The festival typically showcases many French-language films made in Africa, this year including the World Premiere of The Soul of Africa, director Gabriel Souleyka's documentary about African Spirituality.
On May 2, 2025, arts and cultural organizations across the country received notifications that grants and funding promised by the National Endowment for the Arts were being rescinded. This was part of a larger initiative by the Trump Administration to dismantle not just the NEA, but also other arts advocacy programs including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
"Michael" was designed to be an international crowd-pleaser—the kind of film that executives hope will drag audiences away from their small screens and deposit them in front of big ones, where they can watch and sing along and even dance, if theatres permit it.
Los Angeles is home to more than a dozen one-of-a-kind cinemas that operate on their own terms. Some of these theaters have been around for 100 years, and in classic LA fashion some of them are owned by living LA legends-think Quentin Tarantino and Kyle Ng. Kristen Stewart recently announced she's also jumping into the mix with her purchase of Los Angeles's Highland Theatre.
In a big studio-backed awards season, it's rare to see much overlap between the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Oscars. A west coast cousin of sorts to the Gotham Awards, the Indie Spirits often celebrate the movies that the Academy skipped over with its nominations. The ceremony itself is also more fun (there's some day-drinking involved) than the more staid guild awards that dot the homestretch ahead of the similarly serious Academy Awards.
George Lucas should have died. It was 1962; the 17-year-old had just crashed his yellow Autobianchi convertible into a walnut tree, in Modesto, California. The car rolled, bounced and came to rest - it was "beyond mangled, flipped upside down and twisted like a crushed Coke can against the tree". When the teenager woke in hospital two weeks later, his heart having nearly stopped, he had a new philosophy: "Maybe there's a reason I survived this accident that nobody should have survived."
