Day: May 20, 2024
CANNES, France — While Donald Trump’s hush money trial entered its sixth week in New York, an origin story for the Republican presidential candidate premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, unveiling a scathing portrait of the former president in the 1980s.
“The Apprentice,” directed by the Iranian Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi, stars Sebastian Stan as Trump. The central relationship of the movie is between Trump and Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the defense attorney who was chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s Senate investigations.
Cohn is depicted as a longtime mentor to Trump, coaching him in the ruthlessness of New York City politics and business. Early on, Cohn aided the Trump Organization when it was being sued by the federal government for racial discrimination in housing.
“The Apprentice,” which is labeled as inspired by true events, portrays Trump’s dealings with Cohn as a Faustian bargain that guided his rise as a businessman and, later, as a politician. Stan’s Trump is initially a more naive real-estate striver, soon transformed by Cohn’s education.
The film notably contains a scene depicting Trump raping his wife, Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova). In Ivana Trump’s 1990 divorce deposition, she stated that Trump raped her. Trump denied the allegation and Ivana Trump later said she didn’t mean it literally, but rather that she had felt violated.
That scene and others make “The Apprentice” a potentially explosive big-screen drama in the midst of the U.S. presidential election. The film is for sale in Cannes, so it doesn’t yet have a release date.
Variety on Monday reported alleged behind-the-scenes drama surrounding “The Apprentice.” Citing anonymous sources, the trade publication reported that billionaire Dan Snyder, the former owner of the Washington Commanders and an investor in “The Apprentice,” has pressured the filmmakers to edit the film over its portrayal of Trump. Snyder previously donated to Trump’s presidential campaign.
Neither representatives for the film nor Snyder could immediately be reached for comment.
In the press notes for the film, Abbasi, whose previous film “Holy Spider” depicts a female journalist investigating a serial killer in Iran, said he didn’t set out to make “a History Channel episode.”
“This is not a biopic of Donald Trump,” said Abbasi. “We’re not interested in every detail of his life going from A to Z. We’re interested in telling a very specific story through his relationship with Roy and Roy’s relationship with him.”
Regardless of its political impact, “The Apprentice” is likely to be much discussed as a potential awards contender. The film, shot in a gritty 1980’s aesthetic, returns Strong to a New York landscape of money and power a year following the conclusion of HBO’s “Succession.” Strong, who’s currently performing on Broadway in “An Enemy of the People,” didn’t attend the Cannes premiere Monday.
“The Apprentice” is playing in competition in Cannes, making it eligible for the festival’s top award, the Palme d’Or. At Cannes, filmmakers and casts hold press conferences the day after a movie’s premiere. “The Apprentice” press conference will be Tuesday.
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Paris — Climate change played a key role in last year’s record-low levels of Antarctic sea ice, a study published on Monday found, marking an abrupt shift from the growth seen in previous decades.
Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) found that human-caused global warming resulted in a once-in-2,000-year low in ocean surface around the continent blanketed by ice.
Compared to an average winter over the last several decades, the maximum extent of Antarctic sea covered by ice shrank by two million square kilometers — an area four times the size of France, the BAS said.
“This is why we were so interested in studying what climate models can tell us about how often large, rapid losses like this are likely to happen,” the study’s lead author Rachel Diamond told AFP.
Scientists, having analyzed 18 distinct climate models, found that climate change quadrupled the likelihood of such large and rapid melting events.
Understanding the cause of sea ice melt is complex as there are many variables — from ocean water to air temperature to winds — that can effect it, scientists say.
But determining the role of climate change is critical since ice formation has global impacts from ocean currents to sea-level rise.
Sea ice, which forms from freezing salt water already in the ocean, has no discernible impact on sea levels.
But when highly reflective snow and ice give way to dark blue ocean, the same amount of the Sun’s energy that was bounced back into space is absorbed by water instead, accelerating the pace of global warming.
Recovery unlikely
Unlike the Arctic, where sea ice has been declining since satellite records began in the 1970s, the melt trend in Antarctica is a more recent phenomenon.
Antarctic sea ice increased “slightly and steadily” from 1978 until 2015, according to the BAS.
But 2017 brought a sharp decline, followed by several years of low ice levels.
In the study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, BAS researchers also ran projections to see whether the ice would return.
“It doesn’t completely recover to original levels even after 20 years,” Diamond told AFP. That means “the average Antarctic sea ice may still stay relatively low for decades to come”, he added.
“The impacts… would be profound, including on local and global weather and on unique Southern Ocean ecosystems — including whales and penguins,” co-author Louise Sime said.
Previous studies by the BAS have shown that the abnormal melt has led to the deaths of thousands of emperor penguin chicks.
Reared on the ice sheets, they perished when they were plunged into the ocean before they had developed their waterproof feathers.
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SYDNEY — Researchers in Australia and the United States say that a new artificial intelligence tool has allowed them to classify brain tumors more quickly and accurately.
The current method for identifying different kinds of brain tumors, while accurate, can take several weeks to produce results. The method, called DNA methylation-based profiling, is not available at many hospitals around the world.
To address these challenges, a research team from the Australian National University, in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute in the United States, has developed a way to predict DNA methylation, which acts like a switch to control gene activity.
This allows them to classify brain tumors into 10 major categories using a deep learning model.
This is a branch of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to process data in a way that is inspired by a human brain.
The joint U.S.-Australian system is called DEPLOY and uses microscopic pictures of a patient’s tissue called histopathology images.
The researchers see the DEPLOY technology as complementary to an initial diagnosis by a pathologist or physician.
Danh-Tai Hoang, a research fellow at the Australian National University, told VOA that AI will enhance current diagnostic methods that can often be slow.
“The technique is very time consuming,” Hoang said. “It is often around two to three weeks to obtain a result from the test, whereas patients with high-grade brain tumors often require treatment as soon as possible because time is the goal for brain tumor(s), so they need to get treatment as soon as possible.”
The research team said its AI model was validated on large datasets of approximately 4,000 patients from across the United States and Europe and an accuracy rate of 95 percent.
Their study has been published in the journal Nature Medicine.
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Cannes, France — Filmmakers Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir spent so much time following an all-girl theatre troupe in a remote Egyptian village that at one point someone tried to sell them a house.
“He thought we were always there so we might as well live there,” Riyadh told AFP after the premiere of their documentary at the Cannes Film Festival.
“The Brink of Dreams” follows a group of teenage girls in rural southern Egypt over four years, between rehearsals, as they navigate the tough decisions that will determine their adulthood.
Majda dreams of studying theatre in Cairo, Monika wants to become a famous singer and Haidi is being pursued by the hottest guy in the village.
In their feminist street performances, they boldly rail against the patriarchy, challenging members of the crowd on issues such as self-fulfillment and early marriage.
But soon life takes over and the teenagers from Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority find themselves confronted with these concepts for real.
The camera discreetly captures conversations in the family shop, between a father and daughter, or two lovers, as neighbors and animals go about their daily lives.
“In the beginning there was a lot of people always looking at the camera. Everybody was self-conscious,” said Riyadh.
But “once the trust had been built between them and us, we had that chance to blend in.”
Riyadh said the documentary, which is screening in a sidebar section of the festival, was driven by her and co-director Amin discovering the troupe in 2017.
The film “is intentionally feminist in every way but I think it was also dictated by what this inspiring group of women was already doing,” she said.
It’s “mind-blowing because they’re demanding answers about very important things and opening a dialogue with everybody in their community.”
Co-director Amin said the main challenge was editing down 100 hours of footage to tell this coming-of-age tale and convey a seldom seen side of Egypt.
“Most mainstream films in Egypt tell stories about living in gated compounds and shopping in malls,” Amin said.
“It’s very rare to see stories that take place in the south outside of Cairo or Alexandria and see girls like those girls on screen.”
The documentary has a French distributor, but the filmmakers also hope to show the film widely in Egypt, including in the rural south.
Until then, six of the actors in the film got to attend the Cannes premiere, after a last-minute rush to get them their first passports and visas on time.
Monika, the aspiring singer, has two children now. But on the red carpet, the DJ played the catchy song that she made with a popular Egyptian producer called Molotof for the film’s final credits.
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