RuPaul is the undisputed queen of self-confidence — and he shares his tips for learning how to love yourself in the new issue of Us Weekly.
26.05.2023 - 18:51 / variety.com
Christopher Vourlias What’s in a name? For the Congolese Belgian rapper-turned-filmmaker Baloji, whose directorial debut, “Omen,” bows in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section on May 22, it’s a question that poses itself whenever flustered immigration officials inspect his passport at the airport in Congo. “Always the same question, every time,” Baloji tells Variety. “Do you know what it means?” In the pre-colonial era, baloji meant “man of science” in Swahili, but the word became corrupted by Christian evangelists during the years of Belgian colonial rule. Today it is more akin to a man of occult sciences and sorcery. “Some people of faith do not dare to say my name in public for fear of invoking evil spirits and the suspicions that may accompany it,” the director says. “In such an animistic culture it is equivalent to being called devil or demon in the West.”
He admits it took a long time for him to come to terms with the stigma attached to that moniker, acknowledging now, “That name influenced the person I am.” Nowhere is that clearer than in Baloji’s startling directorial debut, a kaleidoscopic portrait of four characters accused of witchcraft that uses arresting visuals and magical-realist flourishes to blur the line between fantasy and reality. The film centers on Koffi, played by Marc Zinga (“Tori and Lokita,” “Dheepan”), a Belgian man who returns to his native Congo to make peace with his estranged family while struggling to navigate the traditions of his ancestral land. Pic is produced by Belgian company Wrong Men (“Zero Fucks Given,” “Annette”) and co-produced by Tosala Films, New Amsterdam, Special Touch Studios, Serendipity, RadicalMedia and Big World Cinema. Memento Intl. is handling world
RuPaul is the undisputed queen of self-confidence — and he shares his tips for learning how to love yourself in the new issue of Us Weekly.
EXCLUSIVE: Rising comedian, actor and TikTok sensation Matt Rife is set to launch his first world tour. Rife’s ProbleMATTic World Tour, produced by Live Nation, will hit cities across North America, Australia and Europe throughout 2023 and 2024.
At Tuesday night’s world premiere of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, there was a huge sigh of relief from the mass of animators inside Westwood’s Regency Village Theater: The $100M-budgeted sequel to the Oscar-winning 2018 animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, was done, having completed post-production literally just 10 days ago after a five-year trek to the screen which included a Covid delay due to the backlog in post-production houses. Starting today abroad, and into Thursday in U.S./Canada, the continuing adventures of Miles Morales will see the light of day in what is expected to be a $150M global opening.
A post shared by Brett Goldstein (@mrbrettgoldstein)The Season 3 finale, titled “So Long, Farewell,” seemed to close the chapter on nearly every major storyline from the beloved comedy series. After winning the big game against West Ham and getting second place in the Champions League, Ted made good on his promise and moved back to Kansas to be closer to his son.
Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Momento Film, the leading Swedish banner founded by David Herdies (“Winter Buoy”) and Michael Krotkiewski (“Bellum — The Daemon Of War”), is boasting a slate of projects including the documentaries “Leaving Jesus” and “The Underdog,” as well as Simón Mesa Soto’s “A Poet.” While at Cannes, the banner also started teasing one of its biggest project so far, “The Swedish Torpedo,” Frida Kempff (“Winter Buoy”)’s period film inspired by the life of Sally Bauer, the first Scandinavian to swim across the English Channel in 1939. “The Swedish Torpedo” will start shooting in August with a topnotch cast led by Josefin Neldén (“Border,” “438 Days”), Mikkel Boe Følsgaard (“Royal Affair,” “Borgen”), as well as Lisa Carlehed (“The Emigrants”).
Does Megan Thee Stallion have a new man in her life?
EXCLUSIVE: Up-and-comers Kue Lawrence (Beautiful Boy), Kai Cech (Dear Santa) and Max Malas (New Amsterdam) are set to star opposite Corbin Bersen (White House Plumbers) in the sci-fi horror mystery Marshmallow from director Daniel DelPurgatorio, which is heading into production in a couple of weeks.
Asda is to buy the majority of EG Group's UK and Ireland operations in a deal worth over £2bn.
David O. Russell made his comeback last year with “Amsterdam,” his first movie since 2015’s “Joy.” But neither critics nor audiences took to the period ensemble film that much.
EXCLUSIVE: Four-time Emmy winner Will Ferrell (Spirited) is in early talks to star as the NFL’s John Madden in Madden, a new film to be directed for Amazon/MGM by five-time Oscar nominee David O. Russell (American Hustle), multiple sources tell Deadline.
UK director Molly Manning Walker’s first film How To Have Sex won the top prize in Cannes Un Certain Regard on Friday evening.
Uk director Molly Manning Walker’s How To Have Sex won the top prize in Cannes Un Certain Regard on Friday evening.
With the Cannes Film Festival heading towards its conclusion on Saturday, the first awards are starting to trickle out. Sidebar Critics’ Week, which is devoted to first and second features, closed this evening, honoring Amanda Nell Eu’s debut Tiger Stripes with its Grand Prize. (Scroll down for the full list of winners).
Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent “Tiger Stripes,” the debut feature of Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu, won the Grand Prize at Cannes’ Critics Week, the Cannes sidebar dedicated to first or second films. The prize was awarded by a jury presided over by Audrey Diwan, the Venice prizewinning director of “Happening.” The French Touch Jury Award went to Belgian director Paloma Sermon-Daï’s “It’s Raining in the House,” a film about adolescence, while the Revelation prize from the Louis Roederer Foundation was handed out to Jovan Ginic, the actor of Vladimir Perisic’s “Lost Country.” The SACD prize, meanwhile, went to “Le Ravissement” by Iris Kaltenbäck.
Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Live sports streaming service DAZN and social analytics firm Videocites have forged a partnership to fight rampant sports content piracy in the social media sphere. Dubbed “The Netflix of Sports,” DAZN is a leading premium live sports platform with a footprint comprising Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Japan, Canada, U.S. and the U.K. The company boasts that Videocities’ cutting-edge technology will now enable DAZN to automatically remove 98% of the thousands of pirated streams detected on social media within minutes with unprecedented efficiency, it said in a statement. NBA Equity is an investor in Videocites which has several offices around the world, including in Tel Aviv and one recently opened in New York.
EXCLUSIVE: France tv distribution has launched sales on French director Benoît Jacquot’s upcoming crime thriller Belle starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Guillaume Canet.
The CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator today announced the projects that will take part in the sixth edition of the prestigious training program for women-identifying nonfiction filmmakers.
Godard speaks! Again. Quite rightly there’s a lot of hoopla about the world premiere of a 20-minute trailer the late cinema legend Jean-Luc Godard made for a feature film that will never exist: Phoney Wars.
Mediawan has been shaking the foundations of the film and TV world in France and Europe since it was launched in 2015 by producer Pierre-Antoine Capton, billionaire entrepreneur Xavier Niel and financier Matthieu Pigasse.
Carole Horst How did John Cameron Mitchell become the head of this year’s Queer Palm award jury in Cannes? “Sexual favors,” he quips. While the director of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” (which played out of competition at Cannes) is joking, sexuality is at the heart of one of the world’s most prestigious LGBTQ+ film awards. And with more anti-queer legislation being enacted around the world than at any time in recent memory, the attention it brings to films that humanize this scapegoated population is arguably more important than ever. “The Queer Palm, the festival and any awards help to dignify work, so that it often can be distributed and sometimes celebrated in its own queer-phobic country,” says Mitchell, who helped start a queer dance night at the American Pavilion in 2004 and DJs when he’s in town. “[The trans-themed] ‘Joyland’ was banned in Pakistan until it got a lot of attention in the press, and [the government felt] that the ban was not worth the bad attention.” His fellow jurors are actress/director Isabel Sandoval, actress Louise Chevillotte, director Zeno Graton and film critic Cédric Succivalli, who’ll reveal the winner at a ceremony and party on May 26.