Tag: Entertainment – Variety

At MIPJunior, it’s not often that a little creeper gets put out on center-stage. But on Oct. 10, as “Migali” makes its world premiere in front of buyers from all across the globe, a tiny spider princess seems to be set on weaving webs of laughter and fun at the unmissable Cannes children’s TV market.

Produced by Adelaïde Terme (Easy Peasy Entertainment, the production/licensing arm of French Auzou Publishing Group) along with Bardaf! Productions in co-production with RTBF, Ketnet, RTS and TF1, “Migali” is a 52x11minute series centered on six-year-old Migali, a spider princess determined to become queen.

As she heads to the Royal Academy, where princes and princesses of all kingdoms learn to control their abilities, Migali brings her boundless energy and extraodinary web-weaving skills to the school, meeting a gallery of other quirky characters from all size and shapes. Facing (and, more often than not, provoking) chaos in her daily life, Migali stays happy, merry and positive, meeting each challenge as a new, fun adventure.

An adaptation of the eponymous comic book series by Alexandre Arlène and Fabien Ockö Lambert, “Migali” is directed by Cédric Frémeaux (“50/50 Heroes”). Ahead of the premiere, Frémeaux spoke with Variety about the smooth journey that has been bringing this loveable, quirky spider princess from page to screen.

“I’ve always loved animated series,” recalls the storyboard artist-turned director. “As a kid, I woke every morning eager to discover ‘Dexter’s Laboratory,’ ‘Dragonball,’ and many others. I was captivated by these worlds. Growing up, it quickly became clear to me that I wanted to work in that industry someday.”

During high school, Frémeaux found his way as an intern at Ankama, the French multimedia giant behind videogame hit “Dofus,” subsequent animated series “Wakfu” and manga hit “Radiant.” After studying animation at LISAA in Paris, he started his career as a storyboard artist, dabbling with editing and directing on trailers and teasers. “Migali” is his second series, a match made possible by Terme, who reached out to Frémeaux for this adaptation.

“She presented me Auzou’s line-up, and I immediately connected with ‘Migali,’ which turned out to be her own pick for our collaboration. What struck me with this character is how radiant and fun she was, as a heroin. With our target audience [kids 5-8], it’s very important to connect with a protagonist. And with Migali, they definitely can as she faces the sames challenges that they do.”

Migali, who Frémeaux frames as “Spiderman’s young cousin living in a world of unicorns, dragons and potions,” was brought to screen in close connection with the author duo and Terme, who saw the potential for an animated series even before the first comic was published.

Since then, Migali’s books have sold more than 150,000 copies in France, and boasts nine volumes already. This success fueled Frémeaux’s enthusiasm even more, as he prepared himself for the challenge of bringing this character to the screen.

“What I also love about ‘Migali’ is its humor, which doesn’t shy away from deeper topics that really connect with kids. Children from this age are much smart than we think, and if you’re lazy in your writing, they will see it instantly. Today, they have access to so much content. They know these narratives, and they know how it works. Instead of fighting for their attention span with fast-paced, frantic content, we chose to craft something that both takes them seriously and makes them laugh. And I think that’s key to succeeding in retaining kids’ attention today.”

Yet, as Frémeaux continued, the challenge of producing 52 episodes of 11 minutes (or as he put it, a nine-hour movie) was a huge undertaking. “Once storyboard was locked, we had to deliver a full episode’s animatic every week. And to do that, there’s only way I know: surrounding yourself with talented people who understand the project.”

Frémeaux goes even further: “My role as a director is to find people who are better than me at they own field of expertise. Once I managed to achieve that, every piece fell right into place, and the production was very smooth.” A production that was split between Caribara studios in Annecy, Paris, and Caribara Belgian subsidiary Waoooh.

“The key is these large European co-productions is to communicate constantly, and maintain overall cohesiveness throughout the whole pipeline. Animation is, at its heart, a collaborative art, and I strongly believe ‘Migali’ benefits from this collective effort. It would be a far less interesting product if I had created it alone with AI tools.”

“Migali” is AI-free, as the teams received strict instructions during this creative process. While aknowledging its uses, Frémeaux views AI technology as a tool that can’t be part of creating something. “Technology has always been part of the animation industry, which faced similar issues with the introduction of 3D, and other tools that revolutionized the medium over and over. But creativity has to remain at the center of this process, and tools can’t replace artists. Our show is made by people who asked themselves a lot of questions, who made choices in framing, staging, and poured their craft and soul in this series. And that is something that AI can’t do.”

As “Migali” premieres this afternoon, Frémeaux is eager to present this colorful, quirky character to the world. “Much like in our show, Migali is about to discover a whole new world, and I can’t wait to introduce her to global audiences. The series has a lot of potential, and we’ve only scratched the surface of Migali’s universe. There are many more paths and characters we can explore, to build beyond the Royal Academy and introduce children to this loveable IP.”

“Migali” premieres today at MipJunior, subsequently airing on TF1 and other partner broadcasters in the following months. The series is distributed internationally by Moon-Keys International Content.

On a balmy April afternoon at Abbey Road Studios in London, a 74-piece orchestra comprised of violinists, cellists, flautists and even an organ-payer, is packed into Studio One. The iconic room, which has hosted musical legends from Edward Elgar to Harry Styles, is painted “Toy Story” blue, a fitting color given the reason everyone is here today is to record the score for “Ray Gunn,” a new feature animation from Pixar legend Brad Bird, the brains behind “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles.”

The film, which has been gestating inside Bird’s mind for three decades, is not a Pixar or Disney project, however (more on which later), but a Skydance Animation production which will hit Netflix on Dec. 18 (it premieres at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 10).

Directing the orchestra at Abbey Road is Bird’s longtime collaborator, composer Michael Giacchino. “Ray Gunn” is the duo’s sixth project together since first teaming up for “The Incredibles” in 2004 and it’s one Giacchino (who won an Oscar for Pixar’s “Up” in 2010) has had more than two decades to prepare for. “We talked about this movie during ‘The Incredibles,’” the composer reveals, when we speak a few months later. “I’ve known about this for a very long time.”

Fittingly, given the key role of music in the film, Bird first conceived the idea for “Ray Gunn” – a noir detective caper set in a “Jetsons”-style retro future – after hearing The B-52s’ song “Planet Claire.” To Bird, the tune sounded like a mash-up between the theme song to 1960s detective series “Peter Gunn” and “a ’50s monster sci-fi movie,” Bird says in an interview a day before the film’s premiere. “I went, ‘This is not “Peter Gunn.” What is this?’ And then I went, ‘It’s Ray-Gun.’ And then I went, ‘Ray Gunn: It’s a guy’s name. He’s a detective, but it’s in the future.’”

But the idea got shelved as other projects got in the way: there was his sophomore Pixar project “Ratatouille” followed by “The Incredibles 2” and, in between, live action fare “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” and “Tomorrowland” as well as an abandoned attempt to adapt Will Eisner’s comic “The Spirit.” Bird, who describes his mind as a “big shop floor,” would come back and “tinker” with “Ray Gunn” every now and again, biding his time until he could bring it to life (the film fell through at other studios including Warner Bros.)

It was “Mission: Impossible” that finally paved the way for what had effectively become Bird’s real-life mission: impossible. “It was [Skydance’s] second film and everybody was happy with how it turned out,” Bird says of his turn at the helm of the Tom Cruise franchise. So when the opportunity arose to pitch the studio on another idea, “Ray Gunn” was the obvious choice. (The move also reunited Bird with Pixar co-founder John Lasseter, now the head of Skydance Animation.)

“I never pitched it at Pixar because I felt like it wasn’t in Pixar’s wheelhouse exactly,” Bird explains, referring to the studio’s reputation for catering to younger audiences than the one he’s aiming at with “Ray Gunn.” “If you put a Pixar label on it people would go, ‘Oh well, it’s meant for the same audience that these other films were meant for,’ and inevitably some of them would go, ‘Well, my little Jimmy would be unhappy at this.’”

Bird expands on the theme, pointing out there are “10 billion animated films” for children and far fewer for teenagers and adults, despite them comprising the majority of the movie-going audience. Making animated films for them “shouldn’t be a controversial decision,” Bird says, “and yet it was always treated that way by the ministers of resource allocation [at Pixar].” (He is returning to Pixar for his next project, a third “Incredibles” movie.)

Skydance had a different take. “My thought when [they] got involved was that that they’ll go with me on this slightly different audience tangent,” Bird says. “And here it is.” Skydance CEO David Ellison is a producer on “Ray Gunn”: was that in name only or was he fairly hands-on? “Well, he was more involved in the earlier days,” Bird says. “But he got — you know, his plate became very full.” The director is obliquely referring to Ellison’s recent battle to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Bird won’t be drawn on whether he thinks Ellison will stick to his promise, made as part of his bid, that Skydance will produce at least 30 theatrical films a year. “All that stuff is beyond my pay grade,” he says, sidestepping the question.

While Skydance may have become the latest lightning rod in an increasingly polarised and under pressure Hollywood, Bird is a pragmatist. Later in our conversation, he notes that after making “The Iron Giant” he took his nascent idea for “The Incredibles” to Pixar. “The crew from ‘Iron Giant,’ a lot of them were mad at me initially because they felt like I was leaving hand-drawn [animation] and going to the sexy new CG,” Bird recalls. “And I said I don’t really care about the technology part. I’m going up to Pixar because they protect storytelling.”

As it happens, protecting — versus exploiting — art is one of the themes of “Ray Gunn,” which follows the eponymous private detective (voiced by Sam Rockwell) as he uncovers a dastardly plot involving Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), a superstar singer with a huge secret.

For Giacchino, the trick to scoring a film filled with so much intrigue is keeping the viewer guessing. “Probably the second toughest thing was just making sure everything was always in alignment thematically, so that I didn’t give the audience something that they shouldn’t be thinking about,” he notes. (The actual toughest, he says, was an intimate scene between Gunn and Nova when they’re first opening up to each other. “It needed to really hit every single emotional beat in this perfect way,” he explains.)

Bird may have written “Ray Gunn” almost three decades ago but it’s themes of art, technology and corporate greed resonate now as much as they did in the late 1990s. He says the screenplay changed “less than you’d think” between that first draft and the finished movie.

“A lot of the things that people are saying that [the film] is dealing with that are contemporary right now in the headlines were in there 30 years ago,” Bird notes. “People are people and greed is greed and the flaws of people make good subject material for films. If that’s what’s driving the story, then the story’s not going to age because it’s about eternal things rather than things that were in the news last week.”

Hollywood’s appetite for Asian stories has broadened, but for Lionsgate’s Helen Lee-Kim, “every movie is still a fight.”

Lee-Kim, the studio’s president of international, made the remark at the Busan International Film Festival‘s Asian Contents & Film Market during the panel “UTA × Gold House: Hollywood & The Asian Diaspora,” moderated by Variety‘s Asia Editor Naman Ramachandran.

The discussion brought together representatives from Lionsgate, UTA, Gold House Studios, Hybe America Studios and East West Bank to examine how Asian stories can reach wider audiences without sacrificing their cultural identity.

Lee-Kim said pandemic viewing, despite the disruption COVID brought to the industry, exposed audiences to films across languages and helped make language less of a barrier. Asian content can attract viewers beyond Asia, she said, with a compelling concept remaining central to its commercial appeal.

She pointed to “Karoshi,” the action thriller starring Teo Yoo and directed by Takashi Doscher, as an example of bringing Asian talent into Hollywood filmmaking. Such projects still require studios and distributors to take individual creative bets, she said.

UTA’s David Park cited “Parasite” and “Squid Game” as breakthroughs that demonstrated possibilities once difficult to imagine. Their success has expanded the routes available to Asian filmmakers beyond moving to Hollywood and working in English, he said.

Discussing Na Hong-Jin’s Korean project “Hope,” Park highlighted its ambition, original concept and global genre appeal, with Asian actors in the leading roles alongside international stars.

Park also pointed to “Past Lives” and “Tokyo Vice” as examples of multicultural storytelling grounded in particular experiences. He expressed a desire for more such collaborations to develop organically, cautioning against allowing calculations about global audiences to dictate the work.

Christine Yi, president of Gold House Studios, said the company was looking across genres, without a prescribed category. What mattered was originality and a human, subjective perspective, she said. Its interest in new voices did not require creators to compromise or deliberately internationalize their material.

Hybe America Studios president James Shin emphasized collaboration with artists and Korean creative teams as the company builds its film and television business. Discussing “K-Pop: The Debut,” he stressed the importance of working across cultures through creative partnerships.

East West Bank executive vice president Bennett Pozil, who financed “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” pointed to growing investment activity across Southeast Asia. He cited the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) as an example of funding being channeled directly into the industry, alongside co-production investments in Singapore and Thailand.

His view on cross-border storytelling was shared across the panel as multilingual and multicultural filmmaking opens more paths to audiences.

“Don’t force anything,” Pozil said. “It has to be authentic.”

When Kim Ji-yong read the script for “Possible Love,” its emotional climax, set in a still forest by the beach, had no wind in it. Korean summer storms on location changed that.

The cinematographer behind “Decision to Leave” and “Squid Game” Season 2 asked director Lee Chang-dong to change the scene’s setup, a choice that ended with crew members shaking the trees with ropes.

Delivering a masterclass titled “Cinematography of Possible Love: Quiet, Yet Deeper” at Netflix’s Creative Asia program during the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), Kim detailed how he and Lee built the film’s look around natural light, and how much preparation that choice required.

“Possible Love,” Lee’s first film in eight years, won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at Venice last month and is South Korea’s submission for the international feature Oscar. It screens in BIFF’s Icons section ahead of its Netflix launch on Nov. 6. The drama follows two married couples from opposite ends of the economic ladder: Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and her laid-off husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and documentary filmmaker Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung).

For all the film’s naturalism, almost nothing in it was left to chance, not even the weather on the day of the climax.

The team prepared for every windy day announced by Lee’s favorite weather YouTube channel. “And every time, the director would say, ‘There is such a thing as a film ghost,’” Kim told the audience. “But that ghost only appears and helps once we have prepared thoroughly past 100% and put in all our effort.”

The ghost never showed up. Instead, everyone on set except the five or six crew members needed to shoot went into the woods, tied ropes, hung onto them and shook the trees. “The film ghost did not appear. But our staff ghosts on set created this,” Kim said, calling it one of the most memorable moments of his more than 20 years in film.

That tension between the natural and the constructed ran through the lighting too. “Ultimately, the balance was centered on supporting natural light, using film fixtures only to assist,” Kim said. In day scenes, film lights were only used where natural light fell short; at night, the team relied as much as possible on existing streetlights and lamps.

That meant designing around the locations. Lee found the site of rich husband Sang-woo’s vacation home on a real estate YouTube channel, and the team built the house during two months of pre-production, down to the direction and size of every window. “To create that kind of result requires an enormous amount of calculation, planning and preparation,” Kim said. “Compared to any film I’ve worked on, this is the one where we worried, debated and planned the most to make it appear that way.”

Kim’s credits also include effects-heavy productions such as “Ashfall.” “Being human, a certain style inevitably emerges,” he said. “For this project, I wanted to strip those away.”

“Possible Love” was shot handheld with a single camera, except for two dialogue scenes. “If it’s too close, it feels exaggerated, and if it’s too far, it feels like we are cropping, cutting up the frame and peeping in,” Kim said of the camera’s distance from the characters.

With Ye-ji’s documentary at the heart of the story, separating her footage from Lee’s film was another question. “Is making that distinction really necessary?” Kim said. “So we decided not to set it in stone.”

“I wanted to blur that boundary,” he said of the shots from the documentary team’s cameras and his own, which become harder to tell apart as the film goes on. “The reason is hard to explain in words, but it was an intuitive sense that it felt right.”

As for the forest, Kim hasn’t given up on the film ghost. “If I get another chance to work with the director in the future, I hope we can definitely meet it then,” he said.

Namkoong Sun, director of Netflix’s Korean romance “Love Untangled,” said her first commercial feature felt little different from her independent films once cameras rolled, apart from the scale. The freedom, she added, came with weight.

Namkoong was speaking at “New Voices in Film,” an industry panel staged by the Busan International Film Festival and Netflix as part of Creative Asia, alongside Ryu Eun-jung and Song Kwang-min, the married co-directors of the short “My Aunt.”

Namkoong’s first two features, “Ten Months” and “Time to Be Strong,” were independent titles released in theaters. She joined “Love Untangled” when the project and screenplay were already in place, coming on at the adaptation stage, and said the offer landed just as she wanted to find joy again after two films about thorny social problems. A little over a year passed between opening the production office and release.

“Once we went into production, it was a system where we could focus only on the film,” Namkoong said. “There may be upsides and downsides to that. I didn’t want to imagine what would happen if I failed to take responsibility within that freedom. But because that freedom was there, there were definitely things I was able to bring to it.”

Netflix staff sat in on meetings and worked inside the team throughout, she said, and the changes to the script were her own, made in service of what she saw as the film’s theme of happiness. The story is set in 1990s Busan, and with a modest budget for a period piece, the production recreated the Gwangan Bridge under construction to give the film a sense of place.

Her message to younger directors was that a director always carries responsibility for the story, “but within a space where creative freedom is guaranteed, I think you have to take that responsibility really seriously.”

Namkoong said she missed crying and laughing with audiences and cast in theaters, a ritual a streaming release doesn’t allow. “Once it was out on Netflix, people all over the world were watching it at the same time. On Twitter, Instagram, all kinds of social media, everyone flocked in and enjoyed it together, me included,” she said. “Small, sweet romance films don’t make up a big share of the Korean audience. But I was getting messages from people in Brazil and friends in Poland and Colombia saying the film was popular there.”

The film reached No. 1 in many countries and stayed in the global top 10 for more than six weeks, she said, even though it was made in Korean and is “really just a Busan story, a very local story.”

Her earlier releases had harder luck with timing. “Ten Months” premiered in the first year of the pandemic, with festivals shut and cinemas at half capacity. The press screening for “Time to Be Strong” took place on the day martial law was declared in Korea. “We did all the press, went home excited, and then that happened that night, so our news disappeared,” Namkoong said.

“My Aunt” is a 24-minute short. It follows a dog groomer looking after an abandoned dog over the course of one day, when the niece she raised 10 years earlier turns up at her door. It won three prizes at this year’s Mise-en-scène Short Film Festival, where Namkoong served on the jury. It is streaming on Netflix in Korea until December as part of the platform’s showcase of the festival’s prizewinners.

Ryu, who also plays the lead, drew on her own childhood, when she was raised by her fifth aunt, who later took in an abandoned dog. She had no plans to act in it but, having worked as an actor before, took the role herself and asked Song, her husband, to co-direct. Song handled directing on set, the pair shared storyboarding in pre-production, and Ryu led post-production. A previous collaboration had involved shouting matches over the phone, both recalled. This time, both said, speaking to each other without a filter built trust.

Song said he had first felt torn about a Netflix release, given what cinemas offer in image texture and sound, but came to see it as a stroke of luck. On a film-rating app, his previous film drew responses from about 15 people. “My Aunt” has been logged by 7,000 to 8,000 viewers, with more than 1,000 comments.

Namkoong, who was once a Mise-en-scène breakout herself, described the festival as a launchpad for the next generation of Korean directors. “These days, unlike in the past, anyone can upload their film to YouTube. You can screen it anywhere, really,” she said. “But what we do is pick out films and say, these are films that are more like real cinema, these are the films we’d like people to see, and put them on a list somewhere. When that came together with Netflix, the impact became huge.”

Asked by an audience member to name the single biggest challenge facing Korean independent filmmakers, the three directors answered in turn.

“The difficulty in the independent film world, then and now, is raising the budget. But more than that, the biggest challenge is not knowing in advance where a film will go after it’s made,” Namkoong said. “Even when a film is shown at a festival, you can’t tell whether it will get a release, because of what a release costs and various other things. We manage somehow to get it made, but there isn’t the infrastructure, like theatrical infrastructure, to show it.”

Ryu said cost was her main worry with “My Aunt” too. “Independent film is film made independently of capital, so it has to be made with the individual creator’s own money,” she said, noting that platforms for indie film, and interest in it, remain limited. Song, who has always paid for his films himself, named capital as the biggest hurdle but said he had no other complaints. “Shooting films is so much fun. I loved it.”

All three are now writing screenplays for their next projects. Namkoong said she hopes to make a film set in present-day Busan, drawn to the city’s two sides. “It’s a city and also the sea, a tourist spot and also a place where people live,” she said.

Magic: The Gathering has unveiled its next Marvel-themed set and announced a special collaboration with the upcoming theatrical release of “Avengers: Doomsday.”

Titled “Darkhold Destiny,” the set is focused on “the mystical, the mythical and the mighty” magical characters from the Marvel universe, including Doctor Strange, Thor, Hela and Dormammu. The collection, which marks the third “Universes Beyond” collaboration in Magic and Marvel’s multiyear deal, will include a brand-new storyline set in the Marvel Universe and an original character created by the team.

The “Darkhold Destiny” Magic set will release April 7, 2027 and debut alongside a new Marvel comic book that showcases the story.

“This is a new kind of Universes Beyond set,” reads the description from Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Magic: The Gathering. “By taking the core elements players love about Magic: The Gathering, the team thoughtfully and strategically expressed those design intentions through the Marvel Universe. The narrative unfolds across nearly 30 dimensions and is centered around four main characters — Doctor Strange, Thor, Hela and Dormammu.”

The news was revealed during Magic’s New York Comic Con panel Friday, where Wizards also announced that fans who see “Avengers: Doomsday” opening weekend in Infinity Vision at Regal Cinemas will receive an exclusive Magic: The Gathering card featuring Doctor Doom.

Additionally, two more Marvel-Magic team-ups were promoted during the panel: a special release called “Doomsdrop” and a new Secret Lair kit titled “Marvel’s History of Heroes.”

The Doomsdrop is inspired by the Marvel comics and is a multi-drop collection that will “predominantly feature Doctor Doom, although fans should expect other special guests from the Marvel Universe,” according to Wizards.

“Secret Lair Countdown Kit: Marvel’s History of Heroes” is a collection of 30 cards “that bring the storied past of Marvel to life.” That limited-edition drop will launch Nov. 2 at 9 a.m. PT and is priced at $199.99.

Per Wizards, “The release features illustrations crafted by over 30 artists celebrating iconic moments from Marvel’s comic history — from the transformation of the Fantastic Four in space via cosmic rays, to the first appearance of Iron Man with Ho Yinsen, to Jean Grey’s transformation into the fiery Phoenix.”

See below for a first look at cards from the new “Darkhold Destiny” Magic: The Gathering set.

It’s rare to see a dramatic feature filmmaker move into the realm of documentary with the craftmanship and authority and insightful power summoned by Ava DuVernay. “13th,” the documentary she made back in 2016, was a revelation — it told the lacerating story of how the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, was a revolutionary act of law that, at the same time, opened the door to the way that numerous dimensions of slavery would be perpetuated in America under different names and tactics. The film was despairing and inspiring in equal measure; it cleansed you with the truth.

Tonight, the New York Film Festival presented the premiere of “14th,” a documentary follow-up in which DuVernay sets her sights on the 14th Amendment, a Constitutional addendum, ratified in 1868, that was so monumental — it guarantees equal protection under the law, but also encompasses five intricate sections that deal with issues from insurrection to due process — that one observer calls it “a Constitution in and of itself,” and another hails it as “the everything bagel of democracy.”

“14th,” I’m pleased to report, exerts the same kind of historical/topical force that “13th” did. DuVernay, while she works in an extremely accessible and mainstream way, has a singular gift for making the nuances of history come alive. “14th” is steeped in history, but it’s not a dry lecture. Instead, DuVernay cuts through the dusty complacency with which we tend to regard the Constitution (just hearing that word can make you feel like you’re back in school) and shows you that the Constitution is a living, breathing document, one that we fail to heed at our peril. Which is more or less what’s happening today.

A potent movie about history almost has to surprise you. It needs to show you that what you think you know isn’t the half of it. “14th” kicks off with the cutting insight that the three amendments to the Constitution that were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War — the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments — represented nothing less than a restart of American life and society. Yet we don’t necessarily talk about them that way. Everyone knows who “the framers” of the Constitution were (Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin), but “14th” argues that the period just after the cataclysm of the Civil War had its own framers, who were nearly as significant. Thaddeus Stevens, a member of the House of Representatives who was part of the Radical Republican faction of the 1860s, is a figure who, according to one of the film’s observers, “created the world we live in today.”

With the abolition of slavery, four million people who were formerly enslaved were suddenly added to the fabric of American society. How would that work? DuVernay tell the story of Reconstruction through fresh eyes, and part of the power of her chronicle is that she doesn’t stint on the joy and liberation that were part of it. Black Americans, who were now citizens, formed communities and industries, they became newspaper editors and law enforcers, as well as politicians (there were 1,000 newly elected Black representatives). But it’s more than that. The point is made that Black people, for the first time in American life, could create a fully realized dream of who they wanted to be as individuals. But this would not work unless their citizenship was enshrined. That’s the first thing the 14th Amendment did. It guaranteed equal protection under the law, and it established birthright citizenship for all people born in the United States — a radical idea, one designed to apply to both the children of former enslaved people and the children of immigrants, because what that represented was a stepping up of the rejection of the European aristocratic system (i.e., citizenship by legacy) that had first been overthrown by the American Revolution. Birthright citizenship continued what the original Constitution started.

In recent years, it’s become a stylistic tic in documentaries to keep the talking heads offscreen, letting their words simply flow on the soundtrack without interrupting the images. DuVernay is having none of that. She has assembled an extraordinary roster of scholars, politicians, and commentators, led by the Civil Rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill, who becomes the film’s oratorical star. We see the speakers and absorb the play of their personalities, as they describe, with a big-picture yet highly personalized passion, how the law of the land actually played out in the creation of the second America that rose from the ashes of the Civil War. DuVernay makes history organic by capturing how the very texture of people’s lives was changed by the law. And she’ll go wherever she needs to illustrate that, even to comedy clips from George Carlin and the great Paul Mooney, who does a bit about the happiness of white people when they were slave owners that must be seen to be believed. (His bit isn’t really about the slave era; it’s about today.)

As the film captures, the rise of the new Black citizenry during Reconstruction was rapid. For one thing, Black Americans did not waste time or spirit on vengeance. But the fall was every bit as rapid, as a culture of systematized violence and murder rose up in the South to try to stuff the genie of emancipation back in the bottle. The Ku Klux Klan was one half of it. The other half is captured in DuVernay’s fascinating portrait of the Lost Cause — the culture of defiance and regret and literal whitewashing that came to represent the Southern consciousness of what life had been before the Civil War. Slavery itself, the obscene horror and inhumanity of it, was washed out of the collective memory, and the Civil War was recast as “the war of Northern aggression.”

What remained were totems and symbols that were somehow infused with nobility. The film traces the history of the Confederate flag as signifier, showing us how rock stars from Tom Petty to ZZ Top used it as a badass backdrop, and spotlighting how the flag was imprinted on the roof of the General Lee, the orange 1969 Dodge Charger driven by the heroes of “The Dukes of Hazzard.” This was one of the most popular TV shows of its time (it debuted in 1979, just as Jimmy Carter’s presidency was winding down), and it was basically using the semiotics of the Civil War — of those who went to war to maintain slavery — as a signifier of cool.

This consciousness extended to the erecting of Confederate monuments in public squares, a movement so widespread — there were 2,629 such monuments built across the South — that it became larger than the sum of its parts. The message to Black citizens, according to one the film’s observers, was, “You matter so little that we’ll celebrate the people who wanted to enslave you.” The film looks at what the movement to remove those monuments, notably the statue of Robert E. Lee that stood in the capital of Virginia (the former capital of the Confederacy), was really about and what it entailed. It’s all part of how the Lost Cause myth became what the film calls “the greatest lie in American history.”

But what does that have to do with the 14th Amendment? DuVernay is getting to that. The true subject of the movie is the power of law, and the erosion of law. The dehumanization of Black people represented by the persistence of Confederate iconography in mainstream culture became an underground signifier of the precariousness of the freedoms enshrined by the 14th Amendment. The rise of the Klan, who took their cross-burning imagery from “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), wasn’t simply a matter of domestic terrorism. It was an attempt “to overthrow biracial democracy.” Between the Civil War and World War II, there were 4,400 lynchings. So entrenched was the backlash against Reconstruction, which was institutionalized with Jim Crow (a system of “law” that was really a culture of fascist violence), that it wasn’t until Brown vs. Board of Education, in 1954, that the might of the 14th Amendment began to reassert itself.

Documentaries tend to lessen in impact when they catch up to recent events, but as “14th” moves into the current era something remarkable happens: The film’s themes of racial oppression begin to mutate into themes of generalized oppression. The section of the 14th Amendment that deals with “insurrection” could not be more explicit. It states that anyone who has been responsible for fomenting an insurrection against the United States government cannot run for public office. This means that Donald Trump, after the unambiguous insurrection of Jan. 6, should not have been allowed to run for president in 2024. In that sense, he trampled on the Constitution simply by being re-elected, and the trashing of the 14th Amendment continued unabated. Birthright citizenship? Ignored. Due process? Out the window with ICE.

The degree to which the United States has been in the ugly thick of a Constitutional crisis since the beginning of 2025 has been persistently understated by the media. But Ava DuVernay states it with meticulous boldness. I don’t agree with her attempt to posit DEI as a Constitutional issue on the level of the Voting Rights Act. (The film itself acknowledges that the DEI movement, whatever one’s opinion of it, represented nothing so much as a “cultural shift.”) But where she shows us the big picture is in capturing how the freedoms of the 14th Amendment have been under siege, and how this may be nothing less than the ritual growing pains — the built-in trauma — of American democracy. Advance, backlash, conflict spilling over into violence…and then re-advance. That’s the rhythm, the moral and spiritual roller-coaster of perfecting our imperfect union. “14th” makes you see that we’re in the heat of the backlash now. But it also lets you feel that a re-advance is waiting in the wings.

Debuting Italian director Margherita Ferrari is at the Busan International Film Festival with “Föa – Once Upon a Future,” an innovative coming-of-age drama that also marks Paolo Sorrentino‘s debut as a producer.

Set in Genoa during the tragic days in July 2001 when the G8 summit led to deathly clashes between protesters and police, “Once Upon a Future” tells the story of Nicole, an 18-year-old girl who is eight months pregnant and takes three protesters into her home. Using a fable-like tone, the film provides a fresh perspective on the G8 violence that became a watershed moment in the anti-globalization movement.

“’Föa’ begins with a wound that history never quite managed to close,” Sorrentino said in a statement to Variety. “Margherita Ferrari turns the memory of Genoa into something intimate and dreamlike, where the past quietly returns to question the future.”

“Föa – Once Upon a Future,” which stars emerging talents Gaia Ravina, Clara Tramontano, Iker Urgoiti and Gabriele Falsetta, was co-produced by Sorrentino′s production company Numero 10, with The Apartment and PiperFilm. PiperPlay is handling international sales.

“At a time when imagination needs to be protected, supporting new authors and their singular visions feels more important than ever,” Sorrentino continued. “I am particularly proud that Numero 10 begins this journey with a film told through such a powerful female gaze — a story that reminds us that even after the future seems to have disappeared, it may still be waiting for us.”

The film started as Ferrari’s graduation short at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale film school, after which she had the opportunity to pitch the expanded project to Sorrentino. Below, Ferrari speaks to Variety about what sparked “Once Upon a Future” creatively and its fortuitous production journey.

How did the “Föa – Once Upon a Future” story germinate?

On July 20, 2001, I was only 4. I remember the windows and the typical green shutters of our living room in Genoa had to be closed because outside there was smoke and noise. So, even though it was summer and sweltering inside, we had to barricade ourselves in, staying in the dark. Shut away. That image came back to me during the pandemic. I had sought out that same feeling — of solitude, isolation and even powerlessness — while something much bigger than me and all of us, something powerfully collective, was happening outside. On a more personal level, I’ve always felt a certain disillusionment regarding the limits of my own power; how little impact I can actually have on the world or on contemporary reality. It’s a feeling that hits me every time I speak about this subject.

Tell me more.

I know I’m not just talking about me. I see this reflected in so many of my peers, and perhaps in people in general, who are experiencing the world as it is today. So there is that, combined with the lingering wound of those days and all the traces they left behind. Speaking as someone from Genoa, I felt a desire to tell a story that, even though it’s set in 2001, is really about the future and about today. How do you do that? Usually, fairy tales are set in the distant past. Yet they’re actually meant to speak to the present. So, that’s more or less how it all came about.

Starting with the title, “Föa – Once Upon a Future,” this film is a fable of sorts. Talk to me about this narrative choice, which is unusual in dealing with historical fact.

The Genoese term “Föa” actually means “story,” in the sense of a made-up story, a little tale or a fable. That aspect interested us [myself and my co-writers] partly because we wanted to blend history with a capital H, the kind you study in books, with a fictional tale about a character who doesn’t exist. It also suggests that to tell the truth about reality, you somehow need invention and metaphors, and therefore cinema and fables too. We also wanted to approach this historical event from a more emotional, dreamlike perspective, focusing on the almost unconscious traces that were left within us by those days. This applies even to those, like us, who experienced the aftermath of the Genoa G8 events. In a way, we always felt like we were inside Nicole’s womb, so to speak. The child Nicole is carrying in the film would be 25 or 26 years old today. In a sense, he has been carrying the same question we have, which is: “What will the future awaiting us actually be like?”

I’d like to add that I hope this film offers more than just the questions that are raised by those events. I hope it allows the audience to imagine that things might turn out a bit better. It’s like in fairy tales, I always envisioned a moment of relief at the end, a breath of fresh air that leaves room for that possibility.

What was it like to have Paolo Sorrentino as your producer?

Paolo was very involved during both the initial writing phase and the editing process. But not on set. He treaded lightly in that phase. He just stopped by once to say hello. I tried to get him involved, but he didn’t want to. Basically, he was very keen on not being intrusive and to respect the boundaries of the set. I view that gesture as an act of great tenderness on his part. Even though I’ve always loved getting his advice, it never scared me, I find Paolo to be very patient. I think he had often already thought out certain solutions before we did. But he waited for me, or for me and the editor, to get there on our own, to reach the direction in which the film needed to go. He helped me pursue and protect my vision all the way to the end, while supporting my work as a director through every single phase. It was a beautiful creative process from the start. It also helped me grow, helped me bring the film to the screen and become the person I am today. That’s more or less how it went.

He’s been one half of one of the most cherished on-screen duos in history, yet has famously never spoken a word. That is, up until now.

Gromit, the whip-smart and eye-rolling four-legged friend to cheese-loving inventor Wallace across numerous stop-motion classics from Aardman Animation and “Wallace & Gromit” creator Nick Park, is getting his first autobiography and, with it, an audiobook.

In step Martin Freeman, who will narrate “Grand: The Autobiography of Gromit, as Told to Nick Park,” a book in which, according to the description, Gromit “finally breaks his silence.”

“When you create a character who has no voice, and whose facial expressions are everything, what do you do when your publisher reminds you there’ll be an audiobook? Who could possibly be the voice of a character everyone feels they know, but nobody’s actually heard?” said Park, winner of four Oscars, including three for Wallace & Gromit films “The Wrong Trousers,” “A Close Shave” and “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”

“The more I thought about it, the more I realised Martin Freeman was the obvious choice really. I was genuinely thrilled and honoured when he said yes.”

Recording took place earlier this month at Penguin Studios, with both “Grand: The Autobiography of Gromit” and the audiobook now due for release Oct. 22.

But Park, having previously stated that Freeman was “the voice” of Gromit, in almost the same breath attempted to (doggy) walk back the de-muting of his plasticine hound.

“Martin is not doing a Gromit ‘voice’ as such,” he said. “He’s reading Gromit’s story as Gromit put it; his inner thoughts, his candid insights and endless witticisms, bringing to them his usual colour, thoughtfulness and wry humour.” now from all major audiobook retailers.