The nominations are out for the 44th annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards, and CNN leads the way with a commanding 45 noms ahead of Vice (30) and ABC and PBS (26 each). See the list of nominees in all 62 categories below or click here.
09.07.2023 - 20:35 / variety.com
Stephen Rodrick Some things are best in small doses. Cheesecake and Ketamine come to mind. The more-is-not-necessarily-better conundrum confronts the creators of “Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello Story,” a Vice News documentary about the punk folk band Gogol Bordello and Eugene Hütz, the band’s charismatic lead singer. Hütz also doubles as a Ukrainian activist/raconteur/resident deep thinker. He can be a lot. Audiences’ appreciation of the doc will depend on their patience with Hütz, a man whose intentions are good even if his volume is always set to 11. Directors Nate Pommer and Eric Weinrib have the difficult task of trying to explain a 24-year-old cult band in 99 minutes. It is very much an immigrant story. There’s an early shot of Hütz swaggering onstage with the band — a mélange of violinists, drummers and guitarists — and baptizing the audience with his beer.
But soon the film drops into Hütz’s origin story. He was born in Ukraine during the last decades of the repressive and rotting Soviet regime. He had the double strike of being both Ukrainian and Roma. Hütz remembers only three colors: the gray of the buildings, the yellow of the sand needed to build more gray buildings and the blue sky above. His first real introduction to Ukrainian music and dance happens when his family flees Kyiv for Western Ukraine after the Chernobyl meltdown. He talks in wonder of the “flamboyant” customs of his countrymen who existed a few hundred miles further away from Moscow’s reach. The Soviet Union’s fall allowed his family to emigrate, first to Europe and then to Burlington, Vt., where Hütz made his first friends at a record shop by simply repeating the name of punk bands, Dead Kennedys and The Ramones. In his 20s, he
The nominations are out for the 44th annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards, and CNN leads the way with a commanding 45 noms ahead of Vice (30) and ABC and PBS (26 each). See the list of nominees in all 62 categories below or click here.
Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Beta Film has sold more than 100 hours of drama series to PBS Distribution-backed Walter Presents for the U.S., and Channel 4-backed Walter Presents for the U.K. Five seasons of Italy’s gritty crime series “Rocco Schiavone” as well as Canadian mystery dramas “The Wall – The Chateau Murder” and “The Wall – The Orchard” will be available in both territories.
Addie Morfoot Contributor A documentary about women who accused Louis C.K. of sexual harassment and the consequences those accusations had on their careers is one of 22 documentaries from 12 countries heading to the 2023 Toronto Intl. Film Festival.
There was a theft on the Beetlejuice 2 set!
It’s Day 11 of the SAG-AFTRA strike and Day 84 of the WGA strike.
Marcus Rashford has been a mainstay at Manchester United for the last seven years and is set to remain so for the next five at least.
Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Recently restored versions of William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist,” Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “One From the Heart” feature in the Venice Classics section of the 80th Venice Film Festival. The lineup of recently restored films in Venice Classics, which is curated by the festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera in collaboration with Federico Gironi, was unveiled on Friday. “The Exorcist” is screened, 50 years after it was produced by Warner Bros., alongside Disney’s “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” starring Shirley Temple and directed by “the prolific and sometimes brilliant” Allan Dwan, to mark the Hollywood studios’ 100th anniversaries.
Oppenheimer,” a brainy, brassy yet, on the whole, majestic historical biopic-thriller about the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Brent Lang Executive Editor Joshua Zeman’s latest feature documentary “Checkpoint Zoo,” an inspiring story that unfolds in a war-torn part of the world, has wrapped principal photography. The film tells the story of the daring rescue of over 5,000 animals that were trapped in a wildlife park behind enemy lines during the early days of the Russian-Ukrainian War. “Checkpoint Zoo” was produced by Zeman and Zach Mortensen for Ghost Robot, with Ian Davies and Torquil Jones for Noah Media Group, which is also financing the project. UTA Independent Film Group has signed on to lead worldwide sales of the picture. In the early days of the war, a beloved animal refuge known as Feldman Ecopark, located in Ukraine’s second largest city, was in a precarious position. On one side of the park was the invading Russian army; on the other sat the Ukrainian front line. With thousands of animals trapped with little food and water, a group of men and women risked their lives to bring them to safety.
The Chernobyl disaster is regarded as the world's worst-ever civil nuclear incident.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin has seen his State TV channel experience a humiliating primetime hack, in which millions of his people were warned “the hour of reckoning has come.”
Peta Murgatroyd and Maksim Chmerkovskiy are best known as professional dancers on ABC's hit reality competition, their love story began on a different stage entirely — Broadway. The couple began as close friends over a decade ago while performing together in New York, and they remained friends for years before things turned romantic while behind the scenes at Chmerkovskiy and Murgatroyd's romance quickly became a fan favorite on the ballroom floor and off. They performed together for over five years at andlaunched a touring production of their own in 2018 while remaining key figures of the community. ET takes a look at their love story below. Before their time together on Murgatroyd and Chmerkovskiy both worked as dancers on the Broadway production a live dance show inspired by a performance at Elton John's 50th birthday party.Chmerkovskiy, originally from Ukraine, had already been in the U.S.
William Earl The SAG-AFTRA strike has shut down scores of film and TV productions as actors picket. While many sets had already shut down as a result of the WGA writers strike, this will effectively slow Hollywood down to a crawl as negotiations continue. Read Variety‘s list of newly-halted productions below, which will be updated throughout the strike. Beetlejuice 2 The Tim Burton production, with Michael Keaton reprising his role as the crude ghost, is almost done with shooting in London, but was still expected to film one more sequence in Vermont when the strike took place.
Addie Morfoot Contributor On the evening of Feb. 23, 2022, a small team of AP correspondents including Mstyslav Chernov headed to Mariupol. They pulled into the Ukrainian port city at 3:30 a.m. Russia invaded Mariupol one hour later. As the only international reporters in the city, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and his team captured what later became defining images of the war: dying children, mass graves, and the bombing of a maternity hospital. Chernov, Vasilisa Stepanenko and Evgeniy Maloletka initially went to Mariupol to capture what they thought would be news segments. But after escaping the city, Chernov knew that he needed to take the harrowing footage he and his team had captured and make a documentary. The result is “20 Days in Mariupol,” a 94-minute film that is both devastating and riveting. Scenes include a mother weeping over the body of her four-year-old, who died from shelling wounds, as well as a father crying that his teenage son’s legs were torn off by a bomb while playing soccer outside a school.
Over one thousand Ukrainian refugees who have been living on a ship in Edinburgh have finally been rehomed. MS Victoria has been docked in Leith Harbour for a year to accommodate the Ukrainians who fled their home country after it was invaded by Russia.
Nick Holdsworth Eugene Hütz, founder and frontman with U.S. gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello, would likely to have ended up a painter wearing “dirty pants and long hair” had his parents not left the Soviet Union when he was 16. “I would probably have become a painter, as there was more of a path paved in that in my family,” he says. “I was drawing most of my childhood and my uncle – Mikhail Mykolayev – is a pretty well-known painter who still lives in Kyiv.” Fresh from playing a brief, impromptu solo guitar gig at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, following the international premiere of a new documentary about the band, “Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello Story,” Hütz fits the bill, although his khaki cargo pants are not paint spattered.
“I don’t know why I was fired, I really don’t,” declared Tucker Carlson today on his sudden departure from the airwaves of Fox News on April 24. “I’m not angry about it,” the former primetime host told pal Russell Brand. “I honestly don’t know.”
The One Show viewers have been told what they are entitled to if their flight is suddenly cancelled. It comes after holidaymakers have been warned this week of flight delays over the summer.
Brent Lang Executive Editor A temporary protective order in Massachusetts against Ezra Miller, the embattled star of “The Flash,” was lifted on Friday. Miller was accused of acting inappropriately around the 12-year old child of Shannon Guin, a Massachusetts woman, and of menacing her family. “I’m encouraged by today’s outcome and very grateful at this moment to everyone who has stood beside me and sought to ensure that this egregious misuse of the protective order system was halted,” Miller wrote in a statement on Instagram. Miller, who uses they/them pronouns and identifies as nonbinary, never faced criminal charges. In their Instagram statement, Miller argued that the protective order issued against them was being “used as weapons by those seeking attention or fleeting tabloid fame or some sort of personal vengeance when there are people in true and dire need of these services.”
“There’s something I have to tell you:” As an 18-year-old undergraduate at Harvard, Ted Hall was recruited to help Robert Oppenheimer and his team develop a weapon that would alter the course of human history. When the Atomic Bomb was detonated twice the following year, over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hall did not share in his colleagues’ enthusiasm for the Manhattan Project.