Women Protestors Storm Cannes Premiere of ‘Holy Spider’ With Smoke Devices

Austin Butler and Tom Hanks suit up sharp for the premiere of their new film, Elvis, held at BFI Southbank on Tuesday night (May 31) in London, England.

Naman Ramachandran Streamer and distributor MUBI has acquired Ali Abbasi’s Cannes Film Festival competition title “Holy Spider” for the U.K., Ireland, Latin America and Malaysia. The film will be released theatrically followed by an exclusive MUBI streaming release. The film follows family man Saeed as he embarks on his own religious quest — to “cleanse” the holy Iranian city of Mashhad of immoral and corrupt street prostitutes.

MUBI has acquired rights to Cannes hit Holy Spider for the UK, Ireland, LatAm and Malaysia.

Cannes Film Festival.Members of the production team for “Butterly Vision,” by Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechni, protested the ongoing war in Ukraine while on the red carpet Wednesday.In front of Salle Debussy, the second-largest theater in Cannes, the team — including producers Darya Bassel and Yelizaveta Smit, plus actress Rita Burkovska — held a banner that read, “Russians kill Ukrainians. Do you find it offensive or disturbing to talk about this genocide?”The sirens heard on the red carpet stairs were meant to symbolize air raids in Ukraine, while the protestors held signs that read “sensitive content” over their faces.Not only were they demonstrating the ongoing devastation in Ukraine, but they were also attempting to show the extent of Russian censorship.The film “Butterfly Vision” explores a similar idea, albeit in a fictional world.

The cast of Elvis has arrived for the premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival!

Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, and Olivia DeJonge headlined the star-studded premiere for the upcoming Elvis Presley biopic at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday. The group was also joined by the singer’s ex-wife, Priscilla Presley. On the red carpet, Luhrmann showed off a flashy Elvis belt buckle to an impressed Butler. The group was also peppered with a long list of other stars showing their support, including Shakira, Sharon Stone, Ricky Martin, Kylie Minogue, Maye Musk, Jwan Yosef, Winnie Harlow, Shanina Shaik, Elsa Hosk, Candice Swanepoel, Stella Maxwell, Adriana Lima, and Andre Lemmers. Team #Elvis has entered the building.

review of the film for TheWrap, Ben Croll wrote that Abbasi with “Holy Spider” turns the murder thriller “upside down, telling a story where the killer’s identify is never in doubt and his intentions are always crystal clear, and where the greatest source of tension comes from wondering whether anyone in power will lift a finger to stop him.”Abbasi wrote “Holy Spider” with Afshin Kamran Bahrami. Sol Bondy and Jacob Jarek produced the film.

EXCLUSIVE: Utopia has finalized its North American deal for Cannes Competition pic Holy Spider, the noir thriller from Danish-Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi. We told you the deal was all but there a couple of days ago.

Naomi Campbell looks amazing on the red carpet at the premiere of Decision To Leave during the 2022 Cannes Film Festival on Monday (May 23) in Cannes, France.

Kristen Stewart just gave us another great red carpet moment!

A drastic departure from his prior films “Border” and “Shelley,” Ali Abbasi’s newest film, “Holy Spider,” draws inspiration from the 2000-2001 crimes and subsequent trial of Saeed Hanaei (played here by Mehdi Bajestani), a war veteran-turned-serial killer in the Iranian city of Mashhad who murdered 16 sex workers, claiming that he was cleansing the holy city of sinners and corruption in the name of Islam.

Forbes). “I know we are human beings and that we are very complicated, and the power of art is that it knows no color. Because human beings, when they sit and watch art they want to feel less alone.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefIranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi insists that his Cannes competition film “Holy Spider” is not intended to be a controversial truth telling. Rather, he is telling the truth through a fictional interpretation of real events. The film chronicles a killing spree in the streets of the religious city of Mashhad, where 16 prostitutes were found dead between 2000 and 2001.“I am not a big fan of serial killers or serial killer movies,” Abbasi said May 23 at the Cannes Film Festival.

“We didn’t do the movie to highlight women’s conditions in Iran, we didn’t do the movie to do activist work,” exclaimed Swedish-Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi about his latest in competition Cannes Film Festival title, Holy Spider at the pic’s press conference this morning.

EXCLUSIVE: Holy Spider, the Ali Abbasi-directed Iranian serial killer thriller, is nearing a deal for U.S. rights with Utopia, the U.S. sales and distribution firm owned by Robert Schwartzman and Cole Harper. The provocative Cannes Competition film premiered today on the Croisette to strong applause.

Ramin Setoodeh Executive Editor“Holy Spider,” a gritty drama about a real-life Iranian serial killer, stunned the Cannes Film Festival at its premiere on Sunday afternoon, earning a thunderous seven-minute standing ovation and bringing a jolt of electricity to what’s been a sleepy festival so far.The film, from Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi (“Border”), chronicles a killing spree in the streets of the religious city of Mashhad, where 16 prostitutes were found dead from 2000 to 2001.  A local journalist, Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), is trying to crack the case as she grows frustrated by the police’s apathy toward finding the murderer. But in one of many twists in this drama, the identity of the serial killer is revealed early on — he’s a war veteran named Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani), a seemingly normal family man who spends his nights picking up women on his motorcycle and brutally strangling them in his home as a religious cleansing ritual.

Sometimes it hardly matters whether we know a story is based on truth or not. Watching Ali Abbasi’s thunderously damning Holy Spider, on the other hand, it drives a wedge into your mind knowing that a serial killer really did terrorize the Iranian holy city of Mashhad in the early 2000s, that he killed 16 street prostitutes, that there were police who conspired to help him escape and that there were people in Iran — a lot of people, he keeps assuring his family — who were on the murderer’s side. He was doing God’s work.

stormed the Cannes red carpet donned in body paint to disrupt the “Three Thousand Years of Longing” premiere, a new protest erupted at the start of the red carpet for competition title “Holy Spider,” in which a group of women held smoke bombs and a massive poster — though this time the demonstration appears to have been pre-planned. The group involved in the demonstration is Les Colleuses, a guerilla feminist movement in France.

Cannes has had another protest on the red-carpet, a couple of days after a naked woman demonstrated against violence towards women in Ukraine.

Christopher Vourlias Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s latest documentary, “The Natural History of Destruction,” bows May 23 in the Cannes Premiere section of the Cannes Film Festival. The director returns to the Croisette one year after his last feature, “Babi Yar.