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Grand Praemium

Taiwan-born film director Ang Lee has been named as one of the five recipients of the Praemium Imperiale award of the Japan Art Association. The awards ceremony will take place in Tokyo on Nov. 19.

Each recipient will receive JPY15 million alongside a testimonial letter and a medal. This year’s other recipients are: Sophie Calle (painting, France); Doris Salcedo (sculpture, Colombia); Shigeru Ban (architecture, Japan); and Maria João Pires (music, Portugal/Switzerland).

The Praemium Imperiale is the world’s largest and most prestigious art award in the five disciplines of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theatre/film. Now in its 35th year, it gives international recognition to the arts, much as the Nobel Prizes do to the sciences.

Previous film sector winners include Ingmar Berman, Jean-Luc Godard and Kurosawa Akira.

Kiwi Figures

The 2024 New Zealand International Film Festival (Nziff) has completed its marathon tour around the country. Its...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson)

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is in a rut. He’s still trying to get a publisher to accept his latest book in a market that doesn’t exactly embrace his erudite style. His gig as a college professor lecturing to students that are too “goddamn delicate” to embrace thorny topics of race has him ostracized from colleagues. He’s estranged from family, all of whom are juggling their own issues––health problems, divorce, the financial strain that comes with both. When Monk concocts an elaborate joke to get more fame and acceptance, it’s taken shocking seriously, setting off a series of misadventures exploring how white America is more willing to accept the most reductive, pandering stories of Black...

Christian Petzold, the director of the well-timed summer movie Afire with Anne-Katrin Titze: “I’m really sure that we don’t have summer movies. The Americans have summer movies, the French have summer movies.”

Christian Petzold’s slow-burning Afire, shot by Hans Fromm, stars Paula Beer, Thomas Schubert, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs, and Matthias Brandt.

Nadja (Paula Beer) with Devid (Enno Trebs), Felix (Langston Uibel), and Leon (Thomas Schubert) in Afire

A scene in Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember (with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr); Sophie Calle’s Voir La Mer and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs; Astrid Lindgren; a Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre touch; Uwe Johnson’s Mutmassungen über Jakob and Margarethe von Trotta’s Jahrestage series; Johan Wolfgang von Goethe; a Nanni Moretti quote; meeting Paul Dano’s Wildlife cinematographer Diego García (Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery Of Splendor) in Tel Aviv; Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Curt Siodmak, Robert Siodmak,...

Fans of the DC Universe can expect to see “worlds collide” in long-awaited feature “The Flash”.

On Friday, Feb. 10, a new trailer for the upcoming movie was unveiled, offering fans their first look at Ezra Miller as the speedy superhero in his first solo big-screen outing.

Read More: ‘The Flash’ Director Teases The Return Of Michael Keaton’s Batman

In the poster, Barry Allen/The Flash is seen standing in Batman’s Batcave.

Warner Bros.

Miller’s Flash was introduced back in 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”, with Miller reprising the role in the subsequent “Justice League”.

Read More: Ben Affleck Had ‘Fun’ Reprising Batman In ‘The Flash’ Despite ‘Difficult’ Time Making ‘Justice League’

Production on “The Flash”, which wrapped in October 2021, was reportedly troubled, plagued with continual script rewrites and, more recently, the headline-making bizarre behaviour of Miller.

Meanwhile, the arrival of the poster is preceding a new trailer for the film,...

Reza Dormishian was born in 1981 in Tehran. He studied English Language and in 1997 started writing as a film critic for several newspapers. He was an assistant to some prestigious Iranian filmmakers, including Dariush Mehrjui and worked as a screenwriter. He started making short films in 2002. His first feature film, “Hatred”, has been selected in Montreal and Venice Film Festival. His next movies are all selected and awarded in international festivals.

Fatemah Motamed-Arya was born in Tehran, Iran in 1961. From her very young age, she participated in theater dramas and muppet shows in Kanoon-e-Parvaresh in Tehran. She is a graduate of the Tehran Art Academy. She has won more than 30 acting awards. She has won more than any other Iranian actress and earned recognition as Best Iranian Actres ever. She apparead in more than 45 long features under supervision of people such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Abbas Kiarostami or Bharam Beyzai…...

A wide group of global entertainment figures have signed a letter supporting the Polish LGBT+ community in the face of growing controversy in the country.

On Tuesday, the government stepped in to support the Polish town of Tuchow, which recently lost financial support from the EU after it set up a ‘LGBT-free’ zone. The authorities said they were “supporting a municipality that has a pro-family agenda”; the decision has provoked angry responses around the world. On August 8, authorities detained 48 people at a reportedly peaceful pro-lgbt+ protest.

The responses now include an open letter signed by a cross-section of notable figures from film, literature and further afield, including the Oscar-winning director Pedro Almodóvar and Oscar-nominated Luca Guadagnino, the Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk, The Handmaid’s Tale writer Margaret Atwood, and Polish filmmakers Agnieszka Holland and Jan Komasa.

The letter, published on the website wyborcza.pl, states that homophobia in Poland is...

“Pain and Glory” director Pedro Almodovar, “The Nun” actor Isabelle Huppert and “Call Me by Your Name” filmmaker Luca Guadagnino are among a galaxy of 70 film, television, literature and eminent personalities from other walks of life who have signed an open letter expressing “outrage” over the repression of the LGBT+ community in Poland.

Addressed to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, the letter states: “We, the undersigned, express our outrage at repressions directed against the LGBT+ community in Poland. We speak out in solidarity with activists and their allies, who are being detained, brutalized, and intimidated. We voice our grave concern about the future of democracy in Poland, a country with an admirable history of resistance to totalitarianism and struggle for freedom.”

Other signees include Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski, whose “Ida” won an Oscar, “The Favourite” director Yorgos Lanthimos, “Vera Drake” director Mike Leigh, and actors Ed Harris and James Norton.

Eight years ago, self-taught Mexican filmmaker Lila Avilés came across a photography book by visual artist Sophie Calle titled “Hotel.” It featured images of the garbage and objects guests left behind at a hotel in Venice, Italy. From these traces of absence, Avilés realized she could construct a profile of the person who once stayed there.

As Avilés considered the people who enter these private spaces, collect the remnants of their lives, and fix them up for the next occupant, these ingredients became the basis for a stage play — and that, in turn, gave way to the screenplay for her first feature, “The Chambermaid,” which she co-wrote with Juan Carlos Marquéz.

The captivating film is now Mexico’s Oscar contender in the newly renamed Best International Feature Film category, after premiering at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival followed by an extensive, globe-trekking festival run. Picked up by Kino Lorber, “The Chambermaid” opened in U.

A young employee wafts from room to room in this disquieting story of the unseen servant class maintaining a five-star hotel

Lila Avilés is the Mexican actor-turned-director who makes a terrifically assured feature debut with The Chambermaid: an eerily atmospheric, poignant, disquieting movie about 21st-century luxury and the invisible servant class required to maintain it. It is a film to put alongside Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, in that it’s about the emotional cost of submission.

Working with co-screenwriter Juan Carlos Marquéz, Avilés has adapted her own stage play, which was inspired by the 1981 photographic installation project The Hotel by artist Sophie Calle. Avilés elegantly conveys her fascination with the uncanny spaces of the modern hotel and, like Kubrick in The Shining, intuits that all hotels are haunted: they are public yet private. Each room, inscrutably blank and interchangeable, withholds the truth from the freshly checked-in guest about the...

Going beyond dirty towels and fully stocked mini bars, Lila Avilés’ The Chambermaid shines a white sheets bright light on an a workforce that are mostly invisible. Perhaps a grandchild to Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, this debut film is a container piece — with an aestheticism and discourse that evokes a certain hamster wheel non-progression for more than just the film’s central character. Influenced by photographer Sophie Calle’s book Hotel, Avilés offers a pensive look at how it feels to be below the ground floor and going up or down. I had the chance to sit down with the filmmaker at the 2018 Marrakech Intl.…...

One of the most striking directorial debuts of the year is Lila Avilés’s The Chambermaid which invites a keen look at the class divide in a luxury Mexico City hotel. Brimming with humanity, we follow Evelina (Gabriela Cartol), a chambermaid as she balances her workload, her dreams, and her fantasies dozens of stories above her home life which, in a clever decision, we never see. After a festival tour including Tiff, Nd/Nf, AFI Fest, San Francisco Film Festival (where it won the top prize), and Morelia Film Festival (where it won Best Mexican Film), Kino Lorber will release it next month and we’re pleased to premiere the U.S. trailer and poster.

In our review from the Toronto International Film Festival (which is also quoted in the trailer), John Fink said, “The Chambermaid offers a sometimes funny and playful look into the inner life of Eve; nuanced and natural,...

Panama City — A journey is a common metaphor for storytelling and Mexican director Lila Avilés thinks that the experiences she had gained from traveling to 43 festivals in six months with “The Chambermaid” constitute a key formative period, that will shape her future projects.

She sees herself as an “outsider” and self-taught when it comes to cinema and says that traveling with her pic has been a learning process and also a bit like meditation or yoga, an introspective journey, that is interspersed with unexpected encounters that have engendered personal revelations.

She has particularly valued the Q&A sessions, which have opened her eyes to other people and cultures and how they see her film.

“The power of festivals is the exchange of films and the chance to meet new people. Films and people,” she says. “With a film like mine, which is closed and open at the same time, the interpretations can be really diverse.

Lila Avilés: 'For me, life is to see and to realise what is happening all around us' Lila Avilés with her Jury Prize in Marrakech Photo: Courtesy of Marrakech Film Festival Lila Avilés' debut film The Chambermaid, is set in a plush high-rise hotel, where Eve (Gabriel Cartol) cleans rooms, each one opening up on to a different small world of guests, at the same time as trying to work her way up the pecking order.

The film became a passion project for the director, who spent eight years working on it.

"It all stemmed from curiosity," she says, when I catch up with her at Marrakech Film Festival, where the film won the Jury Prize. "I'm curious and I saw a book by the photographer Sophie Calle, named Hotel. She disguised herself as a chambermaid in Venice and took photos of all the trash and belongings of the guests.

In an ongoing series, Variety profiles 10 emerging Mexican women filmmakers.

A year has been a long time for Mexican actress-dramatist-director Lila Avilés. Last October, she was preparing to screen her first feature, “The Chambermaid” (La Camarista) in rough-cut at Los Cabos.“The Chambermaid” won at Los Cabos, attracted co-producers in Bad Boy Billy Production and La Panda, swept Ventana Sur, again as a work in progress, and soon after snagged a sales agent, Paris-based Alpha Violet. In September, it world premiered at Toronto Festival, then segued to San Sebastian’s prestigous New Directors showcase, sparking reviews which announced Avilés as a talent to track.

A quiet melodrama, “La Camarista” follows the daily grind of a chambermaid, Eve (Gabriela Cartol) at Mexico City’s chic Hotel Presidente Internacional as it charts the search for identity of a person who seems invisible to some clients, is already a mother, but not yet her own person.

Bono, Pharrell, Michael Stipe and Laurie Anderson are among a host of musicians who have contributed to a new album from French artist Sophie Calle about her dead cat, NPR reports.

The 37-track project is named for the late feline, Souris, which translates to “mouse” in English. Souris Calle is available to stream via Spotify, while it can also be purchased on triple LP vinyl.

Souris Calle opens with a voicemail ode from Bono, who speaks over a rumbling rock groove: “She seems to hide all looks that have ever...

This year’s Tiff presented two portraits about Mexico’s working class. We have Alfonso Cuaron’s take and then we have theatre director turned filmmaker Lila Avilés‘ directorial fiction debut in The Chambermaid (La camarista). The Discovery programme (will move onto the San Sebastian Film Festival) offering showcases Gabriela Cartol (she is having a remarkable 2018 with several titles to be released). This is inspired by Avilés’ theater play of the same name—in turn inspired by Sophie Calle’s 1980 artistic project The Hotel.…...

Disclosure: I’ve never done therapy, although it has certainly been suggested over the years. Any recent therapy-curiosity was tempered by watching a couple of episodes of the Naomi Watts/Netflix series Gypsy, which made seeing a therapist seem like being the unwitting subject of a Sophie Calle art piece. Offering a point-of-view both more optimistic and realistic is, timed to National Therapy Day, a set of six new shorts from directors Alex Karpovsky and Teddy Blanks in which five women and one man discuss their various experiences in therapy. Director Kimberly Peirce talks about an experience in couples therapy, author Susan […]...