Tag: Entertainment-HollywoodReporter

Onstage comments at this year’s Berlinale awards ceremony, which saw filmmakers call out the German and Israeli governments for the “genocide in Gaza,” have drawn a political backlash in Germany.

Syrian-Palestinian director Abdallah Al-Khatib, winner of the Berlinale Perspectives section for his drama Chronicles of a Siege, said the current German government were “partners in the genocide in Gaza by Israel” and noted that “the long awaited day is coming, and when people ask you what happened, tell them: Palestine remembers. We will remember everyone who stood with us, and we will remember everyone who stood against us, against our right to live with dignity, or who choose silence or choose to be silent.”

The comments prompted German environment minister Carsten Schneider to leave the gala in protest. In a statement, a spokesperson of the minister said Schneider “considers these statements unacceptable and therefore left the event during the speech.”

Chronicles of a Siege is an episodic drama following the stories of a Palestinian population under siege amid the ruins of a destroyed city. The city is never named but it bears a strong resemblance to Gaza.

Lebanese director Marie-Rose Osta, whose film Someday a Child won the Golden Bear for best short film, also used the stage for a political statement, denouncing Israeli bombings in her home country and what she described as a “collapse of international law” in the region.

“In reality children in Gaza, in all of Palestine and in my Lebanon do not have superpowers to protect them from Israeli bombs,” she said. “No child should need superpowers to survive a genocide empowered by veto powers and the collapse of international law. … If this Golden Bear means anything, let it mean that Lebanese and Palestinian children are not negotiable,” she said.

Conservative politicians took to the tabloids and social media to snap back at the directors and the Berlinale for giving them the platform.

On X, Alexander Hoffmann, a parliamentarian for the conservative Christian Social Union party, called out what he termed the “disgusting scenes” at the awards ceremony, filled with “absolutely unacceptable…accusations of genocide, antisemitic outbursts and threats against Germany.” In his post, he said the ceremony underscored “the need to take a clear stance and classify antisemitism as particularly serious form of incitement to hatred. Whether in public, at events or online: there must be no platform for Israel haters.”

Speaking to German tabloid Bild, Berlin mayor Kai Wegner said the awards ceremony was “misused for political destruction,” depriving many artists “of their unique moment of recognition for their work.” He claimed that those expressing pro-Palestinian views at the festival, “who present themselves here as pro-Palestinian activists are not concerned with human rights. They are not concerned with dialogue, peace or nuanced criticism. They are solely concerned with hatred of Israel.”

Discussions about Israeli actions are particularly sensitive in Germany, which sees a historic responsibility to support Israel because of the legacy of the Nazi Holocaust. Following the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas, that killed more than 1,200 people with more than 250 taken as hostages, the German government said Israel has a right to self-defense. Germany has continued to sell weapons to Israel throughout the conflict, though German Chancellor Friedrich Merz did pause approvals for new exports briefly, between August and November of last year, citing concerns German-made weapons could be used in Gaza.

Merz has also criticized Israeli military action in Gaza, which has resulted in the killing of more than 70,000 people. A study published in the Lancet Global Health medical journal puts the death toll at more than 75,000, with women, children and elderly people among the majority of those killed.

“Some people told me, maybe you have to be careful before you say what I want to say now, because you are a refugee in Germany, and there are so many red lines. But I don’t care. I care about my people, about Palestine,” said Al-Khatib at the Berlinale ceremony, raising a Palestinian flag at the end of his speech.

The Berlin festival saw similar onstage proclamations and experienced a similar political backlash two years ago, when the Israeli-Palestinian documentary No Other Land won both the audience award and the best documentary prize. The film, which went on to win the best documentary feature Oscar, chronicles Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. In his acceptance speech, No Other Land‘s Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham called out what he termed the “apartheid” system in his home country, drawing outrage and accusations of “antisemitism” from (mostly conservative, mostly Christian) politicians in Germany.

This year’s Berlinale was political from start to finish. Jury president Wim Wenders became the target of online outrage after saying, in response to a press conference question on Gaza, that filmmakers “have to stay out of politics.”

At the awards ceremony on Saturday, Wenders tried to strike a conciliatory tone, saying the disputes were largely do to an “artificial discrepancy” between “the language of cinema,” which he described as “empathetic,” and the “effective” language of social media. “Activists are fighting, mainly on the internet, for humanitarian causes, namely the dignity and protection of human life. These are our causes as well, as the Berlinale films clearly show,” said Wenders. Speaking to the activists, he added “Most of us filmmakers applaud you. All of us applaud you. You do necessary and courageous work. But does it need to be in competition with us? Do our languages need to clash?”

Contacted by The Hollywood Reporter, the Berlinale said it would respond on Tuesday.

The classic PBS children’s show Reading Rainbow is officially back, with the series securing a 24-episode pickup.

Sony Pictures Television and Buffalo Toronto Public Media announced the pickup Monday.

Mychal Threets, known as Mychal the Librarian on social media, will return as host, with Sesame Street and Ms. Rachel veteran Kristen McGregor joining the show as executive producer and showrunner.

The show was revived last year with four digital episodes (20 years after the original incarnation hosted by LeVar Burton signed off the air) as a series for the Sony-owned YouTube channel KudZuko, garnering some 4.8 million views.

While KidZuko will continue to get exclusive shortened episodes of the show, SPT is taking it to market, seeking to sell the 24-episode season to a TV network or streaming service. The company says talks are already underway.

The four-episode revival featured guest appearances from Rylee Arnold (Dancing with the Stars), Ezra Sosa (Dancing with the Stars), Bellen Woodard (author for the children’s book “More Than Peach”), and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear), with Jamie Chung, Gabrielle Union, Adam DeVine, John Legend, and Chrissy Teigen among the celebrities narrating books featured in the show.

The new season will feature many more celebrities and books, SPT says.

In addition to McGregor, the series is executive produced by Michael Davies (Jeopardy!) for Sony’s Embassy Row, Tom Calderone and Nancy Hammond for Buffalo Toronto Public Media.

The revival also marks something of a win for public media, after funding for the Corporate for Public Broadcasting was cut by the Trump administration last year. The Buffalo, New York-based public media station will benefit from having Reading Rainbow revived, providing a new revenue source once a buyer is found.

“When I saw the response to the relaunch of Reading Rainbow and the enthusiasm for Mychal as host, it was clear there is a passionate audience that truly values educational children’s programming,” said Michael Davies, executive producer and president of Embassy Row. “This series offers more than entertainment—it empowers viewers through reading, which feels especially critical at a time when literacy rates are in historic decline. I’m incredibly excited to welcome Kristen and her expertise as we continue to evolve the show and discover what new magic Reading Rainbow can bring.”

“We’ve been working for several years to bring Reading Rainbow back, and Michael Davies and Embassy Row have been the ideal partners to help make that vision a reality,” added Tom Calderone, CEO and president of Buffalo Toronto Public Media. “Seeing the impact these first four episodes have already had confirms that the timing is right — and that evolving the series for today’s audiences is both necessary and meaningful.”

For Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, directors of the Oscar- and Annie Awards-nominated animated short film The Girl Who Cried Pearls, one man’s trash became miniature set materials for their stop-motion film that captures Montreal in the present and at the dawn of the 20th century.

“People don’t necessarily appreciate when something is broken or dirty, it isn’t only that; it speaks to a history as it seems to carry, locked inside of itself, memories of another time,” Szczerbowski tells THR about recycling street waste to bring texture and authenticity to a tiny real-world set, where in reality, everything is fake.

“There are no real, found locations. The light is not coming from the sun. Everything is a facsimile. So the more real material you stick into the image, the more it subconsciously works on an audience to make you forget about that illusion and buy it as reality,” he adds.

Such trickery to assign great value to low-worth materials also underpins the surprise ending for The Girl Who Cried Pearls, which follows a poor boy falling in love with a girl overwhelmed by sorrow to the point her tears turn into pearls. The boy collects and sells the pearls for gain to a ruthless pawnbroker, even as he must choose between love or fortune. The film was nominated in the best short subject category, but lost to Snow Bear.

The National Film Board of Canada filmmakers also opted to digitally replace the mouths of their hand-sculpted puppets to seamlessly match the sound of their dialogue and narration.

“If it felt like they were CG mouths on top of a handcrafted puppet, then the whole illusion, the whole romance of stop-motion, of handcrafted work, would be shattered,” Lavis explains.

And to avoid the appearance of simple wooden dolls as characters, Lavis and Szczerbowski had the heads of their puppets designed to look like old wood with multilayered oil painting that in reality are silicon molds placed on white plastic.

The Montreal filmmakers also eschewed traditional storyboards for their animated film in favor of actors being invited into a studio to help shape their evolving script.

During rehearsals with handheld cameras and angles, the actors were encouraged to capture with high-energy gestures and behaviors how the stop-motion puppets may eventually be shown in motion at 24 frames per second from their miniature set.

“We don’t treat those actors like puppets. We want our puppets to act like people, and the best way to make that happen is to work with great performances,” Lavis adds of the actors being encouraged to be loose and playful in the studio, noting that the stop-motion animation to follow, by contrast, would be precise and painstaking.

The animated short features Colm Feore as the narrator, with Patrick Watson doing the music and Brigitte Henry serving as artistic director.

The Oscar nomination for The Girl Who Cried Pearls marks the second for Lavis and Szczerbowski, after their 2007 short Madame Tutli-Putli earned them their first. And, as with their first trip to the Oscars, they feel like winners already.

“We didn’t come home from the last Oscars we went to as people who lost. We accomplished something beyond our wildest dreams by even being invited,” Szczerbowski says.

Lavis adds that they want to represent their country and the National Film Board of Canada, which has put its faith in their animated short films, and the tight creative community in Montreal from which they draw inspiration and collaborators.

“This is one of those cities that should exist in the world’s imagination, and one of our goals is to add a tiny bit of mythology to the streets that we walk through, the way that Hans Christian Andersen mythologized Copenhagen or the way New York romanticizes itself,” says Lavis.

This story appeared in the Feb. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

BBC Studios CEO Tom Fussell and Zai Bennett, CEO and chief creative officer of BBC Studios Productions, discussed tariff talk by U.S. President Donald Trump, mega-consolidation, including the planned Netflix-Warner Bros. Discovery deal, the growth of the company’s U.S. streaming business, and the Bluey movie.

They spoke to the press on the first day of the 50th annual BBC Studios Showcase in London. BBC Studios, the commercial arm of British broadcaster BBC, is known for such hit franchises as animated powerhouse Bluey, Netflix’s Baby Reindeer, legal drama The Split and its upcoming spin-off The Split Up, and such natural science hits as Walking With Dinosaurs, and it recently unveiled new shows to mark broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough’s 100th birthday on May 8.

“We have seen no impact” from Trump tariff talk, Fussell said when asked about any possible fallout, also lauding the continuing popularity of BBC News in the U.S. He didn’t discuss Trump’s lawsuit against BBC News, simply touting the resilience of the BBC brand and saying “we are not seeing any changes.”

Asked about Netflix-WBD, he said “we are well diversified, and obviously, you can only control what you can control, so you focus on your priorities, and our priority is carrying the transformation and the growth in the areas we’ve got.” He emphasized though that “no doubt, … people have talked about challenging markets and the rest of it, and our view going forward is that the market growth is not going to be anything like what it had been in the [past] five years.”

Continued Fussell: “And when you start seeing rumors upon rumors about takeovers and consolidation, that normally is testament to the fact there aren’t huge amounts of growth in the market, because everyone’s looking for … synergies. But we know what we’re doing. We know where we want to be investing in our global expansion of our studio.”

In that context, he also highlighted that BBC Studios was “a growing business that’s transforming,” with revenue up 55.7 percent over the last four years.

Following TV market challenges, Bennett on Monday suggested that “there are definitely green shoots of recovery,” sharing that “Paramount is back in the market, spending money,” among other things. But he reiterated that things are “definitely not” expected to return to the highs of the past five years but play out in a new normal range.

Fussell suggested though that he felt the business would be “talking about striving again,” from scripted to unscripted and, vitally, kids programming.

Mentioning the 2019 BBC Studios deal with what was then Discovery to take full control of UKTV’s entertainment channels, including Dave, Gold, and Drama, as well as a 2024 deal with ITV that gave the company full control of streamer BritBox International, Fussell also signaled that BBC Studios could also strike more acquisitions of its own. He said it would “carry on investing organically and maybe inorganically.”

Bennett, who started his role in late 2024, similarly noted that BBC Studios Productions is seeing “solid organic growth and investment” and “looking for inorganic growth in some territories,” mentioning the rest of Europe, the Middle East and Africa as one possible region for deals.

Fussell added that there “are opportunities for inorganic growth in streaming across the genres,” adding: “I think we have a right, as the home of British streaming, to grow that even further.” But he emphasized that “these opportunities take time,” concluding: “We are very judicious with how we spend that investment.”

Fussell on Monday also touted the success of streaming services BritBox and BBC Select, which focuses on documentaries, in North America. “Last week was the fifth birthday of BBC Select, and BBC Select is now the third-largest factual SVOD in the States, and we’re really proud of that,” he said. He also touted the growth of BritBox and its launch of a premium tier.

Among content trends, Bennett was asked about the growth of microdramas, saying that “we’re looking at that right now” and signaling the company could talk about this space more in the coming months. He added: “We’re certainly experimenting.”

Questioned about audience and buyer appetite, he sees for escapist content versus programming dealing with the world’s cultural and political divisions, Bennett said BBC Studios Productions looks at market needs and is “leaning into specificity and Britishness” more than anything else.

Current and old content favorites also drew reporter questions on Monday. Could motoring show Top Gear return to U.K. screens? Replied Bennett: “Never say never.”

Of course, the upcoming Bluey: The Movie was also a talking point. Fussell shared that he just visited creator Joe Brumm in his studio in Brisbane, calling the experience “an absolute pleasure,” and saying that the work on the film was going well. But “I can’t say anything” more, he emphasized. And Bennett shared: “We’ve seen bits of it, and it looks amazing.”

Beyond the fact that they both technically belong in the genre of “sports,” the Jewish table-tennis-hustler film Marty Supreme and the spicy gay hockey TV series Heated Rivalry seem to have almost nothing in common.

And yet Josh Safdie’s Oscar contender and Jacob Tierney’s TV phenomenon have riled up parts of their audience in similar ways. Both works, critics say, display uncomfortable stereotypes that have been used to marginalize their respective Jewish and gay populations for a very long time.

In the case of Marty Mauser, it’s the persona of a grasping, lying shyster who will do anything and sell anyone out for money. For Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander, it’s a depiction as psych-textbook caricatures, the two muscularly embodying the narcissistic, decadent compulsion for sex with zero attachment and intimacy. And so for all their acclaim and popularity, the pieces have been slammed by these critics for playing to ugly tropes. Further complicating the sense of betrayal is the fact that Marty Supreme was created by Safdie, who is Jewish, and Heated Rivalry was created by Tierney, who is gay.

Nor do the characters play to affectionate Hollywood type in any way. Marty is not cultured, colorful and neurotic with a penchant for Yiddish outbursts. Ilya and Shane are not sensitive, stylish and creative and don’t have a drag scene. Instead, Marty lies to everyone, holds a co-worker at gunpoint for his pay and, infamously, makes a shocking wisecrack about Auschwitz. Meanwhile, over years of random, closeted and compulsive encounters, Shane and Ilya barely exchange pleasantries during their hot, impersonal hookups, even calling each other by their last names — half bros, half hos. These are not good Woody Allen Jews or good Tony Kushner gays.

For critics, these characters evoke a long history of pop-cultural stereotypes. From the predatory Jewish villain Svengali (made famous in the 19th century French best-seller Trilby) to the 1991 “Big Five” Oscar winner Silence of the Lambs (with its predatory queer villain Buffalo Bill), there’s a whole century of coded prejudice that hasn’t exactly vanished from the world.

But people focusing on these kinds of inhuman portrayals might consider what Safdie and Tierney are doing differently. Both Marty Supreme and Heated Rivalry cleverly use these aspects as starting points to slowly draw back the curtains on their characters’ stifled humanity.

After a grueling 135 minutes of danger-dealing (in which he finally gets to the world championships and scores a minor moral victory), Marty limps back humbled to New York and goes straight to the hospital to see his newborn son and his (married) girlfriend Rachel, whispering “love you” to her sleeping form, a selfless moment of redemption.

And in Heated Rivalry, after eight years of brief hotel hookups, Shane spends the day at Ilya’s house. Ilya makes Shane a tuna melt, and, for the first time, they use each other’s first names. When Shane can’t handle it, we see the damaged humanity under the hotness.

It’s as though both these narratives have set up a long con, where the stereotyped behavior acts as a form of misdirection — and it pays off with a sudden release when the characters’ latent humanity is revealed. This is as much a physics experiment as a drama: Tension is stored as stereotype and ratcheted up, then finally discharged as complexity.

This technique can be seen in another Oscar contender, Sentimental Value, in which Stellan Skarsgard’s distant father is finally revealed as scarred rather than selfish.

What all these works suggest is that stereotypes don’t need to be avoided — they can be used strategically as powerful ingredients for characters to defy.

Yes, there’s a lot to be said for humanity, empathy and the rest of today’s values checklist. But as Marty, Ilya and Shane make clear, that’s not always an inclusive spectrum. Real people are complicated and selfish. Real people want sex and success. Everyone wants to win, not just people stuck in “the patriarchy.” Instead of policing representation as some perfect singular, we should be trying to make it as plural as possible. Both Heated Rivalry and Marty Supreme prove that complicated characters and even stereotypes can be a dramatic vehicle for helping us see and reconcile all kinds of conflicting human urges. Actors want to show range. The world does, too.

This story appeared in the Feb. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.