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Kuwait Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Kuwait Times
Hollywood stars condemn Gaza 'genocide' as Cannes Festival opens
More than 380 figures from the cinema world including "Schindler's List" actor Ralph Fiennes condemned "genocide" in Gaza in an open letter published on Tuesday ahead of the Cannes Festival opening. "We cannot remain silent while genocide is taking place in Gaza," read the letter initiated by several pro-Palestinian activist groups and published in French newspaper Liberation and US magazine Variety. The signatories -- which include Hollywood stars Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon, as well as acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodovar and former Cannes winner Ruben Ostlund -- decried the death of Gazan photojournalist Fatima Hassouna. Hassouna, 25, is the subject of a documentary which will premiere in Cannes on Thursday by Iranian director Sepideh Farsi, titled "Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk". Hassouna was killed along with 10 relatives in an Israeli air strike on her family home in northern Gaza last month, the day after the documentary was announced as part of the ACID Cannes selection. Farsi welcomed the impact of her film but called on Cannes Festival organisers to denounce Israel's ongoing bombardment of the devastated Palestinian territory. "There needs to be a real statement," she told AFP. "Saying 'the festival isn't political' makes no sense." This year's Cannes jury president Juliette Binoche was initially said by organisers to have signed the petition, but her spokeswoman told AFP that she had not endorsed it and her name was not published by Liberation. Other signatories include Jonathan Glazer, the British director of Jewish origin who won an Oscar for his 2023 Auschwitz drama "The Zone of Interest", as well as US star Mark Ruffalo and Spanish actor Javier Bardem. File photo shows US actor Mark Ruffalo attends the Oscar Nominees Luncheon at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California. File photo shows English director Jonathan Glazer poses in the press room with the Oscar for Best International Feature Film for "The Zone of Interest". File photo shows Spanish director Pedro Almodovar poses to promote the film "La Habitacion de al lado" ("The Room Next Door"). File photo shows Spanish actor Javier Bardem attends the LACMA Art Film Gala at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Los Angeles. File photo shows US actress Susan Sarandon speaks during a protest against US President Donald Trump on the day of Trump's inauguration as the 47th US President. War programming The Cannes Festival kicks off on Tuesday on the French Riviera, with an opening ceremony headlined by Robert De Niro and three films showing the devastation of Russia's war on Ukraine. Two documentaries featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a third film shot on the brutal frontlines of Europe's biggest war in 80 years are to be screened on a "Ukraine Day" of programming. It is "a reminder of the commitment of artists, authors and journalists to tell the story of this conflict in the heart of Europe", the festival said. Nothing similar has been planned for the war in Gaza, but the film on Hassouna is set to "honour" her memory, organisers said previously. Gazan filmmakers Arab and Tarzan Nasser are also set to showcase their fiction feature set in 2007 in the Palestinian territory in one of the secondary sections of the festival. The opening film on Tuesday evening is "Leave One Day" by French director Amelie Bonnin, a newcomer, before Hollywood heavyweight De Niro receives an honorary Palme d'Or. File photo shows British actor Ralph Fiennes attends the 97th Annual Academy Awards. Richard Gere attends "The Agency" | FYC Event at Saban Media Center. Iranian filmmaker and activist Sepideh Farsi looks at a portrait of the Palestinian photographer Fatima Hassouna, during a photo session at her home in Paris on May 5, 2025. French actress and president of the jury of the 78th cannes film festival Juliette Binoche arrives for a dinner with fellow members of the jury at the Grand Hyatt Cannes Hotel Martinez. Late afternoon sunlight illuminated the facade of the Grand Hyatt Cannes Hotel Martinez, on the eve of the opening ceremony of the 78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 12, 2025. Depardieu De Niro is one of the most outspoken critics of US President Donald Trump in the American cinema world, with the "Taxi Driver" star often struggling to find words harsh enough for the US president. Trump has made himself one of the main talking points in Cannes after announcing on May 5 that he wanted 100-percent tariffs on movies "produced in foreign lands". The idea sent shockwaves through the film world, although few insiders or experts understand how such a policy could be implemented. Cannes director Thierry Fremaux talked up the festival's "rich" American film programme on Monday, with movies from Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Ari Aster and Kelly Reichardt in the main competition. "American cinema remains great cinema. The United States remains a great country of cinema," he said. Off-screen news in France is also likely to overshadow the red-carpet action in Cannes on Tuesday, with French film icon Gerard Depardieu facing a verdict in a sexual harassment case in Paris. Depardieu, who has acted in more than 200 films and television series, is the highest-profile figure caught up in France's response to the #MeToo movement against sexual violence. Cruise in town While independent cinema forms the core of the Cannes festival, organisers also hand over part of the programme to major Hollywood studios to promote their blockbusters. Tom Cruise is set to return to the Riviera for the premiere of the latest instalment of his "Mission: Impossible" franchise on Thursday, three years after he lit up the festival while promoting "Top Gun: Maverick". The festival will also see a series of high-profile debut films from actors-turned-directors, including "Eleanor the Great" from Scarlett Johansson and "The Chronology of Water" by Kristen Stewart. Organisers on Monday denied reports that they had banned provocative near-nude dresses from the red carpet. However, "full nudity on the red carpet" has been formally outlawed, "in keeping with French law". - AFP
Wales Online
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wales Online
'Disturbing' Oscar winning WWII film leaves Amazon Prime Video
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info Amazon Prime Video has confirmed its latest wave of departures, including a British-made WWII film that Steven Spielberg once called "the best Holocaust movie I've witnessed since my own". This is a film that's unlike any other; rather than showing the unimaginable horror of the event, you hear it, glimpse the fringes of it, and witness the evil of indifference. It is a gut-wrenching, disturbing, unsettling experience unlike any other regarding the Holocaust and it's a film that challenges you as a viewer, as it's deliberate in what it chooses to show and what it doesn't. Read more: Clarkson's Farm star Kaleb Cooper 'replaced' in new series as Jeremy Clarkson 'left in the lurch' The official synopsis states: "In 1943, the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife, Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house right next to the concentration and extermination camp he helped create." Critics lauded the film upon release, with Variety penning: "It's a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. "In a sense, it's a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality. Time Out wrote: "It's a stunning film – thoughtful, challenging and disturbing." Robbie Collin of The Telegraph also stated: ''To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric', Theodor Adorno famously wrote. "Glazer's film gives us the prosaic instead, refashioning it into the darkest, most vital sort of art it might be possible for us as a species to produce." While Screen Daily also added: "The Zone of Interest is a challenging rather than conventionally provocative film but, by any measure, essential viewing and a work that will be a vital focus of discussion both in the cinephile world and beyond." It wasn't just the critics that were floored by the film, as Schindler's List filmmaker Steven Speilberg also praised it. "The Zone of Interest is the best Holocaust movie I've witnessed since my own. It's doing a lot of good work in raising awareness, especially about the banality of evil," he commented. It became the first international feature winner for the UK at the Oscars 2024. It also took home three awards from the BAFTAs: Best Sound, Outstanding British Film, and Best Film Not in the English language.
Newsroom
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
Book of the Week: Catherine Chidgey's monsters
What comes after the Holocaust? Where do you go? That was the dilemma Catherine Chidgey faced after Remote Sympathy, the second of her deep, thoroughly researched novels set in Nazi Germany. In a situation reminiscent of The Zone of Interest – the excellent Jonathan Glazer film, not the less-than-excellent Martin Amis novel – Chidgey placed the apex of European civilisation right next to an extermination camp and asked how these worlds could co-exist. How do we go on living when we know what is happening over the wall? There were other related moral questions in there too, to do with the ethics of medical experiments. There were medical miracles and there were medical nightmares. So, what do you do after taking on humanity's darkest material? And not once, but twice (the other novel was The Wish Child). One superficial answer is that you go commercial. Chidgey's next two novels, The Axeman's Carnival and Pet, seemed more straight-forward, more popular, as though we were getting a necessary break from the hard stuff. They were set in New Zealand, in the 1980s and the present day, not Germany in the 1930s and 40s. The style seemed easier too. Rather than telling a story through a multiplicity of assembled sources, such as fictional diary entries, letters, interviews and so on, the narratives became more conventional. Both books moved rapidly to their conclusions, and Chidgey showed she had discovered the art of suspense. There was even humour, which was previously verboten. But it would be foolish to think of those two books as strictly entertainment: as in the German novels, both stories were also about families with missing pieces, and the problems that come when you try to plug the gaps. And now, two years after Pet, we get The Book of Guilt. This arrives with even greater levels of hype and commercial hope than the last two. There has been talk of a bidding war for the UK rights and big marketing spends. All of which is good news for Chidgey and her publishers, and thoroughly deserved, but the bit that really interests us is what this novel is doing, and where it is going. The unexpected answer is that the novel loops back around and does both the old Chidgey thing and the new Chidgey thing in ways that are quite fascinating. Firstly, it turns out Chidgey can and indeed has written a third Holocaust novel, albeit less directly than before. The Book of Guilt is set in Britain in an alternate 1979. In this version of history, the attempted assassination of Hitler in November 1943 was successful rather than thwarted, which quickly led to a peace treaty between Britain and Germany and the sharing of medical research gleaned during World War II. What kind of research? Let's just say Josef Mengele's name comes up. After the war, the British government started the Sycamore Scheme, a breeding programme for medical experimentation on children that was inspired by some of that shared research, although the exact origins of the blonde, identical triplets Lawrence, William and Vincent only become clear to us later in the novel. The three boys are impressive creations indeed. While visually identical, they have personalities that are distinct and clearly drawn. But now the Sycamore Scheme is being wound up. Lawrence, William and Vincent are the last residents of the Captain Scott dormitory, 'a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest', where they are monitored in shifts by three caring women known only as Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night (is that a reference to one of Kurt Vonnegut's Nazi books?). The mothers feed the boys and keep them medicated. They record the boys' dreams in The Book of Dreams. They record the boys' transgressions in The Book of Guilt. A third book, The Book of Knowledge, is an out-of-date set of encyclopedias. The boys are otherwise sheltered from the world, including from a suspicious public, and when literature appears, it has the potential to be dangerously liberating or disruptive. History's what-ifs are a popular game and Nazis are typically involved. Those scenarios tell us that if Germany had won World War II, subsequent history would be utterly different and the present would be unrecognisable. But it turns out that if World War II had ended in a draw, very little would have really changed. Lord Mountbatten is still assassinated in this version of Britain in 1979. There is an unnamed prime minister who is probably Margaret Thatcher. A Minister of Loneliness sounds like an Orwellian joke until you remember that such a position really was established in 2018. In all sorts of other ways, this is still recognisably the Britain of the 1970s. It is a Britain of crap television, crap food and crap decor. A miserable Britain of coastal towns they forgot to close down. The crapness of 70s Britain disguised something more sinister, both in real history and in this version of it. Some of the decade's kitsch might be laid on just a bit too thick in places – there are Richard Clayderman records on the stereo, the Two Ronnies and Bruce Forsyth on television, bowls of wax fruit and plastic covers on the furniture – but it also sets up one of Chidgey's simultaneously macabre and tragic jokes. One of the novel's characters is a devoted viewer of a popular TV show that offers hope to children by making their wishes come true, and she turns to it at a crucial moment as a possible solution to a life-or-death situation. That show is Jim'll Fix It, which is more likely to ring a bell with British readers than New Zealand ones. It was hosted by Jimmy Savile, a beloved broadcaster, national treasure and incorrigible paedophile protected for decades by the establishment. He abused children in care homes and hostels that are not a million miles away from the Captain Scott house in The Book of Guilt. As a monster who wore a disguise, Savile was a symbol of the era's danger and depravity and the ugly side of light entertainment. In an excoriating essay in the London Review of Books, writer Andrew O'Hagan described the light entertainment division at the BBC during the Savile years as 'a big, double-entendre-filled department, of interest to brilliant deviants'. Elsewhere in The Book of Guilt there is a child-killer closely modelled on real-life Moors murderer Ian Brady, another deviant from the same era. The suggestion is that we don't have to invent very much if we want to imagine 60s and 70s Britain as a culture that was horrifically unsafe for children, and therefore susceptible to the darker version Chidgey imagines. One of the disturbing elements for New Zealand readers of a certain age is that so much of this culture made its way unfiltered onto our television screens too, although from memory we never got Jim'll Fix It. There is a blend of nostalgia and creepiness as that world reappears for us, and perhaps implicates us. But it was also a last gasp. It seems telling that by the time we reached the early 1980s of Pet, the touchstones were American, brighter and less seedy. Think The Love Boat, Debbie Harry, and Rebecca De Mornay in Risky Business. If Chidgey has looped back to an earlier subject, she has also returned to the multiple perspectives of her earlier novels after the single narrators of The Axeman's Carnival and Pet. There are three of them this time: two children and one adult. The latter is the least vital as this is essentially a novel about children and their dawning knowledge, their self-awareness, their understanding that the world is a much darker and more complicated place than they thought. Children test their power. Like Pet, it is a story about adolescence, told in hindsight from a rueful distance. Chidgey is good at writing from within the naive fastidiousness of intelligent children who have been turned into introverts by isolation and illness, or family circumstances. You might even say her Tama, the smart-aleck magpie of The Axeman's Carnival, was another of those too-curious, too-intelligent children. Just as The Book of Guilt gives us a Britain of dead children and mother-in-law jokes on television, it also gives us a Britain of sand castles, sunshine and pony rides. The boys dream of Margate, a real but also imaginary seaside resort. When the kids graduate from the experimental scheme, they are told the Big House at Margate is their reward. The novel's cover and marketing draws on 1950s promotional material for the real Margate. In this post-war vision of health and leisure, a boy and his mother frolic on the sand. The sky is blue and the sand is soft and golden. Of course imagery such as this can easily be given an ironic or darker twist, and it is not too much of a stretch to say it resembles Nazi propaganda scenes of ideal Aryan families enjoying the great outdoors. After the real World War II, a number of prominent Nazis were tried and sentenced for their crimes. The way Mengele is talked about in The Book of Guilt suggests that the Nazis would have avoided such an outcome if the war had ended in a draw. That means questions of where evil came from and how it is transmitted from one generation to the next, along with related questions about guilt and how long it endures, would not have been dwelt on as they really were in post-war Germany. Explaining this might have required more backstory or world building than Chidgey was willing to provide, and while more background might have deepened the experience of the book, it would also have slowed down the plot. Yet even as the story moves through a series of too-rushed expositions towards an impressively melancholy and thoughtful end, it becomes clear that the moral questions posed in earlier novels still preoccupy Chidgey. Of course those questions never go away. How do we live with the knowledge of institutional cruelty done in our name and for the greater good? Should we try to forget traumatic history or confront it? Are we complicit if we turn away? How much of history is our fault? To steal an image from Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, what do we do about the screams that are coming from the other side of the wall? This is a Holocaust-inflected novel, only with a jolly seaside-postcard cover and a lighter touch. The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores. Philip Matthews' review concludes ReadingRoom week-long coverage of the book and its author. Monday: Chapter 1 of the new novel. Tuesday: her cohort enrolled in Bill Manhire's writing class in 1995 remember Chidgey as destined for greatness. Wednesday: Steve Braunias interview the author on the craft of fiction.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Auschwitz Memorial Announces Project To Create Digital Replica Offering Virtual Film Location
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial is working on a project to create a certified digital replica of the preserved concentration and extermination camp which can be used as a virtual film location. The initiative is likely to draw considerable interest from the film world because the production of fiction feature films is not permitted at the memorial, situated on the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in southern Poland, where around 1.1 million people died in horrific conditions during World War Two. More from Deadline Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, for example, was made in cooperation with the memorial and museum, which gave the production access to camp documents, survivors' testimonies, and expert guidance, and also allowed it to scan parts of the area of the former camp. However, none of the dramatic reconstructions were filmed on the site. Documentary films are allowed to film with permission, which meant the final sequences of the Oscar-nominated drama, showing the work of the museum and the objects that belonged to victims, could be shot on its premises. The groundbreaking digital replica project, bannered Picture From Auschwitz, will be presented in a panel at the Cannes Film Festival's Marche du Film as part of its technology and innovation focused Cannes Next strand. Polish director Agnieszka Holland and Polish American photographer Ryszard Horowitz; an Auschwitz survivor, who was one of the youngest survivors on Schindler's List, will join Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation CEO Wojciech Soczewica, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Deputy Spokesperson Paweł Sawicki and the project's creative producer Maciej Żemojcin on stage to talk about the project. Żemojcin and his team are using cutting-edge 3D scanning technologies to create a certified digital replica which preserves and protects the site's historical integrity. 'The certified digital replica offers filmmakers a revolutionary tool rooted in accuracy and ethical storytelling helping combat denial and distortion at a time when misinformation is on the rise,' read a release announcing the project and panel. 'Designed for a wide range of films – from documentaries to large-scale Hollywood productions – Picture From Auschwitz supports the telling of the true story of the camp as out of numerous reasons the historical site is not and will not be accessible for filmmaking.' The replica will feature every detail of the site from the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' entry gate to its fence posts, with every brick or roof tile of its buildings meticulously documented, to reveal perspectives and details invisible to the naked eye. The data will be preserved and reprocessed over time as new technologies emerge. Żemojcin's team has already completed a 1:1 digital replica of Auschwitz I using the most advanced spatial scanning tools available. Next steps in the project include completing the digital interiors of Auschwitz I, and the exteriors and interiors of Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp – securing the entirety of the Memorial site. Licensing fees for the virtual replica will directly support the Memorial, which is marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp this year, and its mission of commemorating all victims, fighting antisemitism and all forms of hatred as well as raising reflection about our contemporary moral responsibility. Partners on the project include the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial, Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, American Friends of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, Creative Media Europe, ATM Virtual and Leica Geosystems. Footage from the project will be showcased during the panel while a website for the initiative will go live on May 15. Best of Deadline Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Channel 4 CEO Alex Mahon to Step Down This Summer After 8 Years
Channel 4 announced on Monday that CEO Alex Mahon has decided to step down from her role later this summer after almost eight years leading the British public broadcaster. In her place, COO Jonathan Allan will serve as interim CEO while a replacement is found. Mahon became Channel 4's first female CEO when she joined in 2017. 'Working at Channel 4 has been a lifetime privilege because Channel 4 is the most extraordinary organization. What we get to do here is much more than television because we reflect our country with humor, creativity, grit and care. We try our best to challenge convention and to change conversations. And we do it with a kind of irreverent brilliance that simply doesn't exist anywhere else,' she said in a statement. 'I feel lucky beyond belief to have had the chance to lead Channel 4 for nearly eight years – through calm seas (very few) and stormy waters (more than our fair share). From navigating the threat of privatization (twice), to shifting out of London, to digital transformation, lockdowns, political upheaval, advertising chaos – there has never been a dull moment,' Mahon continued. 'But through every twist and turn, there's been one constant: the astonishing calibre, resilience and creativity of all my colleagues at Channel 4. Together, I hope that we have evolved what Channel 4 means and what it stands for. We've protected the brand, even as we reinvented it. We've stayed risky, relevant and relentlessly new – with 60% of our shows fresh each year. And through it all, it's been the programs – and their impact – that have brought me the most joy and pride.' The channel pointed to shows and movies such as 'It's a Sin,' 'The Piano,' 'Channel 4 News,' 'The Zone of Interest,' 'The Banshees of Inisherin,' 'All of Us Strangers,' 'Poor Things' and their Paris 2024 Paralympic Games coverage as programs that flourished under Mahon's leadership. Channel 4 interim chair Dawn Airey added: 'Alex is a great figure in British television. She has been one of the most impactful CEOs since Jeremy Isaacs' founding of Channel 4 more than 42 years ago. She is business-minded and has also been transformational both culturally and creatively, proving time and again her extraordinary ability to inspire and drive positive and meaningful change. Under her leadership, Channel 4 has moved with the times and driven the times.' 'Her commitment to Channel 4's public service mission has been unwavering. She has backed entertaining, shocking, interesting telly, never playing it safe and her grit and resilience more than met the rough-tough challenges of recent times,' she further noted. 'She leaves a strengthened and well-run Channel 4 that will continue to flourish, with its Fast Forward strategy reengineering the organization for the future.' In announcing her upcoming exit, Channel 4 also celebrated Mahon for championing women's health and disability representation in the workplace, as she launched U.K. media's first menopause and pregnancy loss post Channel 4 CEO Alex Mahon to Step Down This Summer After 8 Years appeared first on TheWrap.
