Jessica Kiang Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Jessica Kiang The man is not in black. He is in nothing at all. Wearing his nakedness calmly, like a fact so obvious it requires no explanation, an 86-year-old Chinese male stands up slowly in the otherwise empty gallery of Paris’ famous Bouffes du Nord theatre. The artfully peeling, faded-grandeur interior, dim but for gathered pools of warm light, booms with the sound of his wooden seat swinging back into place, then with the creaks of the floorboards under his bare feet. This is the arresting opening to Chinese documentarian Wang Bing’s other Cannes 2023 film, “Man in Black,” a project so diametrically different from his Competition entry “Youth: Spring” that it feels hard to credit them both to the same person. Perhaps we shouldn’t. This brief but profoundly moving film represents such a consummate collaboration between director, cinematographer, editor and subject that its authorship could be recorded as a four-way tie. 

The Flats, a film about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, won the top award at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen at a Friday night, earning a €10,000 prize. 

Lise Pedersen The ongoing war in Gaza was high on the agenda at the awards ceremony of CPH:DOX, Copenhagen’s international documentary film festival, with numerous filmmakers calling for a ceasefire in Gaza as they picked up their awards. Opening the ceremony following a concert by the locally-based Middle East Peace Ensemble, artistic director Niklas Engstrøm told the crowd gathered in Copenhagen’s historic Kunsthal Charlottenborg, which is home to the fest throughout the 10-day event: “It felt right to start with this basic human message of hope and peace.” On the theme of conflicts past and present, Italian director Alessandra Celesia picked up the top Dox:Award for “The Flats,” a powerful, timely and haunting film about a community living in the shadow of the pain and trauma of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Superstar Japanese auteur Hamaguchi Ryusuke will unveil “Gift,” a companion piece to his recent “Evil Does Not Exist” as a one-off live performance at next month’s Hong Kong International Film Festival. Following the success of his breakout “Drive My Car,” which won the Oscar for best international feature film, Hamaguchi initially made “Gift” as a silent film project to accompany the live performance of Ishibashi Eiko, the music composer of both “Drive” and later “Evil.” From the same project, Hamaguchi also derived “Evil Does Not Exist,” which then went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Venice International Film Festival.

Savina Petkova A vampire with qualms about killing to survive is no longer a figure exclusive to the “Twilight” franchise, when a Canadian French-language debut places a teenage girl in a tricky situation, torn between what the world demands of her and what she herself wants. The film’s title is eloquent enough — “Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person” — and it already won Ariane Louis-Seize the best director prize at this year’s Venice Days, and was praised for a “strong directorial vision.” The film screened as part of the main competition at the Thessaloniki Film Festival last week.

Christopher Vourlias Sofia Exarchou’s “Animal” won the Golden Alexander at the 64th Thessaloniki Film Festival on Sunday, marking the first time in 30 years that a Greek film took home the top honors at the country’s longest-running film event. Exarchou’s sophomore feature, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, was praised by Variety’s Jessica Kiang as “a poignant portrait of life amid the sequins and the seediness of a Greek resort.” The film follows a group of entertainers at an all-inclusive island resort preparing for the busy tourist season who are forced to wrestle with the dark reality that the show must go on as the sultry Mediterranean nights turn violent.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Oscar-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o is stepping into an executive producer role to support Sudan’s second-ever Academy Award international feature film submission, “Goodbye Julia.” The timely film, directed by Sudanese filmmaker Mohamed Kordofani, takes place just before the 2011 secession of South Sudan and won the Un Certain Regard section’s Prix de Liberté (Freedom Prize) at Cannes. “‘Goodbye Julia’ is a powerful representation of the conflict happening in Sudan right now, which affects millions of lives across Eastern Africa,” Nyong’o said in a statement.

Christopher Vourlias Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland has remained defiant despite a wave of vicious political attacks and online hate speech as she prepares to release her Venice Special Jury Prize-winning refugee drama “Green Border” in Poland on Sept. 22.

Jessica Kiang Check under most any post relating to the recently released trailer for Luc Besson’s “Dogman,” and you’ll find one, if not several responses riffing, to various degrees of enthusiasm, on the theme of “OMG, what if ‘Joker’ but with dogs?” That rhetorical question can now be answered, following this numbskulled nonsense movie’s inexplicable Venice Competition premiere, with a resounding “If only.” The bludgeoningly obvious, creatively inert, deathly dull tale of a cross-dressing misfit in a wheelchair who favors canine company over that of humans, it is scarcely fit to lap from the same water bowl as Todd Phillips’ controversial Golden Lion winner. Even those who didn’t much like “Joker” have to admit that it did not so actively treat its audience as if they were brain dead that everyone left feeling about 30 IQ points dumber than when they went in.

Christopher Vourlias Receiving a lifetime achievement award this week at the Sarajevo Film Festival, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay teased a slew of projects currently in the pipeline, heralding her much-anticipated return to the director’s chair since wowing Cannes in 2017 with the Joaquin Phoenix-starring thriller “You Were Never Really Here.” Among them are a second collaboration with Phoenix, who earned best actor honors on the Croisette for that performance, as well as “Stone Mattress,” a revenge thriller set aboard a luxury Arctic cruise that stars Julianne Moore and Sandra Oh. There’s also “Die, My Love,” starring Jennifer Lawrence, which is based on the novel by Argentinian writer Ariana Harwicz about a woman living in isolation in rural France who loses her mind amid marriage and motherhood.

Guy Lodge Film Critic On the final weekend of a bustling 18-day event, the in-person edition of this year’s Melbourne Film Festival has drawn to a close with an awards ceremony that saw a whopping $300,000 AUD (over $191,000 USD) in prize money handed out across six categories. The biggest individual award of $140,000 AUD (nearly $90,000 USD) was presented to the winner of the fest’s international Bright Horizons competition: “Banel & Adama,” an arresting debut feature by Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy.

Ellise Shafer Sovereign has acquired the U.K. and Ireland rights to Radu Jude’s latest feature, “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” which won the special jury prize at Locarno Film Festival.

Jessica Kiang In 2008, French politician Simone Veil became only the sixth woman ever inducted into the Académie Française, an august institution tasked with the regulation of the French language. As a newly minted “immortal” — the unofficial name given to the Académie’s 40 members — she was presented with a sword that bore three engravings: the motto of France (“liberté, egalité, fraternité“), that of Europe (“Unis dans le diversité“) and her Auschwitz prisoner number, which remained tattooed on her arm until her death in 2017.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Sudanese director Mohamed Kordofani’s feature debut “Goodbye Julia,” a timely morality tale that takes place just before the 2011 secession of South Sudan and won the Un Certain Regard section’s Prix de Liberté (Freedom Prize) at Cannes, has scored a raft of sales following its launch. The first Sudanese film ever to screen in Cannes official selection, “Goodbye Julia” is the story of two women — one from the North, the other from the South — who are brought together by fate in a complex relationship that attempts to reconcile differences between northern and southern Sudanese communities in the currently war-ravaged country.

Jessica Kiang Director Kim Ki-yeol (Song Kang-ho) only needs two more days of reshoots to craft a new ending to his latest film, and it will no longer be the trashy potboiler everyone thought he was making. It will be, he declares frequently, “A masterpiece!” Director Kim Jee-woon does not seem to harbor similar aspirations for his meta-movie “Cobweb” — his loosest, least substantial and most slapdash film in quite some time — though it’s safe to say the gulf between it and masterpiece status is a little wider than a two-day reshoot could possibly bridge. A film containing another film; a filmmaker referring to the trials of a filmmaker: It’s a movie of many layers, all of them garish and goofy, none of them great.

Sophia Scorziello editor The FBI has it out for Sydney Sweeney in the trailer for “Reality,” Tina Satter’s gripping biopic-docudrama about the America intelligence whistleblower Reality Winner. The upcoming HBO film stars Sweeney as Winner, who was imprisoned for releasing classified information about Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The film also stars Marchánt Davis and Josh Hamilton. “Reality” is based on Satter’s play, “Is This a Room,” and the FBI’s transcript of their 2017 interrogation of Winner, which took place in her home just days prior to her arrest.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent “The Eight Mountains,” Belgian directors Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s Italian-language drama about friendship, mountains and growing up, scored the top prize at Italy’s 68th David di Donatello Awards. Besides winning best picture, the film also scooped statuettes for best non-original screenplay, photography and sound. Given that the directors are not Italian, it was a particularly significant victory for “Mountains,” which was praised as “quietly magnificent” by Variety critic Jessica Kiang. The film, which is currently playing well on the U.S. arthouse circuit, tracks the decades-long friendship between two Italian boys named Pietro and Bruno — one from the city, the other a shepherd boy from the Alps.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Neon has purchased North American rights to “Eileen,” an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s acclaimed novel of the same title. The movie debuted to strong reviews at Sundance, but its high price tag, said by sources to be in the range of $15 million, made it difficult for the film to score a distribution deal. It languished on the market for roughly two months as several studios kicked the tires. This despite the combined star wattage of “Jojo Rabbit’s” Thomasin McKenzie and Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway and a twisty plot. The rest of the ensemble includes Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland, and Owen Teague. William Oldroyd (“Lady Macbeth”) directs from a script by Moshfegh who adapted “Eileen” with Luke Goebel. Neon will release the film theatrically this fall. 

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Mk2 films has enlisted leading distributors around the world for “Reality,” Tina Satter’s feature debut starring Sydney Sweeney, on the heels of its buzzy world premiere at the Berlinale. The movie, which bowed in the Panorama section, stars Sweeney (“White Lotus,” “Euphoria”) as Reality Winner, a 25 year-old whistleblower who spent five years in prison during the Trump administration. A former U.S. Air Force member and National Security Agency translator, Winner was convicted for leaking a confidential report on Russian election interference to the media. The film is based on Satter’s 2019 stage play “Is This a Room” and contains verbatim dialogue from the unedited transcript of a FBI audio recording. “Reality” captures the tense and surreal 90 minutes of FBI’s interrogation with Winner at her home in 2017.

Angelique Jackson Following a buzzy world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, HBO Films has acquired the U.S. rights to the docudrama “Reality,” starring Sydney Sweeney. In the film, directed by Tina Satter, Sweeney portrays Reality Winner, a woman convicted of leaking a confidential report on Russian election interference to the media. The film contains verbatim dialogue from the unedited transcript of a FBI audio recording, capturing a tense 90 minutes as the FBI interrogates Winner at her home in 2017. The whistleblower — a former U.S. Air Force member and National Security Agency translator — was sentenced to five years in prison. Satter makes her feature directorial debut with the film, based on her 2019 stage play “Is This a Room.” She also executive produced the project and co-wrote the screenplay with James Paul Dallas.

Jessica Kiang Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, the maxim goes. And writing about “Music,” the latest beautiful and strange deep-niche arthouse artifact from uncompromising formalist Angela Schanelec, feels like a similarly doomed proposition. The limitations of language are seldom as apparent as when grappling with the silvery elisions and crisp, cryptic omissions of this glancing take on Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex.” Schanelec is unlikely to vastly expand her fanbase here, but the tiny, fervent following she has accrued over the course of now 10 fantastically intricate features may be more than ever entranced by the fertile illogic of “Music,” a postmodern expression of a premodern text. 

Shayeza Walid Acclaimed New York-based theater director Tina Satter has worked on productions on and off Broadway for more than a decade. Now, in her first ever venture into film, Satter makes her directorial debut with “Reality,” starring Sydney Sweeney, based on Satter’s play “Is This a Room.” The film premiered Saturday at the Berlin Film Festival with Variety critic Jessica Kiang calling it a “clever, gripping docudrama.” For Satter, who co-wrote the screenplay with James Paul Dallas, making this movie was always in the books. The film, based on the real-life FBI interrogation transcript of whistleblower Reality Winner, is one Satter could envision the first time she came across the documents of the conversation between Winner and the Federal Bureau.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Sundance standout film “Animalia,” by French-Moroccan filmmaker Sofia Alaoui, has been acquired for distribution across the Middle East and North Africa by Egypt’s Film Clinic, the shingle headed by producer Mohammed Hefzy. Film Clinic, a top film and TV production company that branched out into theatrical distribution in 2016, picked up “Animalia” from Paris-based sales company Totem Films. Alaoui’s genre-bending pic is the tale of a pregnant young woman in Morocco whose life is upended by an alien invasion. In her review, Variety review critic Jessica Kiang praised “Animalia” as “a compellingly different cultural and social perspective on a classic sci-fi premise.” “Alaoui, working from her own taut, confidently ambiguous script, also gets to comment on the position of women in Muslim societies and the limits of wealth and organized faith, as well as elegantly outlining the eerie experience that is suddenly finding yourself startlingly alone during a time of shared global panic,” Kiang noted.

Jessica Kiang 30 years after Japanese moviegoers first heard “The Flower of Carnage,” the theme song of Toshio Fujita’s “Lady Snowblood” sung by star Meiko Kaji, it came to mainstream Western audiences via Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill.” Kaji’s sweet, clear voice sings about a “woman who walks at the brink of life and death,” and Uma Thurman slices the top off Lucy Liu’s head, where three decades before, her song had soundtracked another grievously wounded, kimono-ed beauty whose last breath is captured in full-face close-up before she staggers to her knees in the snow. The trio of Kaji’s films, including “Lady Snowblood,” playing the Lumière Festival this week, invite us to (re)visit this fascinating icon’s work fresh from the source, and find in it a bristling, innovative vitality often absent from the many movies that cite it as an influence.  

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Prague-based sales agent Filmotor has boarded Adela Komrzy’s and Tomas Bojar’s feature documentary “Art Talent Show,” which won two awards at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in July.  After its premiere at Karlovy Vary, where it won the Grand Prix in the Proxima competition section and the FIPRESCI international critics’ award, the film’s North American rights were acquired by Film Movement.  Aero Films will release the film theatrically in the Czech Republic in October, and Film Expanded will release the film theatrically in Slovakia in the spring.

Jessica Kiang When the definitive book on dissident filmmaking is written, it will have at least several chapters and a lengthy appendix dedicated to Iran’s Jafar Panahi, who has now covertly made five astonishingly resourceful features since being banned from filmmaking by the Iranian authorities in 2010. But given those circumstances, perhaps the biggest ongoing surprise of his career has been just how lively his illegally shot films have been — even while, as metafictions, they refer continually to the hampered circumstances of their creation. “No Bears,” which premieres in competition in Venice, certainly starts in that register, with a rugpull or two and handful of seriocomic, absurdist observations on the foibles of Iranian village life. But then, as though it were anticipating the worsening political situation which culminated in Panahi’s detention in July 2022 for a six-year prison sentence, the mood darkens, prior to an ambiguous but devastating finale which seems to even include the director’s own tendency toward playfulness in its critique. If Panahi’s dissident films have to date been journeys of discovery about the subversively liberating, life-affirming power of cinema, “No Bears” is where he slams on the brakes. 

Annika Pham New Europe Film Sales has added U.K. distributor Signature Entertainment to the slew of global buyers won over by Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s “Beautiful Beings,” which has racked up awards from Poland, Bulgaria, Italy and Taiwan, since its first bow at the last Berlinale Panorama. Earlier deals were closed with the U.S. (Altered Innocence), Hungary (Vertigo), Benelux (Arti Film), Germany/Austria (Salzgeber), Spain (Filmin), and CEE (HBO).Billed by Variety reviewer Jessica Kiang as an “Icelandic coming-of age, radiant with violence and tenderness,” Guðmundsson’s drama revolves around a young boy raised by a clairvoyant mother who decides to adopt a bullied misfit into his gang of outsiders. 

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorIFC Films has set the U.S. release date for “Corsage,” whose star Vicky Krieps won the best performance prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. Marie Kreutzer’s film will have its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival has just announced that the film will screen there too.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentOne year after she dazzled at the Cannes Festival, winning its Golden Eye for best documentary for “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” Payal Kapadia’s fiction debut “All We Imagine as Light,” has attracted the most potent production partner support of any project introduced at this year’s Locarno Match Me!“Night’s” producers. Petit Chaos’ Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff  in France and Ranabir Das (also DP and editor on “Night”) at India’s Another Birth will produce “Light.”Also on board, confirmed early July, is Oliver Pere at Arte France Cinéma.  Further co-producers take in Zico Maitra and Aastha Singh (Chalk & Cheese, India), Frank Hoeve (Baldr, Netherlands), Gilles Chanial (Les Films Fauves, Luxembourg and, in the latest addition to partners, Denise Lee and Roberto Minervini (Pulpa Films, Italy).

Manori Ravindran International EditorThe Belfast Film Festival has named Variety film critic Jessica Kiang and Rose Baker as its new programmers, and has also launched an inaugural feature competition.Kiang and Baker will serve as the creative leads for this year’s BFF, which runs from Nov. 3-12.

Jessica Kiang “Okinawan kindness leaves no one behind!” goes the chirpy sign-off on a political radio commercial halfway through Japanese director Masaaki Kudo’s artful and affecting Karlovy Vary competition title, “A Far Shore.” Already it plays like the bitterest irony. Aoi, a 17-year-old mother working illegally as a nightclub hostess in Okinawa, the poorest prefecture in Japan, listens with a dissociated look in her eyes: She has been left behind by practically everyone, and while Kudo’s film is deeply compassionate toward the struggling, stubborn, subjugated teen, this is an Okinawa of precious little kindness.We first meet Aoi — rivetingly played by Kotone Hanase — at work with her lissome best friend Mio (Yumemi Ishida), also a minor, as the girls giggle, drink and flirt with a couple of guys in town for a good time.

Jessica Kiang With eternal respect to Virginia Woolf, whose “A Room of One’s Own” clearly inspires the title of Ioseb ‘Soso’ Bliadze’s beautifully articulate miniature, even before a woman needs money and her own space to be able to pursue self-fulfillment, she needs to know she needs those things. Bliadze’s superbly performed, remarkably immersive Karlovy Vary competition entry is one such story of tentative, interior emancipation, described in the tiniest arcs of change: the width of a smile, the warmth of an embrace, the directness of a gaze.

Christopher Vourlias Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s “Utama,” which won the grand jury prize in the World Cinema Dramatic competition at Sundance this year, took home top honors at the closing ceremony of the Transilvania Film Festival on Saturday night.Grisi’s feature debut tells the story of an elderly couple in the Bolivian highlands who refuse to relocate to the city despite the constant threat of drought. In a glowing review, Variety’s Peter Debruge described the film as a “sublime, quietly elegiac” character study that “looks quite unlike anything else.”“By relying on the simplicity, purity and poetry of his cinematic approach, the director takes the audience on a universal journey, talking about the essence of life, death and everything in between,” said the Transilvania jury, praising a film that “gives the audience a deep, multilayered feeling of how fragile our future is.” “Utama” was also feted with the festival’s Audience Award.

Jessica Kiang When left-wing coalition leader Gabriel Boric was elected to the Chilean premiership in 2021, he was 35 years old. When, a few months later, he was sworn in as the nation’s youngest-ever president — also the youngest state leader in the world — revered Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán was 80.

Jessica Kiang The Empress is unimpressed. Introduced to us at the beginning of Marie Kreutzer’s sneaky and terrific Un Certain Regard premiere “Corsage,” submerged in a bathtub during one of her many self-imposed endurance training rituals, Duchess Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie in Bavaria, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, is holding her breath underwater for as long as she can.

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorBig World Pictures has taken distribution rights in U.S. and Canada to Salomé Jashi’s documentary “Taming the Garden,” which competed at the Sundance Film Festival, and also played in the Forum section of the Berlinale. World sales are being handled by Toronto-based Syndicado Film Sales.In her review for Variety, Jessica Kiang described the film as “quietly magnificent and strange,” adding that it is “surreal, serene and maybe just a little bit sacred.”The opening shot of this environmental tale captures a tree as tall as a 15-story building floating on a barge across the Black Sea.