscow to his hometown of Briansk, riding along with two businessmen (Valentin Novopolskij, Dmitrij Denisiuk) who he suspects could be NKVD agents. After some hesitation, he decides to drink and be merry with them, enjoying an impromptu music performance as the train chugs along through the night, unaware of the fate already in store for him. Loznitsa is much less of a dupe than the naïve young Korvev, and the director ultimately leaves the viewer back at the same prison door where his film began. The journey in Two Prosecutors is therefore a circular one — a long and winding round-trip between a rock and a hard place. This is what life was like in the U.S.S.R. at that time, and it's no secret that life in Russia under Vladimir Putin is hardly different nowadays. Loznitsa is reflecting on the past here, but for anyone who cares to look, he's holding a mirror up to the present. 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
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
German Works by Fatih Akin, Mascha Schilinski, Christian Petzold Unspool in Cannes, Animation Set for Major Market Showcase
German films and co-productions in Cannes this year are sure to entice festgoers and buyers alike with an eclectic selection heavy on historical drama and animation fare. Highly anticipated works by Fatih Akin, Mascha Schilinski and Christian Petzold are premiering at the festival along with German co-productions from Wes Anderson, Sergei Loznitsa and Kirill Serebrennikov that explore postwar Germany, lives intertwined through time, loss and grief, international espionage, Stalin's Great Purge and a war criminal's escape from justice. 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 Wes Anderson Delights Cannes as 'Phoenician Scheme' Lands 6.5-Minute Standing Ovation, Leading Lady Mia Threapleton Overcome With Tears Unspooling in Cannes Premiere, Akin's 'Amrum' is a family drama set in 1945 on the titular North Sea German island and based on the autobiographical novel of screenwriter Hark Bohm, who also penned the script. It centers on 12-year-old Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), who does everything he can to help his mother feed the family during the last days of the war, only to face all new challenges when peace finally arrives. The Beta Cinema title also stars Diane Kruger, Laura Tonke, Lisa Hagmeister, Detlev Buck and Matthias Schweighöfer. ''Amrum' is a very special project: it combines Hark Bohm's personal story with Fatih Akin's signature style and brings a piece of Schleswig-Holstein to the Croisette,' noted Helge Albers, CEO of regional funder MOIN, which supported the pic. Vying for the Golden Palm, Schilinski's sophomore work, 'Sound of Falling,' produced by Studio Zentral and handled internationally by MK2 Films, tells the story of four women from different time periods who spend their youth on the same farmstead and whose lives are eerily intertwined. Petzold's 'Miroirs No. 3,' sold by The Match Factory, screens in Directors' Fortnight and marks the director's fourth collaboration with Paula Beer, who plays a music student struggling with the sudden loss of her boyfriend and the mysterious family who offers her assistance. Anderson's U.S.-German co-production 'The Phoenician Scheme,' co-produced by and shot at Studio Babelsberg near Berlin, also premieres in competition. Boasting an all-star cast, the period film stars Benicio del Toro as a European business magnate facing major international challenges to his ambitious infrastructure project in the fictional West Asian nation of Phoenicia. Focus Features is distributing the film globally. Likewise in competition is Loznitsa's 1937-set 'Two Prosecutors,' whose producers include Leipzig-based LOOKSfilm. The Coproduction Office title follows an idealistic young Soviet prosecutor who comes across a letter written by a prisoner. Believing the man to be a victim of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) — at the time, the Soviet Union's dreaded interior ministry and secret police — the prosecutor embarks on a dangerous journey in the pursuit of justice in Stalin's USSR. Serebrennikov's 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele,' based on the novel by Olivier Guez and co-produced by Berlin-base Lupa Film, screens in Cannes Premiere, with Kinology handling international sales. German actor August Diehl stars as the notorious Nazi doctor who, as a fugitive, flees to South America following World War II, eluding capture for his crimes. Also vying for the Golden Palm are Joachim Trier's Scandinavian drama 'Sentimental Value,' which counts Berlin-based Komplizen Film among its co-producers; and Kleber Mendonça Filho's historical thriller 'The Secret Agent,' set in 1977 Brazil and starring Wagner Moura and Udo Kier and co-produced by Berlin's One Two Films. Other competition titles with German co-producers include Carla Simón's Spanish drama 'Romería' (Ventall Cinema); 'La petite dernière' by French filmmaker Hafsia Herzi (Katuh Studio); and Tarik Saleh's Egyptian drama 'Eagles of the Republic' (Films Boutique). German producers likewise backed a number of Un Certain Regard selections, including Morad Mostafa's Cairo-set 'Aisha Can't Fly' (Mayana Film); Francesco Sossai's Italian drama 'The Last One for the Road' (Maze Pictures) and Diego Céspedes' 1980s-set Chilean tale 'The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo' (Weydemann Bros.). Also unspooling in the sidebar is Arab and Tarzan Nasser's 'Once Upon a Time in Gaza,' which counts Hamburg companies Riva Filmproduktion and Red Balloon among its co-producers. The film follows on from the Nasser brothers' festival hit 'Gaza mon Amour.' This year's Cannes Film Market, meanwhile, boasts German comedy, family, drama, documentary and animated fare. Picture Tree Intl. (PTI) is presenting Simon Verhoeven's 'Old White Man' from Wiedemann & Berg and Sentana Filmproduktion. The comedy stars Jan Josef Liefers as advertising manager Heinz, who sets out to prove he's no old white man with a carefully orchestrated dinner party intended to secure a promotion but that instead turns into a minefield of political correctness, awkward revelations and unexpected chaos. PTI is also screening 'Prank,' a family adventure-comedy directed by Benjamin Heisenberg ('The Robber'), who co-wrote the script with Peer Klehmet ('The Famous Five'). Produced by Berlin-based Kundschafter Film and Zurich's Tellfilm, the film follows 12-year-old Chinese exchange student Xi Zhou (Max Zheng), whose seemingly innocent April Fool's prank spirals out of control and drags his host family, their son Lucas (Noèl Gabriel Kipp) and his crush Charly (Maïmouna Rudolph-Mbacké) into a tumultuous adventure. Among the titles presented by Pluto Film are two award-winning German works: Julia Lemke and Anna Koch's Berlinale documentary 'Circusboy,' about 11-year-old Santino, a child of the circus; and Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay's film crew thriller 'Hysteria,' which won the European Cinema Label in Berlin. The Playmaker Munich offers Christina Tournatzès' 'Karla,' based on a true story, about a 12-year-old girl who, in 1962 Munich, files a complaint against her own father, seeking protection from years of abuse. The company also presents Viktor Jakovleski and Nikias Chryssos' 'Rave On,' which follows Kosmo, a reclusive music producer who tries to deliver his latest record to a legendary DJ playing in Berlin's most notorious techno club, but what begins as a simple mission soon derails into an existential rave odyssey. Aaron Altaras and Klemens Schick star. Likewise in The Playmaker lineup is Norbert Lechner's 'The Secret Floor,' in which 12-year-old Karli, newly arrived in the Alps, where his parents have acquired a hotel, discovers he can travel back in time in the building's old elevator – to the year 1938. There he befriends lively Jewish girl Hannah and shoeshiner Georg and witnesses the rising menace of the Third Reich. Family entertainment specialist Studio 100, meanwhile, is showcasing a slew of animation productions: 'Heidi – Rescue of the Lynx,' by Tobias Schwarz and Aizea Roca and set for release this year, follows the spirited 8-year-old Swiss heroine who lives in the Alps with her gruff but loving grandfather. After rescuing an injured lynx cub, she uncovers a dastardly plot by a sly industrialist that threatens her beloved home and the entire alpine ecosystem. In 'Arnie & Barney,' by Sean Heuston and set for delivery in 2026, an ant platoon tries to save their community during a severe drought. Not cut out for heroics, inept ant soldiers Arnie and Barney decide to tackle the problem by themselves, inadvertently becoming the most unlikely of heroes in the process. 'Conni – Mystery of the Crane,' by Dirk Hampel, follows a young girl and her friends who help a hurt crane recover from his injuries in the hope that he can fly south with his flock. Currenty in production, the film is also set for delivery in 2026. In Rob Sprackling and Raúl Garcia's 'Flamingo Flamenco,' a dancing flamingo named Rosie is left traumatized after losing her sister to an attack by wild dogs. A shadow of her former self, the grieving Rosie has also lost the joy of dance – until she meets Carlos, a carefree and exuberant lizard who encourages her to dance once more. Currently in production, 'Flamingo Flamenco' is set for release in 2027. 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