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NEWS
A Man of Integrity (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2022).
- Having banned producers of and actors in Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024) from leaving the country in an apparent attempt to pressure the director to pull the film from the Cannes Film Festival, Iranian authorities have now sentenced Rasoulof to eight years in prison, whipping, a fine, and confiscation of property, his lawyer announced today, adding that the courts consider the director’s films examples of collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the nation’s security.
- A group of about 200 French festival workers called Sous les écrans la dèche (“Under the screens the waste”) announced Monday that it will move ahead with plans for a strike during Cannes, demanding increased wages and an intervention upon the impending reduction of unemployment benefits. Festival organizers responded yesterday, urging workers “to come together around the bargaining table.”
- IATSE’s general negotiations with AMPTP, now in their second week, are currently focusing on how to fund the union’s benefit plans, which are staring down a $670 million deficit over the next three years after extending coverage to unemployed workers during last year’s strikes.
IN PRODUCTION
- Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers, 2023) will adapt Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson’s 2017 biography of the Renaissance artist and scientist, for the screen.
- Kristen Stewart and Oscar Isaac will costar in Flesh of the Gods, the next project from Panos Cosmatos (Mandy, 2018), who promises the film “will take you on a hot rod joy ride deep into the glittering heart of hell.”
- Kristen Stewart will also star in Albert Serra’s Out of this World, involving an American delegation to Russia in the midst of the Ukrainian war.
- Sandra Hüller and Willem Dafoe will costar in Kent Jones’s Late Fame, penned by Samy Burch (May December, 2023).
- Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, her follow-up to Titane (2021), will star Golshifteh Farahani and Tahar Rahim.
REMEMBERING
Portrait of a Woman Artist as a Human Being (Narcisa Hirsch, 1973).
- Narcisa Hirsch has died at 96. The German-born Argentine filmmaker was a pioneer of small-gauge filmmaking in Latin America, and has been celebrated with a number of recent retrospectives, including one at New York’s Museum of Modern Art earlier this year.
- Bernard Hill has died at 79. The English actor is known for his roles in Titanic (1997), True Crime (1999), and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–03). He was honored by his LOTR castmates, including Sean Astin, who said, “He was intrepid, he was funny, he was gruff, he was irascible, he was beautiful.”
- Jeannie Epper has died at 83. The American stunt performer is known for her daring work on Wonder Woman (1975–79), Romancing the Stone (1984), and many other films and television shows throughout her 70-year career. Lynda Carter writes, “We were united in the way that women had to be in order to thrive in a man’s world, through mutual respect, intellect and collaboration.”
- Jan Haag has died at 90. The filmmaker and writer founded in 1974 the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women, through which Maya Angelou, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Lee Grant, and many others have passed.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The first look at Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024) features Adam Driver teetering on the edge of a skyscraper, looking a little bit like a Beatle.
- Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD has produced a new music video for bladee’s “One Second,” featuring Yung Lean, adding fish-eye lenses, glitch transitions, and chroma-keyed bathing suits to the gaming-inspired lexicon on display in Aggro Dr1ft (2023).
RECOMMENDED READING
Riders (Martín Rejtman, 2024).
- “With documentaries I’ve found that nobody cares [about location access]—you go and ask, then it’s either ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ And when it’s ‘yes,” they forget.” For Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov interviews Martín Rejtman about Riders (2024), his new documentary on Venezuelan delivery workers.
- “In all my films generally, people do something that they really would say to themselves they shouldn’t do.” For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rachel Cusk interviews Ira Sachs about Passages (2023) and being a “a writer’s filmmaker.”
- “This being America, product development and naming has also become a religion that keeps the system in place.” For Fast Company, A. S. Hamrah reviews Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story (2024), “an uncomfortable outlier” in the burgeoning genre of the “business nostalgia” film.
- “Starting with a loose script, he built films from improvisation and chance, using a musical sense of repetition and variation around a wisp of plot.” For Reverse Shot, Imogen Sara Smith previews the New York retrospective of Hiroshi Shimizu.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933).
- New York, through June 1: Museum of the Moving Image and Japan Society present a retrospective of Hiroshi Shimizu, “an unsung master of Japanese cinema,” including many imported film prints.
- Los Angeles, May 12: Now Instant Image Hall presents a screening of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973) followed by a conversation between Rachel Kushner and Jean-Pierre Gorin.
- London, through May 19: Close-Up Film Centre presents a full retrospective of Maya Deren’s completed films.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023).
- “I have a rare jewel up my butt.” “In the Streets,” the first edition of the Notebook Insert, concluded with a collection of capsules, flash fiction, comix, and photographs by Martine Syms, Radu Jude, Amalia Ulman, Pan Lu, and Allee Errico.
- “What knowledge of monstrosity, of will, and of love—and fear—do we gain from resurrecting this particular murderer?” Annie Geng looks for a pulse in Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2023).
- “Schoenbrun’s characters reject fulfillment in favor of parallel lives, strange otherworlds where they walk like dysphoria zombies waiting for something—or someone—to change their course.” Grace Byron considers the queer world-making of fictive archives in Jane Schoenbrun’s films, including their latest, I Saw The TV Glow (2024).
EXTRAS
- Applications are open for the fifth edition of the European Workshop for Film Criticism, comprising two weeklong sessions during the Lago Film Festival in July and the Ljubljana Short Film Festival in August. The workshop is organized by the European Network for Film Discourse (END) and Talking Shorts and hosted by Notebook’s own Leonardo Goi.
- Wes Anderson directs and stars in a commercial for Montblanc fountain pens alongside Jason Schwartzman and Rupert Friend. The set design recalls that of his latest films, though several compositions are uncharacteristically asymmetrical.