Latest news with #Romería
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
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Jafar Panahi Wins Cannes Palme d'Or for ‘It Was Just an Accident'
Dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi has won the Palme d'Or for best film for It Was Just an Accident at the 78th Cannes international film festival. Panahi, who just a few years ago was imprisoned in Tehran and under a 20-year travel and work ban, returned triumphantly to Cannes, accepting his award from jury president (and vocal Panahi fan) Juliette Binoche. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Romería' Review: Carla Simón Dives Deep Into Painful Family History in an Act of Reclamation That's Equal Parts Shimmering and Meandering 'Magellan' Review: Gael Garcia Bernal Plays the Famous Explorer in Lav Diaz's Exquisitely Shot Challenge of an Arthouse Epic Cannes: Oliver Laxe's 'Sirat' Sells Wide Internationally Panahi's film, his first since being released from prison in 2023, is a direct assault on Iran's authoritarian regime. The thriller follows a former political prisoner who kidnaps a man he believes to be his torturer and then debates with other dissidents whether to kill or forgive him. The win marks the sixth time in a row a film acquired by Neon for North America has won the Palme d'Or. Tom Quinn's indie outfit kept its Cannes streak going by picking up It Was Just an Accident earlier this week. With his Cannes win, Jafar Panahi has now completed the rare festival triple crown, winning the top prize at all three major European film festivals, following his Golden Lion win in Venice for The Circle (2000) and Berlin's Golden Bear for Taxi (2015). Panahi is only the fourth director — after Henri-Georges Clouzot, Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Altman — to win the big three. The 2025 Cannes jury included actors Halle Berry, Jeremy Strong and Italy's Alba Rohrwacher; directors Dieudo Hamadi, Hong Sang-soo, Payal Kapadia and Carlos Reygadas; and French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani. The festival got its own dramatic twist ending early on Saturday when a regional power outage shut down the electrical grid serving Cannes and much of the surrounding region. The outage, apparently caused by deliberate sabotage on the electrical infrastructure, disrupted early morning screenings and forced hotels, shops and cafes in the city to close. But the festival was largely unaffected. The Palais, where the closing ceremony is held, switched to emergency power and carried on much as before. Cannes had a particularly strong lineup this year, with no single film the overall frontrunner going into the awards. Binoche began the ceremony by bestowing a special prize on Chinese director Bi Gan for Resurrection. Rohrwacher gave the Camera d'Or trophy for first feature to The President's Cake director Hasan Hadi, who is the first Iraqi director to win a prize in Cannes. John C. Reilly, in Cannes for the Un Certain Regard film Heads or Tails?, added a musical touch to the ceremony, breaking out into an English-language rendition of 'La Vie en Rose' when presenting best screenplay prize to two-time Palme d'Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for the Belgian social drama Young Mothers. Brazilian actor Wagner Moura took best actor for his starring role in The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho's 1970s-set Brazilian political thriller. In a rare double award, Filho also took best director for the feature. Newcomer Nadia Melliti beat out Jennifer Lawrence's turn in Lynne Ramsay's Die, My Love to take the best actress honor, playing the lead role in Hafsia Herzi's Muslim lesbian coming-of-age story The Little Sister. German director Mascha Schilinski won the Jury Prize for Sound of Falling, only her second film, an epic family drama set across four generations in the same rural farmhouse. She shared the honor with Spanish director Oliver Laxe for Sirat, a techno-infused apocalyptic drama set in the Moroccan desert. A full list of winners follows: Jafar Panahi for It Was Just an Accident Joachim Trier for Sentimental Value Mascha Schilinski for Sound of Falling and Oliver Laxe for Sirat (tie) Kleber Mendonça Filho for The Secret Agent Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for Young Mothers Nadia Melliti for The Little Sister Wagner Moura for The Secret Agent Resurrection, dir. Bi Gan The President's Cake, dir: Hassan Hadi I'm Glad You're Dead Now, dir: Tawfeek Barhom Ali, dir. Adnan Al Rajeev Un Certain Regard PrizeThe Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, dir. Diego Céspedes Jury PrizeA Poet, dir. Simón Mesa Soto Best DirectorOnce Upon a Time in Gaza, dir. Arab & Tarzan Nasser Best ScreenplayPillion, dir. Harry Lighton Best ActressI Only Rest in the Storm, dir. Pedro Pinho Best ActorFrank Dillane in Urchin, dir. Harris Dickinson Caméra d'Or for best first filmThe President's Cake, dir. Hassan Hadi Special MentionMy Father's Shadow, dir. Akinola Davies Jr La Cinef First PrizeFirst Summer, dir. Heo Gayoung (KAFA, South Korea) Second Prize12 Moments Before the Flag-Raising Ceremony, dir. Qu Zhizheng (Beijing Film Academy, China) Third PrizeGinger Boy, dir. Miki Tanaka (ENBU Seminar, Japan); Winter in March, dir. Natalia Mirzoyan (Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonia) (Tie) The Higher Technical Commission for Sound and Images CST Award for Best Young Female TechnicianÉponine Momenceau, director of photography for Connemara, dir. Alex Lutz CST Artist-Technician Award Ruben Impens, Director of Photography, and Stéphane Thiébaut, Sound Mixer, for Alpha, dir. Julia Ducournau Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Romería' Director Carla Simón on the Importance of Gender Equity in Filmmaking: Women Are ‘Half of the World, We Should Tell Half of the Stories'
Acclaimed director Carla Simón spoke about the importance of gender equity in filmmaking during her Kering Women in Motion Talk at Cannes on Friday, saying: 'We are half of the world, we should tell half of the stories.' The Spanish filmmaker, who premiered her new film 'Romería' in competition at Cannes Film Festival this week — one of seven women directors to do so — said female representation behind as well as in front of the camera is 'so important.' More from Variety 'Caravan' Review: Tender Debut Feature Focuses on a Single Mom's Experience with Her Disabled Son Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza Get Raunchy in Ethan Coen's Detective Movie 'Honey Don't!,' Earning Rowdy 6-Minute Cannes Ovation 'Once Upon a Time in Gaza' Review: An Altruistic but Scattered Palestinian Crime Farce 'I feel that we are advancing, little by little, not so fast. But at least things are changing,' she told Variety's Angelique Jackson. 'And I think we live in a moment [where] there's a historical reparation of themes that have always been told by men, and suddenly we take our perspective. And this is so important because we are half of the world, we should tell half of the stories in order to have a diverse look at the world.' Simón continued that this is 'so, so needed' because stories 'mark society' and are ultimately what help the world to evolve. 'I think little by little, we are getting there,' she said. 'It's fragile… I think we cannot stop talking about it and making sure that we don't go back.' 'Romería' is a personal film for Simón, as it follows an orphaned young woman who travels to the Spanish city of Vigo looking for more information about her biological father, who died of AIDS. There, she meets his side of the family, who are reluctant to revisit the past out of shame. The storyline closely mirrors Simón's own life, as both of her parents died from AIDS when she was 6 years old. 'It was born out of my frustration of not knowing much about my parents when I was a kid,' she said during the Kering talk. 'My family never told me clear things, and I had to kind of almost invent a story for them. And the film is about that, about the power of cinema to create the images that you don't have.' Watch the full conversation in the video above. 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
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
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‘Young Mothers' Review: Belgium's Dardenne Brothers Adopt a Wider Focus for Their Most Humane Drama in More Than a Decade
Before turning their attention to ripped-from-reality social justice stories, Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne got their start making short documentaries set in working-class housing projects. They brought that same immersive, observational approach with them to their fiction features, reflected in the long-take handheld camerawork, gritty street-level locations and casting of nonprofessional actors that have become their signature. And yet, it's doubtful that anyone would have mistaken a Dardenne film for a documentary … until now. 'Young Mothers' is the duo's most convincing film yet, owing largely to the way they have widened the focus from one or two characters in crisis — the sort of urgency that drove everything from 'Rosetta' to 'Tori and Lokita' — to a loose choral form. Instead of presenting a single, nail-biting dramatic situation, the Dardennes' no-less-engaging ensemble drama dedicates quality time to a quartet of young women — girls, really — under the care of a maternal assistance home in Liège. Deeply moving but never manipulative, 'Young Mothers' is the brothers' best film in more than a decades, since they tried incorporating movie stars Cécile de France and Marion Cotillard into their world. More from Variety Rai Cinema Celebrates 'Heads or Tails?' at Cannes and Readies for More Hits: 'Cinema Without Audience Doesn't Exist' 'Romería' Director Carla Simón on the Importance of Gender Equity in Filmmaking: Women Are 'Half of the World, We Should Tell Half of the Stories' Cannes Awards Predictions: Who Could Take the Palme d'Or - and Everything Else? Nearly all the faces here are unfamiliar — and every one is entirely persuasive. Reteaming with DP Benoit Dervaux and longtime editor Marie-Hélène Dozo, the siblings structure this latest, slightly unwieldy narrative as a series of more or less equally weighted dramas, interweaving the four cases as best they can (with a fifth example, played by Samia Hilmi, whose farewell party offers a ray of hope toward which the others can strive). The outcome requires a certain amount of multitasking from the audience, as with Michael Apted's 'Up' series or one of Frederick Wiseman's epic institutional portraits, in which every moment matters, but it's hard to say where things are headed exactly: toward tragedy, success or the status quo. Pregnancy is the common thread between these four teens, who otherwise represent very different instances of children bringing children into the world. Jessica (Babette Verbeek) anxiously waits beside a bus stop, hoping to recognize the birth mother who put her up for adoption as an infant. It's not until the steps away from the camera that we see this immature young girl is pregnant herself. She's already picked out the name for her baby, Alba, and swears she'd never abandon her — a commitment to breaking the cycle by someone who desperately craves her own mother's embrace. Ariane (Janaina Halloy Fokan) has practically the opposite problem: Her welfare-dependent single parent Nathalie (Christelle Cornil) pressured her to deliver, promising to help raise the child, but Ariane wants a better life for her baby. Ironically, this girl's maternal instincts are better than her mom's, who dates abusive men and drinks to extreme, and that sense of responsibility is what drives her to seek out a well-to-do foster couple who swear to teach the child music, offering a potential she never had. In most cases, the babies' fathers are completely out of the picture, although two of the home's residents are still negotiating how committed their boyfriends are willing to be. It's implied that Perla (Lucie Laruelle) hoped that having a kid would strengthen her relationship with Robin (Gunter Duret), only to have the peach-fuzz delinquent blow her off as soon as he gets out of juvie, leaving Perla with only a half-sister (Joely Mbundu) to rely on. By contrast, runaways Julie (Elsa Houben) and Dylan (Jef Jacobs) seem relatively stable, but both are former drug users, which poses its own challenges. Spelling out all these challenges surely makes the film sound far more miserable than it is. In fact, compared to the Dardennes' previous few features — and their Palme d'Or-winning masterpiece, 'The Child' — 'Young Mothers' is positively upbeat. The script is full of setbacks, but it's even better stocked with a sense of community, as characters step in to uplift one another. At the group home, the teens take turns preparing meals, and when one of them is overwhelmed or incapable, someone else invariably steps in to help. That's just one small example of the countless ways 'Young Mothers' celebrates an institution where supportive yet firm social workers (played by Adrienne D'Anna, Mathilde Legrand and Hélène Cattelain) are available around the clock to serve as exactly the kind of role models its residents lacked in their own lives. Obviously, Belgium is fortunate to have such a place; most countries don't. A comparable assistance program would surely make a difference in the United States, where pregnant teens no longer have the choice these characters did over whether to abort. Any movie on the subject of teenage pregnancy carries a polemical dimension of some kind, with a number of impactful recent examples — most notably, 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always' and 'Happening' — adopting a distinctly Dardennian style to drive their messages home. It's interesting then to see the Dardennes themselves taking a far more neutral tack, keeping things as open-ended as possible for the maximum range of reactions. The subject of abortion is frequently discussed, but the focus is exclusively fixed on characters who have brought their pregnancies to term. If there's a political statement to be extrapolated here, it's that instead of thinking of young mothers as being responsible for their children, we should start thinking of society as being responsible for its young mothers. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
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‘Romería' Review: Carla Simón Takes The Scenic Route For A Highly Personal Journey Of Self-Discovery
A textbook example of the difficult follow-up album — or feature film, in this instance — Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón's Romería strains under the weight of her last film Alcarras, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2022, was then invited to 90 more festivals and was as close to a perfect pastorale as any film can claim to be. Drawing on her own Catalan family stories, Alcarras dealt with a family of tenant farmers about to be evicted from the land they have worked for generations. It was a film of sorrow and anger but, above all, a swirl of loving, bickering family life. Along with that film and her 2017 debut, Summer 1993, Romería is grounded in Simón's personal history. This time, she revisits and transforms a trip she took at the age of 17 to Vigo in Galicia, where her father grew up and her parents met. The year is 2004. Fresh-faced Marina — the fictionalized Simón, played by street-casting discovery Llucia Garcia — arrives in Vigo to meet another dense knot of cousins, aunts and her paternal grandparents. Marina grew up in Barcelona, where her mother returned when she was born. Her father, as far as she knows, died when she was a baby. Her mother died when she was 11. Both parents used heroin, both died of AIDS. Ostensibly, Marina's most pressing goal is to obtain a sworn statement from her grandparents of her paternity, which was never officially recorded, if she is to be able to claim study assistance as an orphan. Blurred with her need to get a piece of paper, however, is something more existential and clearly Simón's real interest: a longing for shared memories. For whatever reason, her father's family has maintained radio silence since she was a child. All Marina knows about her parents' life in Vigo is contained in her mother's old diary. More from Deadline Sony Pictures Acquires Remake Rights To French Box Office Hit 'A Little Something Extra' - Cannes Josh O'Connor On 'The Mastermind', 'The History Of Sound', His Secret Spielberg Film & How Harris Dickinson Has Inspired Him To Direct 50 Years On, Michael Douglas Reflects On His Epic Journey Making 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest': "The Movie Reflects What's Happening In America" The diary is her guidebook. She wants to see the apartment where they lived, the boat they used to take up the coast to Portugal, the beach where she imagines them frolicking naked in the sun, basking in the festive freedom of the post-Franco years. Wearing an old dress of her mother's, she is like Alice venturing into her family's seaside wonderland; whimsical dream sequences show her young parents as if in home movies, the camera jerking and the colors faded unevenly. She shares their fantasy of themselves as romantic rebels. But as she will realize, even a secret diary — 'Don't even think about reading this!' says the front page, scrawled in an exuberantly childish hand — doesn't necessarily tell the truth. Her own time, by contrast, is shot largely in available light. Interiors are dark against the bright windows, exteriors dazzling. There are secrets here, but it is hard for us to pin down what they are. Perhaps these people have simply forgotten when Marina's father Fon died and what he was like. Or have they? Marina only has to drift to a window to overhear a few of her innumerable relatives muttering about her, what she wants, and when she might be thinking of leaving. As in Alcarras, the real adults in the room often turn out to be the children, who can't see any reason to keep their elders' secrets. Garcia is a remarkable discovery. Her Marina has a face as mobile as the sea she discovers she loves; one moment childish, the next melancholy with knowing. Like the sea, she is endlessly watchable. By contrast, her brood of uncles and cousins, who confusingly resemble the parallel hippie gang in the 1983 sequences, never acquire definition as individual characters. Only as a group do they coalesce satisfactorily: watching dolphins from the deck of the yacht, gathering to sing filthy bar-room ballads, or hovering around their poisonous matriarch, first encountered on her daybed watching video footage of the wedding of King Carlos. Her generation had its pretensions, however rough the family seems now. Between these more solid moments, however, is a waft of allusions and trails of information that simply peter out, possibly in a deliberate mirroring of Marina's own frustrations. Much more deliberately structured than the largely improvised Alcarras, it actually feels loose by comparison, its quest narrative never working up momentum. What is strongest, albeit as subtext, is the lived experience of La Movida, where the older generation was confronted with the madness of a younger generation that had cut its ties with Catholic, conservative Spain so severely as to become unknowable. But this is learned only by inference, while everything else is frayed loose ends. We end the film having learned nothing about Marina's life before she arrived in Vigo, nothing about the adoptive mother who keeps texting, nothing about the various other relatives who died in what appears to have been a scorched-earth experience of substance abuse. Even the reason she's there — that declaration of paternity – is so fudged I had to ask a Spanish colleague afterwards what it was about. Romería glows with warmth, but so many hints at not very much makes the process of storytelling feel as heavy as wet sand. Simón reaches a kind of point, but she certainly takes the long way round. Title: Romería Festival: Cannes (Competition)Director/screenwriter: Carla SimónCast: Llúcia Garcia, Tristán Ulloa, Mitch Martin, Sara CasasnovasSales agent: MK2Running time: 1 hr 55 mins Best of Deadline Broadway's 2024-2025 Season: All Of Deadline's Reviews Sundance Film Festival U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize Winners Through The Years Deadline Studio At Sundance Film Festival Photo Gallery: Dylan O'Brien, Ayo Edebiri, Jennifer Lopez, Lily Gladstone, Benedict Cumberbatch & More
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Carla Simón's ‘Romería' Gets 11-Minute Ovation In Cannes Debut
Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón made her debut in the Cannes Film Festival competition on Wednesday afternoon, world premiering her latest work, Romería, to an 11-minute ovation. Simón, directing from her own screenplay, here tells the story of Marina (Llúcia Garcia), an 18-year-old who was orphaned at a young age, and must travel to Spain's Atlantic coast to obtain a signature for a scholarship application from the paternal grandparents she has never met. She navigates a sea of new aunts, uncles and cousins, uncertain whether she will be embraced or face resistance. More from Deadline 'Romería' Review: Carla Simón Takes The Scenic Route For A Highly Personal Journey Of Self-Discovery – Cannes Film Festival Spanish Filmmaker Carla Simon Returns With Cannes Competition Title 'Romeria' — First Look Clip Sales Agency First Slate International Debuts With Genre Features Including 'Surviving Silence' & 'Those Who Call' - Cannes Market The experience stirs long-buried emotions as Marina pieces together the fragmented and often contradictory memories of the parents she barely remembers. This is Simón's third feature after Summer 1993 (2017) and Alcarràs (2022). The latter won the Golden Bear in Berlin and was selected as Spain's entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. Those films were shot in the middle of the Catalonian countryside. With Romería, she embraces her Galician roots, mixing professional and non-professional actors. Simón has said Romería is 'a film about the importance of family memory: and about how to shape your identity. When you can't shape your identity through others, you can invent it through creation. Cinema is there for that: creating images that don't exist.' Ad Vitam has French distribution and mk2 is handling international sales. Best of Deadline 'Nine Perfect Strangers' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out? Everything We Know About The 'Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping' Movie So Far Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds
