The Mogadishu Book Fair, an annual literary event that was launched in 2015, took place last week after a three-year break because of the COVID pandemic. The fair, meant to promote reading and Somali culture and heritage by bringing together literary creatives and young people, was held at the National Theatre of Somalia. Mohamed Sheikh Nor has more from Mogadishu.
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“The Little Mermaid ” made moviegoers want to be under the sea on Memorial Day weekend.

Disney’s live-action remake of its 1989 animated classic easily outswam the competition, bringing in $95.5 million on 4,320 screens in North America, according to studio estimates Sunday.

And Disney estimates the film starring Halle Bailey as the titular mermaid Ariel and Melissa McCarthy as her sea witch nemesis Ursula will reach $117.5 million by the time the holiday is over. It ranks as the fifth biggest Memorial Day weekend opening ever.

It displaces “Fast X” in the top spot. The 10th installment in the “Fast and Furious” franchise starring Vin Diesel lagged behind more recent releases in the series, bringing in $23 million domestically for a two-week total of $108 million for Universal Pictures.

In its fourth weekend, Disney and Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” made an estimated $20 million in North America to take third place. It’s now made $299 million domestically.

Fourth went to Universal’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which keeps reaching new levels in its eighth weekend. Now available to rent on VOD, it still earned $6.3 million in theaters. Its cumulative total of $559 million makes Mario and Luigi the year’s biggest earners so far.

Comics couldn’t stand up to Ariel as the week’s other new releases sank.

“The Machine,” an action comedy starring stand-up comedian Bert Kreischer, finished fifth with $4.9 million domestically. And ” About My Father,” the broad comedy starring stand-up Sebastian Maniscalco and Robert De Niro, was sixth with $4.3 million.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. “The Little Mermaid,” $95.5 million.

2. “Fast X,” $23 million.

3. “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” $20 million.

4. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” $6.3 million.

5. “The Machine,” $4.9 million.

6. “About My Father,” $4.3 million.

7. “Kandahar,” $2.4 million.

8. “You Hurt My Feelings,” 1.4 million.

9. “Evil Dead Rise,” $1 million.

10. “Book Club, The Next Chapter,” $920,000.
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The chants of “monkey!” at the Spanish soccer stadium echoed across the Atlantic, reaching people on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.

That’s where Vinícius Júnior, who is Black, grew up and launched his soccer career. Now, despite his global fame and millions, he was again the target of crude European racism.

His city in multiracial Brazil was sickened and has rallied to his defense.

Racism in the Spanish league has intensified this season, especially after Vinícius started celebrating goals by dancing. On at least nine occasions, people have made monkey sounds at Vinícius, chanted the slur “monkey!” and other racist slurs. Vinícius has repeatedly demanded action from Spanish soccer authorities.

Vinícius’ 2017 move to Real Madrid was the culmination of years of effort. One of the most popular clubs in global soccer paid about $50 million — at the time the most ever for a Brazilian teenager — even before his professional debut with Rio-based Flamengo. Relentless racism wasn’t part of Vinícius’ dream when he was growing up in Sao Goncalo.

Sao Goncalo is the second-most populous city in Rio’s metropolitan region, and one of the poorest in the state of Rio de Janeiro, according to the national statistics institute. At night in some areas, motorists turn on their hazard lights to signal to drug-trafficking gangs that the driver is local. It is also where the 2020 police killing of a 14-year-old sparked Black Lives Matter protests across Rio.

Racism has once again fanned outrage.

Rio’s imposing, illuminated Christ the Redeemer statue was made dark one night in solidarity. The city’s enormous bayside Ferris wheel this week exhibits a clenched Black fist and the scrolling words: “EVERYONE AGAINST RACISM.”

“My total repudiation of the episode of racism suffered by our ace and the pride of all of us in Sao Goncalo,” the city’s mayor, Nelson Ruas dos Santos, wrote on Twitter the morning after the incident.

On Thursday, Spanish league president Javier Tebas held a news conference claiming that the league has been acting alone against racism, and that it could end it in six months if granted more power by the government.

At the same time in Rio, representatives of more than 150 activist groups and nonprofits delivered a letter to Spain’s consulate, demanding an investigation into the league and its president. They organized a protest that evening.

“Vinicius has been a warrior, he’s being a warrior, for enduring this since he arrived in Spain and always taking a stand,” activist Valda Neves said. “This time, he’s not alone.”

On Saturday, players from Vinícius’ former club, Flamengo, took the field at the Maracana Stadium before a Brazilian championship match against Cruzeiro wearing jerseys bearing the player’s name and sat on the pitch before kickoff in an anti-racism protest.

In the stands, thousands of supporters made a tifo that read “everyone with Vini Jr.”

The first Black Brazilian players to sign for European clubs in the 1960s met some racism in the largely white society, but rarely spoke out. At the time, Brazil still considered itself a “racial democracy” and did not take on the racism that many faced.

In the late 1980s, the federal government made racial discrimination a crime and created a foundation to promote Afro-Brazilian culture. At the time, many Brazilian players who might identify as Black today did not recognize themselves as such. Incidents of racism in Europe prompted little blowback in Brazil.

In the decades since, Brazil’s Black activists have gained prominence and promoted awareness of structural racism. The federal government instituted policies aimed at addressing it, including affirmative-action admissions for public universities and jobs. There has been heightened consciousness throughout society.

Vinícius’ own educational nonprofit this week launched a program to train public school teachers to raise awareness about racism and instruct kids in fighting discrimination. A teacher at a Sao Goncalo school that will host the project, Mariana Alves, hopes it will provide kids with much-needed support and preparation. She spoke in a classroom with soccer-ball beanbag chairs strewn about, and enormous photos of Vinícius on the walls.

Most of the school’s students are Black or biracial, and many have experienced racism, Alves said in an interview. This week, her 10-year-old students have been asking if she saw what happened to Vinícius because they don’t fully understand.

“He has money, he has all this status, and not even that stopped him from going through this situation of racism,” said Alves, who is Black and from Sao Goncalo. “So the students wonder … ‘Will I go through that, too? Is that going to happen to me?'”

As a boy, Vinícius started training at a nearby feeder school for Flamengo, Brazil’s most popular club, before signing with its youth team.

Sao Goncalo kids practiced there Wednesday afternoon.

One of them, Ryan Gonçalves Negri, said he has talked about it with his friends outside the soccer school, and that Vinícius should transfer out of the Spanish league “urgently.”

“I would never want to play there,” Negri, 13, said. “It’s not for Brazilians who know how to score goals and celebrate.”
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Fantasy adventure “Brahmastra: Part One — Shiva” won a series of prizes as the glitzy International Indian Film Academy Awards show started in Abu Dhabi on Saturday.

Star songstress Shreya Ghoshal won best female playback singer for her turn in the romance-laced epic, which also took awards for music direction and lyrics.

The show, studded with flashy dance numbers, is being held in the capital of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, a third of whose population is Indian, for the second year running.

Earlier the green carpet — adopted in 2007 in a vote for environmentalism — bore some of Bollywood’s biggest names including Abhishek Bachchan, Vicky Kaushal and Sara Ali Khan.

“What does IIFA mean for (Indian) cinema? I think opening up to the global stage and also bringing us to the global stage as well, so it’s exciting both ways,” said actress Jacqueline Fernandez, wearing an Arab-inspired head covering.

The Hindi-language film industry was worth $2.5 billion in 2019. India also releases hundreds of films in its 21 other official languages, churning out about 1,600 each year.

But Mumbai-based Bollywood, the world’s most prolific producer of movies, has been mired in crisis since the pandemic with ticket sales remaining low since cinemas reopened.

The rise in streaming services, competition from other parts of India and demand for meatier fare than Bollywood’s trademark song-and-dance routines have all contributed to the slump, experts say.

However, superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s “Pathaan” smashed Indian box office records in January, in a positive sign for the industry.

Indian cinema also received a boost in March when the viral dance hit “Naatu Naatu” won an Oscar for best song, a first for a film from the country.

The IIFA show, one of several Indian awards ceremonies, is aimed at reaching international audiences and has been held in several countries since its debut in London in 2000.
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Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” won the Palme d’Or at the 76th Cannes Film Festival in a ceremony Saturday that bestowed the festival’s prestigious top prize on an engrossing, rigorously plotted French courtroom drama that puts a marriage on trial.

“Anatomy of a Fall,” which stars Sandra Hüller as a writer trying to prove her innocence in her husband’s death, is only the third film directed by a woman to win the Palme d’Or. One of the two previous winners, Julia Ducournau, was on this year’s jury.

Cannes’ Grand Prix, its second prize, went to Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” a chilling Martin Amis adaptation about a German family living next door to Auschwitz. Hüller also stars in that film.

The awards were decided by a jury presided over by two-time Palme winner Ruben Östlund, the Swedish director who won the prize last year for “Triangle of Sadness.” The ceremony preceded the festival’s closing night film, the Pixar animation “Elemental.”

Remarkably, the award for “Anatomy of a Fall” gives the indie distributor Neon its fourth straight Palme winners. Neon, which acquired the film after its premiere in Cannes, also backed “Triangle of Sadness,”Ducournau’s “Titane” and Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite,” which it steered to a best picture win at the Academy Awards.

Triet was presented the Palme by Jane Fonda, who recalled coming to Cannes in 1963 when, she said, there were no female filmmakers competing “and it never even occurred to us that there was something wrong with that.” This year, a record seven out of the 21 films in competition at Cannes were directed by women.

After a rousing standing ovation, Triet, the 44-year-old French filmmaker, spoke passionately about the protests that have roiled France this year over reforms to pension plans and the retirement age.

“The protests were denied and repressed in a shocking way,” said Triet, who linked that governmental influence to that in cinema. “The merchandizing of culture, defended by a liberal government, is breaking the French cultural exception.”

The jury prize went to Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s “Fallen Leaves,” a deadpan love story about a romance that blooms in a loveless workaday world where dispatches from the war in Ukraine regularly play on the radio.

Best actor went to veteran Japanese star Koji Yakusho, who plays a reflective, middle-aged Tokyo man who cleans toilets in Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days,” a gentle, quotidian character study.

The Turkish actor Merve Dizdar took best actress for the Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses.” Ceylan’s expansive tale is set in snowy eastern Anatolia about a teacher, Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), accused of misconduct by a young female student. Dizdar plays a friend both attracted and repelled by Samet.

“I understand what it’s like to be a woman in this area of the country,” said Dizdar. “I would like to dedicate this prize to all the women who are fighting to exist and overcome difficulties in this world and to retrain hope.”

Vietnamese-French director Tràn Anh Hùng took best director for “Pot-au-Feu,” a lush, foodie love story starring Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel and set in a 19th century French gourmet château.

Best screenplay was won by Yuji Sakamoto for “Monster.” Sakamoto penned Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s nuanced drama, with shifting perspectives, about two boys struggling for acceptance in their school at home. “Monster” also won the Queer Palm, an honor bestowed by journalists for the festival’s strongest LGBTQ-themed film.

Quentin Tarantino, who won Cannes’ top award for “Pulp Fiction,” attended the ceremony to present a tribute to filmmaker Roger Corman. Tarantino praised Corman for filling him and countless moviegoers with “unadulterated cinema pleasure.”

“My cinema is uninhibited, full of excess and fun,” said Corman, the independent film maverick. “I feel like this what Cannes is about.”

The festival’s Un Certain Regard section handed out its awards Friday, giving the top prize to Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature, “How to Have Sex.”

Saturday’s ceremony drew to close a Cannes edition that hasn’t lacked spectacle, stars or controversy.

The biggest wattage premieres came out of competition. Martin Scorsese debuted his Osage murders epic “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a sprawling vision of American exploitation with Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone. “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” Harrison Ford’s Indy farewell, launched with a tribute to Ford. Wes Anderson premiered “Asteroid City.”

The festival opened on a note of controversy. “Jeanne du Barry,” a period drama co-starring Johnny Depp as Louis XV, played as the opening night film. The premiere marked Depp’s highest profile appearance since the conclusion of his explosive trial last year with ex-wife Amber Heard.
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Police in Berlin said Friday that they have opened an investigation of Roger Waters on suspicion of incitement over a costume the Pink Floyd co-founder wore when he performed in the German capital last week.

Images on social media showed Waters firing an imitation machine gun while dressed in a long black coat with a red armband. Police confirmed that an investigation was opened over suspicions that the context of the costume could constitute a glorification, justification or approval of Nazi rule and therefore a disturbance of the public peace.

Once the police investigation is concluded, the case will be handed to Berlin prosecutors, who would decide whether to pursue any charges.

Waters rejected the accusations in a statement early Saturday on Facebook and Instagram, saying that “the elements of my performance that have been questioned are quite clearly a statement in opposition to fascism, injustice, and bigotry in all its forms.”

He claimed that “attempts to portray those elements as something else are disingenuous and politically motivated.”

Waters has drawn ire for his support of the BDS movement, which calls for boycotts and sanctions against Israel. He has rejected accusations of antisemitism.

Authorities in Frankfurt tried to prevent a concert there scheduled for Sunday, but Waters challenged that move successfully in a local court. In Munich, the city council said it had explored possibilities of banning a concert but concluded that it wasn’t legally possible to cancel a contract with the organizer. His appearance there last Sunday was accompanied by a protest attended by the local Jewish community’s leader.

Last year, the Polish city of Krakow canceled gigs by Waters because of his sympathetic stance toward Russia in its war against Ukraine.
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Memorial Day in the United States is supposed to be about mourning the nation’s fallen service members, but it’s come to anchor the unofficial start of summer and a long weekend of discounts on everything from mattresses to lawn mowers.

Auto club AAA said in a travel forecast that this holiday weekend could be “one for the record books, especially at airports,” with more than 42 million Americans projected to travel 50 miles (80 kilometers) or more. Federal officials said Friday that the number of air travelers had already hit a pandemic-era high.

But for Manuel Castaneda Jr., 58, the day will be a quiet one in Durand, Illinois, outside Rockford. He lost his father, a U.S. Marine who served in Vietnam, in an accident in California while training other Marines in 1966.

“Memorial Day is very personal,” said Castaneda, who also served in the Marines and Army National Guard, from which he knew men who died in combat. “It isn’t just the specials. It isn’t just the barbecue.”

But he tries not to judge others who spend the holiday differently: “How can I expect them to understand the depth of what I feel when they haven’t experienced anything like that?”

What is the official purpose of Memorial Day?

It’s a day of reflection and remembrance of those who died while serving in the U.S. military, according to the Congressional Research Service. The holiday is observed in part by the National Moment of Remembrance, which encourages all Americans to pause at 3 p.m. for a moment of silence.

What are the origins of the holiday?

The holiday stems from the American Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 service members — both Union and Confederate — between 1861 and 1865.

There’s little controversy over the first national observance of what was then called Decoration Day. It occurred May 30, 1868, after an organization of Union veterans called for decorating war graves with flowers, which were in bloom.

The practice was already widespread on a local level. Waterloo, New York, began a formal observance on May 5, 1866, and was later proclaimed to be the holiday’s birthplace.

Yet Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, traced its first observance to October 1864, according to the Library of Congress. And women in some Confederate states were decorating graves before the war’s end.

But David Blight, a Yale history professor, points to May 1, 1865, when as many as 10,000 people, many of them Black, held a parade, heard speeches and dedicated the graves of Union dead in Charleston, South Carolina.

A total of 267 Union troops had died at a Confederate prison and were buried in a mass grave. After the war, members of Black churches buried them in individual graves.

“What happened in Charleston does have the right to claim to be first, if that matters,” Blight told The Associated Press in 2011.

In 2021, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel cited the story in a Memorial Day speech in Hudson, Ohio. The ceremony’s organizers turned off his microphone because they said it wasn’t relevant to honoring the city’s veterans. The event’s organizers later resigned.

Has Memorial Day always been a source of contention?

Someone has always lamented the holiday’s drift from its original meaning.

As early as 1869, The New York Times wrote that the holiday could become “sacrilegious” and no longer “sacred” if it focuses more on pomp, dinners and oratory.

In 1871, abolitionist Frederick Douglass feared Americans were forgetting the Civil War’s impetus — slavery — when he gave a Decoration Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery.

“We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation’s destroyers,” Douglass said.

His concerns were well-founded, said Ben Railton, a professor of English and American studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Even though roughly 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army, the holiday in many communities would essentially become “white Memorial Day,” especially after the rise of the Jim Crow South, Railton said.

Meanwhile, how the day was spent — at least by the nation’s elected officials — could draw scrutiny for years after the Civil War. In the 1880s, then-President Grover Cleveland was said to have gone fishing — and “people were appalled,” said Matthew Dennis, an emeritus history professor at the University of Oregon.

By 1911, the Indianapolis 500 held its inaugural race on May 30, drawing 85,000 spectators. A report from The Associated Press made no mention of the holiday — or any controversy.

How has Memorial Day changed?

Dennis said Memorial Day’s potency diminished somewhat with the addition of Armistice Day, which marked World War I’s end on Nov. 11, 1918. Armistice Day became a national holiday by 1938 and was renamed Veterans Day in 1954.

An act of Congress changed Memorial Day from every May 30 to the last Monday in May in 1971. Dennis said the creation of the three-day weekend recognized that Memorial Day had long been transformed into a more generic remembrance of the dead, as well as a day of leisure.

In 1972, Time magazine said the holiday had become “a three-day nationwide hootenanny that seems to have lost much of its original purpose.”

Why is Memorial Day tied to sales and travel?

Even in the 19th century, grave ceremonies were followed by leisure activities such as picnicking and foot races, said Dennis, the Oregon professor.

The holiday also evolved alongside baseball and the automobile, the five-day work week and summer vacation, according to the 2002 book, “A History of Memorial Day: Unity, Discord and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

In the mid-20th century, a small number of businesses began to open defiantly on the holiday.

Once the holiday moved to Monday, “the traditional barriers against doing business began to crumble,” wrote authors Richard Harmond and Thomas Curran.

These days, Memorial Day sales and traveling are deeply woven into the nation’s muscle memory. This weekend, 2.7 million more people will travel for the unofficial start of summer compared to last year — despite inflation, according to AAA.

The Transportation Security Administration said it screened 2.66 million people at airport checkpoints on Thursday, about 2,500 more than last Friday, and the highest number since the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2019. The Federal Aviation Administration had predicted that Thursday would be the busiest travel day of the holiday period, with more than 51,000 airline flights.

Meanwhile, Jason Redman, 48, a retired Navy SEAL who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he’ll be thinking of friends he’s lost. Thirty names are tattooed on his arm “for every guy that I personally knew that died.”

He wants Americans to remember the fallen — but also to enjoy themselves, knowing lives were sacrificed to forge the holiday.
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The traveling art exhibition “Icons on Ammo Boxes” stopped in New York City in early May, featuring the work of Ukrainian artists Oleksandr Klymenko and Sonya Atlantova. The two paint traditional Christian icons on real ammunition boxes from the Ukranian front lines, symbolically portraying life overcoming death. Nina Vishneva has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Natalia Latukhina, Vladimir Badikov
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Art from across Africa is on display in a newly renovated gallery at the Denver Art Museum in the U.S. state of Colorado. VOA’s Scott Stearns shows us what is on display.
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Tina Turner, the American-born singer who left a hardscrabble farming community and abusive relationship to become one of the top recording artists of all time, died on Wednesday at the age of 83.

She died peacefully after a long illness in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland, her representative said.

Turner began her career in the 1950s during the early years of rock ’n’ roll and evolved into an MTV phenomenon.

In the video for her chart-topping song “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” in which she called love a “second-hand emotion,” Turner epitomized 1980s style as she strutted through New York City streets with her spiky blond hair, wearing a cropped jean jacket, mini skirt and stiletto heels.

With her taste for musical experimentation and bluntly worded ballads, Turner gelled perfectly with a 1980s pop landscape in which music fans increasingly valued electronically produced sounds and scorned hippie-era idealism.

Sometimes nicknamed the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Turner won six of her eight Grammy Awards in the 1980s. The decade saw her land a dozen songs on the Top 40, including “Typical Male,” “The Best,” “Private Dancer” and “Better Be Good to Me.” Her 1988 show in Rio de Janeiro drew 180,000 people, which remains one of the largest concert audiences for any single performer.

By then, Turner had been free from her marriage to guitarist Ike Turner for a decade.

The superstar was forthcoming about the abuse she suffered from her former husband during their marital and musical partnership in the 1960s and 1970s. She described bruised eyes, busted lips, a broken jaw and other injuries that repeatedly sent her to the emergency room.

“Tina’s story is not one of victimhood but one of incredible triumph,” singer Janet Jackson wrote about Turner, in a Rolling Stone issue that placed Turner at No. 63 on a list of the top 100 artists of all time.

“She’s transformed herself into an international sensation — an elegant powerhouse,” Jackson said.

In 1985, Turner gave a fictional turn to her reputation as a survivor. She played the ruthless leader of an outpost in a nuclear wasteland, acting opposite Mel Gibson in the third installment in the Mad Max franchise, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.”

Most of Turner’s hit songs were written by others, but she enlivened them with a voice that New York Times music critic Jon Pareles called “one of the more peculiar instruments in pop.”

“It’s three-tiered, with a nasal low register, a yowling, cutting middle range and a high register so startlingly clear it sounds like a falsetto,” Pareles wrote in a 1987 concert review.

She was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, in the rural Tennessee community of Nutbush, which she described in her 1973 song “Nutbush City Limits” as a “quiet little old community, a one-horse town.”

Her father worked as an overseer on a farm and her mother left the family when the singer was 11 years old, according to the singer’s 2018 memoir My Love Story. As a teenager, she moved to St. Louis to rejoin her mom.

Ike Turner, whose 1951 song “Rocket 88” has often been called the first rock ’n’ roll record, discovered her at age 17 when she grabbed the mic to sing at his club show in St. Louis in 1957.

The band leader later recorded a hit song, “A Fool in Love,” with his protégé and gave her the stage name Tina Turner, before the two married in Tijuana, Mexico.

Tina employed her strong voice and strenuously rehearsed dance routines as lead vocalist in an ensemble called the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. She collaborated with members of rock royalty, including The Who and Phil Spector, in the 1960s and 1970s and appeared on the cover of issue two of Rolling Stone magazine in 1967.

Ike and Tina Turner bounced between record labels, owing much of their commercial success to a relentless touring schedule. Their biggest hit was a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.”

Turner left her husband one night in 1976 on a tour stop in Dallas, after he pummeled her during a car ride and she struck back, according to her memoir. Their divorce was finalized in 1978.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted Ike and Tina Turner in 1991, calling them “one of the most formidable live acts in history.” Ike Turner died in 2007.

After leaving her husband, Turner spent years struggling to regain the limelight, releasing solo albums and singles that flopped and gigging at corporate conferences.

In 1980, she met new manager Roger Davies, an Australian music executive who went on to manage her for three decades. That led to a solo No.1 record — “What’s Love Got to Do With It” — and then in 1984 her album “Private Dancer” landed her at the top of the charts.

“Private Dancer” went on to become Turner’s biggest album, the capstone of a career that saw her sell more than 200 million records in total.

In 1985 Turner met German music executive Erwin Bach who became her long-term partner and in 1988 she moved to London, beginning a decades-long residency in Europe. She released two studio albums in the 1990s that sold well, especially in Europe, recorded the theme song for 1995 Bond movie “GoldenEye” and staged a successful world tour in 2008 and 2009.

After that, she retired from show business. She married Bach, relinquishing her U.S. citizenship and becoming a citizen of Switzerland.

She battled a number of health problems after retiring and in 2018 she faced a family tragedy, when her oldest son, Craig, died by suicide at age 59 in Los Angeles. Her younger son Ronnie died in December 2022.

Her name continues to draw audiences years after her retirement. Musical stage show “TINA: The Tina Turner Musical,” with Adrienne Warren initially acting and singing the star’s life story, was a hit first in London’s West End in 2018, and later on Broadway, and is still running. And in 2021 HBO released a documentary about her life, “Tina.”

She is survived by Bach and two sons of Ike Turner’s whom she had adopted.
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An art auction and New York gala have raised nearly $6 million to preserve and restore the childhood home of soul music legend and civil rights activist Nina Simone, organizers said Tuesday.

The twin events brought in some $5.88 million — far more than the original $2 million organizers hoped to raise to restore the rural North Carolina abode.

“The new funding will meaningfully advance our project goals to complete the full restoration of the house and landscape,” said Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. “With this investment, we are well on our way to opening the doors to visitors in 2024.”

Four US artists — Julie Mehretu, Ellen Gallagher, Rashid Johnson and Adam Pendleton — bought the dilapidated rural home in 2017 for $95,000. They’ve since worked with Leggs’ organization, as well as tennis star Venus Williams, to raise money to turn the house into a cultural and historical site.

The online auction, with works donated by British painter Cecily Brown and American artist Sarah Sze, was organized by Pace and Sotheby’s.

Among the 11 works for sale, Mehretu’s ink-and-acrylic “New Dawn, Sing (for Nina)” fetched $1.6 million.

Simone, whose songs found renewed resonance during the Black Lives Matter protests of recent years, had a complex, often difficult relationship with the United States, where she was born in 1933, during the era of racial segregation.

Born Eunice Waymon, she spent the first years of her life in the three-room house in Tryon, in the rural southeastern state of North Carolina, with her parents and siblings, and began playing the piano at age 3.

But her dream of becoming a classical concert performer was shattered when she was rejected by Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, an ordeal she attributed to racism.

In the 1960s, Simone was active in the civil rights movement, including through rousing speeches and song.

Her “Mississippi Goddam,” was a response to a 1963 fire in an Alabama church started by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, she performed “Why? (The king of love is dead).”

Simone eventually left the United States and lived her last years in the south of France, where she died in 2003.
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“The war never ends. Tomorrow it will start again,” remarks a character in “Goodbye Julia,” the first Sudanese film ever selected for Cannes.

It explores the racism fueling decades of conflict in the country, and director Mohamed Kordofani admitted to “contradictory feelings” about walking the glitzy red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival while his fellow Sudanese are cowering from bombs.

The irony is not lost on Kordofani, who did not expect his debut feature to coincide with the breakout of a new conflict in Sudan.

“Right now, I am stranded in Cannes,” he joked in an interview with AFP on a seaside terrace overlooking a flotilla of yachts, before adding on a serious note that he was “heartbroken” by the conflict and the fact he could not go home.

“The bombing needs to stop,” said the former aircraft engineer, who packed in his career to start a film production company.

“Goodbye Julia” is playing in the Un Certain Regard category in Cannes, a segment focusing on young, innovative talent.

The film starts in 2005 after the end of an earlier bout of fighting, between Khartoum and the separatist south, and ends as South Sudan gains independence in 2011.

It tells the story of how a covered-up murder brings a southern Sudanese woman, Julia, into contact with a northern Sudanese woman, Mona, and her overbearing conservative husband.

‘My own transformation’

The two women’s friendship is complex, and the racist undercurrent between Arabs and black Africans that stalks the Middle East and North Africa is on stark display.

Mona’s husband refers to the southerners as “slaves” and “savages,” and she is forced to confront her own ingrained racism, while gender roles are also explored.

Kordofani said he was inspired by how his own views had changed over the past decade.

“I started to review how I was behaving in my previous relationships. I reviewed my own racism.”

He said discrimination was so deeply ingrained in Sudan that “to this day, I don’t know if I’m completely not racist.”

While racism is not at the heart of Sudan’s current conflict, Kordifani said the film’s message was still relevant, as the country lurches from one broken cease-fire to the next, and residents hunker down with barely any food or supplies.

“I don’t think the war will end unless we change. We the people, not the government. We need to be equal, and we need to be inclusive, and we need to learn to coexist.”

Critics have warmly received “Goodbye Julia,” with Screen calling it “a gut-wrenching and emotionally rewarding tale.”

The Hollywood Reporter said it had “shades of a thriller” and praised Kordofani’s “fine direction.”
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Ray Stevenson, who played the villainous British governor in “RRR,” an Asgardian warrior in the “Thor” films, and a member of the 13th Legion in HBO’s “Rome,” has died. He was 58.  

Representatives for Stevenson told The Associated Press that he died Sunday but had no other details to share Monday.  

Stevenson was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, in 1964. After attending the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and years of working in British television, he made his film debut in Paul Greengrass’s 1998 film “The Theory of Flight.” In 2004, he appeared in Antoine Fuqua’s “King Arthur” as a knight of the round table and several years later played the lead in the pre-Disney Marvel adaptation “Punisher: War Zone.” 

Though “Punisher” was not the best-reviewed film, he’d get another taste of Marvel in the first three “Thor” films, in which he played Volstagg. Other prominent film roles included the “Divergent” trilogy, “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” and “The Transporter: Refueled.” 

A looming presence at 6-foot-4, Stevenson, who played his share of soldiers past and present, once said in an interview, “I guess I’m an old warrior at heart.” 

On the small screen, he was the roguish Titus Pullo in “Rome,” a role that really got his career going in the United States and got him a SAG card, at the age of 44. The popular series ran from 2005 to 2007. 

“That was one of the major years of my life,” Stevenson said in an interview. “It made me sit down in my own skin and say, just do the job. The job’s enough.” 

In the Variety review of “Rome,” Brian Lowery wrote that “the imposing Stevenson certainly stands out as a brawling, whoring and none-too-bright warrior — a force of nature who, despite his excesses, somehow keeps landing on his feet.” 

He was Blackbeard in the Starz series “Black Sails,” Commander Jack Swinburne in the German television series “Das Boot,” and Othere in “Vikings.” 

Stevenson also did voice work in “Star Wars Rebels” and “The Clone Wars,” as Gar Saxon, and has a role in the upcoming Star Wars live-action series “Ahsoka,” in which he plays a bad guy, Baylan Skoll. The eight-episode season is expected on Disney+ in August. 

In an interview with Backstage in 2020, Stevenson said his acting idols were, “The likes of Lee Marvin (and) Gene Hackman.” 

“Never a bad performance, and brave and fearless within that caliber,” Stevenson said. “It was never the young, hot leading man; it was men who I could identify with.” 

Stevenson has three sons with Italian anthropologist Elisabetta Caraccia, who he met while working on “Rome.” 
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Most filmmakers in the Cannes Film Festival’s top-rung competition are well-known directors who have been around for decades. One dramatic exception this year is Ramata-Toulaye Sy, a French-Senegalese filmmaker whose first film, “Banel & Adama,” landed among the 21 films competing for the Palme d’Or. 

“It’s only now that I realize that being in competition means being in a competition,” Sy said, laughing, in an interview shortly after “Banel & Adama” premiered in Cannes. “Now that we’re really in the middle of it, I realize there’s a lot of passion going around.” 

Sy, 36, is the sole first-timer in Cannes’ main lineup this year. She is also only the second Black female director to ever compete for the Palme, following Mati Diop, also a French-Senegalese filmmaker, whose “Atlantics” debuted in 2019. For the Paris-raised Sy, it’s not a distinction of significance. 

“I’m a filmmaker and I really wish we stopped being counted as women, as Black or Arab or Asian,” she said. 

In “Banel & Adama,” also the only Africa-set film competing for the Palme this year, Sy crafts a radiant and languorous fable tinged with myth and tragedy. 

Banel (Khady Mane) and Adama (Mamadou Diallo) are a deeply in love married couple living in a small village in northern Senegal. In their intimate romantic idyll, they wish to pull away from the local traditions. Adama is set to become village chief but is uninterested in doing so. Banel dreams of living outside the village, in a home buried under a mountain of sand. 

While Banel and Adama slowly work to sweep away the sand, their yearning to live on their own causes angst in the village, especially when a drought arrives that some take as a curse for their independence. Though often opaque, the film stays largely with the psychology of Banel, whose single-mindedness grows increasingly dark. 

“I was quite reluctant at the start to acknowledge that Banel is me,” Sy said. “Now I have to confess that it’s definitely me. I see myself, my questions, my struggle in her journey. How to become an individual inside a community is really my own question.” 

Sy began writing “Banel & Adama” in 2014 as a student at La Fémis, the French film school. Sy, the daughter of Senegalese immigrants, says she was first drawn to literature. Novels like Toni Morrison’s “Sula” and Elena Frenate’s “My Brilliant Friend” inspired “Banel & Adama.” 

“The love story was a pretext for to deal with myth,” she says. “I wanted to have this kind of mythological female character that you find in Greek tragedy.” 

Sy co-wrote Atiq Rahimi’s “Our Lady of the Nile” and Çagla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanetti’s “Sibel” — both of which played at international festivals. Her first short film, “Astel,” was well-received. 

But little prepared her for the stresses of shooting in rural Senegal. Along with heat, sandstorms and bouts of illness among the crew, Sy struggled to find her Banel. In the end, she found Mane while walking around. 

“We had all the cast except for her. We started five months before shooting and one month before shooting we still didn’t have her. One day I was walking down the street and my eyes locked on this girl,” Sy said. “It was the way that she looked at me. Her gaze had something a bit wise and a bit crazy.” 
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While the world watched Kabul fall and the Taliban surge back to power in 2021 following the withdrawal of U.S. troops, actor Jennifer Lawrence and producer Justine Ciarrocchi were asking themselves what they could do to support women’s rights. 

“Jen’s first response was to find an Afghan filmmaker and give them a platform,” Ciarrocchi told The Hollywood Reporter. 

They eventually found director Sahra Mani, whose 2019 documentary “A Thousand Girls Like Me” looked at a sexually abused woman’s quest for justice. 

On Sunday, “Bread and Roses,” Mani’s documentary about the daily lives of three women after the Taliban’s resurgence, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in a special screening. 

“This film has a message from women in Afghanistan, a soft message; please be their voice who are voiceless under Taliban dictatorship,” said Mani at the premiere. 

The director said in an interview on the Cannes website that she wanted to show the reality of how drastically life has changed under the Taliban for women, even if filming was difficult. “Now that women can no longer leave the house without the veil, I thought we should tell their stories,” she said. 

The safety of the camera crews and the people filmed was of top priority, said Mani, who currently lives in France. 

“The way in which their lives have changed under the Taliban is an everyday reality for us, it’s life under a dictatorship, a cruel reality we cannot ignore.” 
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The 10th installment of the “Fast and Furious” franchise was off to the races this weekend, knocking “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” out of first place and easily claiming the No. 1 spot at the box office. “Fast X” earned $67.5 million in ticket sales from 4,046 North American theaters, according to estimates from Universal Pictures on Sunday.

It’s on the lower end of openings for the series which peaked with “Furious 7’s” $142.2 million launch, the sole movie in the series to surpass $100 million out of the gates. “Fast X’s” domestic debut only ranks above the first three. The last movie, “F9,” opened to $70 million in 2021.

But this is also a series that has usually made the bulk of its money internationally, often over 70%. True to form, overseas it’s on turbo drive. “Fast X” opened in 84 markets internationally, playing in over 24,000 theaters, where it earned an estimated $251.4 million. The top market was China with $78.3 million, followed by Mexico with $16.7 million. And it adds up to a $319 million global debut — the third biggest of the franchise.

“It’s a global franchise with a very broad audience,” said Jim Orr, Universal’s head of domestic distribution. “The themes resonate across the world.”

Directed by Louis Leterrier (who took over from Justin Lin during production), “Fast X” brings back the familiar crew including Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson and Jordana Brewster and adds several newcomers, like Brie Larson, Rita Moreno and a villain played by Jason Momoa. The ever-expanding cast includes Jason Statham, Charlize Theron, Scott Eastwood and Helen Mirren.

Reports say the movie cost $340 million to produce, not including marketing.

Reviews were mixed for “Fast X,” the beginning of the end for the $6 billion franchise, which currently has a 54% on Rotten Tomatoes. AP’s Mark Kennedy wrote in his review that, “It has become almost camp, as if it breathed in too much of its own fumes” and that it’s also “monstrously silly and stupidly entertaining.”

According to exit polls, audiences were 29% Caucasian, 29% Hispanic and 21% Black, and 58% were between the ages of 18 and 34. They gave the film a B+ CinemaScore.

In its third weekend, Disney and Marvel’s ” Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 ” made an estimated $32 million in North America to take second place. It’s now made $266.5 million domestically and $659.1 million globally.

Third place went to another Universal juggernaut, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which is now in its seventh weekend and available to rent on VOD. Nevertheless, it earned an additional $9.8 million in North America, bringing its domestic total to $549.3 million.

“Book Club: The Next Chapter ” added $3 million in its second weekend to take fourth place, while “Evil Dead Rise” rounded out the top five in its fifth weekend with $2.4 million.

“Mario” and “Fast X” are just the latest success stories for Universal, following hits like “Cocaine Bear” and “M3GAN.” And later this summer, on July 21, they’ll release Christopher Nolan’s ” Oppenheimer.”

“Universal as a studio is just on a roll like no other by having this incredible slate of films from all different types of genres,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “They’ve created a release strategy that’s really picture perfect so far.”

“Fast X” doesn’t have an entirely open runway though. Next weekend there will be sizable competition in Disney’s live-action “The Little Mermaid,” in addition to a slew of crowd-pleasers hoping to catch a Memorial Day weekend audience, including Julia Louis-Dreyfus in “You Hurt My Feelings” and the broad comedy “About My Father,” with Sebastian Maniscalco and Robert De Niro.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. “Fast X,” $67.5 million.

2. “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” $32 million.

3. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” $9.8 million.

4. “Book Club: The Next Chapter,” $3 million.

5. “Evil Dead Rise,” $2.4 million.

6. “John Wick: Chapter 4,” $1.3 million.

7. “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” $1.3 million.

8. “Hypnotic,” $825,000.

9. “MET Opera: Don Giovanni,” $701,025.

10. “BlackBerry,” $525,000.
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It was well into the process of making “Killers of the Flower Moon” that Martin Scorsese realized it wasn’t a detective story.

Scorsese, actor Leonardo DiCaprio and screenwriter Eric Roth had many potential avenues in adapting David Grann’s expansive nonfiction history, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.” The film that Scorsese and company premiered Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, however, wasn’t like the one they initially set out to make.

The film, which will open in theaters in October, chronicles the series of killings that took place throughout the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma. The Osage were then enormously rich from oil on their land, and many white barons and gangsters alike sought to control and steal their money. Dozens of Osage Native Americans were killed before the FBI, in its infancy, began to investigate.

DiCaprio had originally been cast to star as FBI agent Tom White. But after mulling the project over, Scorsese decided to pivot.

“I said, ‘I think the audience is ahead of us,’” Scorsese told reporters Sunday in Cannes. “They know it’s not a whodunit. It’s a who-didn’t-do-it.”

The shift, filmmakers said, was largely driven from collaboration with the Osage. Osage Nation Chief Standing Bear, who consulted on the film, praised the filmmakers for centering the story instead on Mollie (Lily Gladstone) and her husband Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), the tragic romance at the heart of Scorsese’s epic of insidious American ethnic exploitation.

“Early on, I asked Mr. Scorsese, ‘How are you going to approach the story? He said I’m going to tell a story about trust, trust between Mollie and Ernest, trust between the outside world and the Osage, and the betrayal of those trusts,” said Chief Standing Bear. “My people suffered greatly and to this very day those effects are with us. But I can say on behalf of the Osage, Marty Scorsese and his team have restored trust and we know that trust will not be betrayed.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon,” the most anticipated film to debut at this year’s Cannes, instead became about Ernest, who Scorsese called “the character the least is written about.”

DiCaprio, who ceded the character of White to Jesse Plemons, said “Killers of the Flower Moon” reverberates with other only recently widely discussed dark chapters of American history.

“This story, much like the Tulsa massacre, has been something that people have started to learn about and started to understand is part of culture, part of our history,” said DiCaprio. “After the screenplay, from almost an anthropological perspective — Marty was there every day — we were talking to the community, trying to hear the real stories and trying to incorporate the truth.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon” premiered Saturday to largely rave reviews and thunderous applause nearly 50 years after Scorsese, as a young filmmaker, was a sensation at Cannes. His “Taxi Driver” won the Palme d’Or in 1976.

Among the most-praised performances has been that of Gladstone, the actor of Blackfeet and Nimíipuu heritage.

“These artistic souls on this stage here cared about telling a story that pierces the veil of what society tells us we’re supposed to care about and not,” said Gladstone, who singled out Scorsese. “Who else is going to challenge people to challenge their own complicity in white supremacy in such a platform except as this man here?”

“We’re speaking of the 1920s Osage community. We’re talking about Black Wall Street and Tulsa. We’re talking about a lot in our film,” she continued. “Why the hell does the world not know about these things? Our communities always have. It’s so central to everything about how we understand our place in the world.”

In the film, Robert De Niro plays a wealthy baron who’s particularly adept at plundering the Osage. Speaking Sunday, De Niro was still mulling his character’s motivations.

“There’s a kind of feeling of entitlement,” said De Niro. “It’s the banality of evil. It’s the thing that we have to watch out for. We see it today, of course. We all know who I’m going to talk about, but I won’t say the name. Because that guy is stupid. Imagine if you’re smart?”

A minute later, De Niro resumed: “I mean, look at Trump,” referring to former President Donald Trump.

With a running time well over three hours and a budget from Apple of $200 million, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is one of Scorsese’s largest undertakings. Asked where he gets the gumption for such risks, the 80-year-old director didn’t hesitate.

“As far as taking risks at this age, what else can I do?” said Scorsese. “‘No, let’s go do something comfortable.’ Are you kidding?”
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A powerful Auschwitz-set psychological horror film, The Zone of Interest, is emerging as the hot ticket at the Cannes Film Festival, with reviews Saturday were near-unanimous in their praise.

British director Jonathan Glazer’s film focuses on the family of Rudolf Hoess, the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz camp, who lived a stone’s throw from the incinerators.

While the screams and gunshots are audible from their beautiful garden, the family carries on as though nothing was amiss.

The horror “is just bearing down on every pixel of every shot, in sound and how we interpret that sound… It affects everything but them,” Glazer told AFP.

“Everything had to be very carefully calibrated to feel that it was always there, this ever-present, monstrous machinery,” he said.

The 58-year-old Glazer, who is Jewish, focused on the banality of daily lives around the death camp, viewing Hoess’s family not as obvious monsters but as terrifyingly ordinary.

“The things that drive these people are familiar. Nice house, nice garden, healthy kids,” he said.

“How like them are we? How terrifying it would be to acknowledge? What is it that we’re so frightened of understanding?”

“Would it be possible to sleep? Could you sleep? What happens if you close the curtains and you wear earplugs, could you do that?”

The film is all the more uncomfortable as it is shot in a realist style, with natural lighting and none of the frills that are typical of a period drama.

It has garnered gushing praise so far from critics at the French Riviera festival.

A “bone-chilling Holocaust drama like no other,” The Hollywood Reporter said of the “audacious film,” concluding that Glazer “is incapable of making a movie that’s anything less than bracingly original.”

Variety said that Glazer had “delivered the first instant sensation of the festival,” describing it as “profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope.”

‘I cogitate a lot’

Glazer is known for taking his time — it has been a decade since his last film, the acclaimed, deeply strange sci-fi Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson.

He made his name with music videos for Radiohead, Blur and Massive Attack in the 1990s before moving into films with Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004).

“I cogitate a lot. I think a lot about what I’m going to make, good or bad,” he said.

“This particular subject obviously is a vast, profound topic and deeply sensitive for many reasons and I couldn’t just approach it casually.”

A novel of the same title by Martin Amis was one catalyst for bringing him to this project.

It provided “a key that unlocked some space for me… the enormous discomfort of being in the room with the perpetrator.”

He spent two years reading other books and accounts on the subject before beginning to map out the film with collaborators.

Glazer’s film is one of 21 in competition for the Palme d’Or, the top prize at Cannes, which runs until May 27.

French reviewers were equally impressed by Glazer’s film, with Le Figaro calling it “a chilling film with dizzying impact” and Liberation saying it could well take home the Palme.
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National Treasure won the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore on Saturday, giving Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert a record-breaking eighth win in the middle jewel of U.S. thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown.

With John Velazquez aboard, National Treasure held off a late charge from Blazing Sevens. Kentucky Derby winner Mage finished third, meaning the chestnut colt will not have a shot at becoming U.S. thoroughbred racing’s 13th Triple Crown winner.

The win capped an emotional day for Baffert, whose colt Havnameltdown was euthanized on the track earlier on Saturday after going down with an injury during a race at Pimlico.

“Losing that horse today really hurt but I am happy for Johnny, he got the win,” Baffert said fighting back tears, referring to the jockey. “It’s been a very emotional day.”

For Baffert, one of the sport’s best-known figures, the Preakness marked his first Triple Crown race in two years due to a lengthy suspension after one of his horses, Medina Spirit, tested positive for a banned substance and was stripped of the Kentucky Derby title in 2021.
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Scottish-Ghanaian architect Lesley Lokko is giving a platform to voices that have long been silenced at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, which opens Saturday, the first ever curated by an African, featuring a preponderance of work by Africans and the African diaspora. 

The 18th architectural Biennale, titled “The Laboratory of the Future,” explores decolonization and decarbonization, topics about which Africans have much to say, Lokko said, citing the long exploitation of the continent for both human and environmental resources. 

“The Black body was Europe’s first unit of energy,” Lokko told The Associated Press this week. “We have had a relationship to resources since time immemorial. We operate at a place where resources are not stable. They are also often fragile. They’re often exploited. Our relationship to them is exploitative.” 

Lokko tapped global stars like David Adjaye and Theaster Gates among 89 participants in the main show — more than half of them from Africa or the African diaspora. To reduce the Biennale’s carbon footprint, Lokko encouraged the participating architects, artists and designers to be as “paper-thin” as possible with their exhibits, resulting in more drawings, film and projections as well as the reuse of materials from last year’s contemporary art Biennale. 

“This exhibition is a way of showing that this work, this imagination, this creativity, has been around for a very, very long time,” Lokko said. “It’s just that it hasn’t found quite the right space, in the same way.” 

It is a fair question why an African-centric exhibition has been so long in coming to such a high-profile, international platform like Venice. 

Okwui Enwezor, the late Nigerian art critic and museum director, was the first African to head the Venice Biennale contemporary art fair, which alternates years with the architectural show, in 2015. Lokko was the first Biennale curator selected by President Roberto Cicutto, who was appointed in 2020 during the global push for inclusion ignited by the killing of George Floyd in the United States. 

“This is more for us than for them,” Cicutto said, “to see the production, hear the voices we have heard too little, or heard in the way we wanted to.” 

Impediments in the West to inclusive events with a focus on the global south were evident in the refusal by the Italian embassy in Ghana to approve visas for three of Lokko’s collaborators, which Lokko decried this week as “an old and familiar tale.” 

A refocusing of the North-South relationship is suggested in the main pavilion’s facade: a corrugated metal roof cut into deconstructed images of the Venetian winged lion. The material is ubiquitous in Africa and other developing regions, and here offers free shade. The lion, native to Africa and for centuries a symbol of Venice, serves as a reminder of how deeply cultural appropriation runs. 

“I don’t see any lions around here,’’ Lokko said wryly. 

Inside, Adjaye’s studio exhibits architectural models created “outside the dominant canon,” like the Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library in South Africa that takes inspiration from pre-colonial buildings. Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama explores the colonial exploitation in the installation, “Parliament of Ghosts.” 

And Olalekan Jeyifous, a Brooklyn-based Nigerian national, creates a sprawling retro-futuristic narrative around the fictional formation of a united African Conservation Effort, something he imagines would have been constructed a decade after African decolonization in an alternative 1972. 

“It’s never utopia/dystopia. Such binary Western terms, that I’m really interested in operating outside of,” said Jeyifous, who won the Silver Lion for a promising young participant. “It’s not just: We’ve solved all the problems now. Everything’s fantastic. It’s never that simple.” 

The Golden Lion for the best participant in the main show, went to Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal for their exhibit DAAR, exploring the legacy and reuse of fascist colonial architecture. 

More than in previous editions, the 64 national participants responded to Lokko’s themes with pavilions that found a natural echo with the main show and its focus on climate change issues and an expanded, more-inclusive dialogue. 

Denmark offered practical solutions for coastal areas to work with nature to create solutions to rising seas, proposing Copenhagen islands that invite the sea in to form canals, not unlike Venice’s.  

Decolonization was a natural theme at the Brazilian pavilion, where curators Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares show the architectural heritage of Indigenous and African Brazilians and challenge the “hegemonic” narrative that the capital, Brasilia, was built in the “middle of nowhere.” Their exhibit, titled “Terra,” was awarded the Golden Lion for the best national participant. 

The U.S. Pavilion looked at ubiquitous plastic, invented and propagated in the United States, and how to cope with its durability, under the title “Everlasting Plastic.” In one of the five exhibits, Norman Teague, a Chicago-based African American artist, designer and furniture-maker, used recycled plastics from such everyday items as Tide laundry detergent bottles to create one-off baskets, referencing weaves from Senegal and Ghana. 

Teague said he was inspired by Lokko’s themes to consider “how I could really think about the lineage between the continent and Chicago.” 

Ukraine returns to the Biennale with two installations that, in the gentlest possible way, serve as a reminder that war continues to rage in Europe. The pavilion in the Arsenale has been decked out in black-out materials to represent ad-hoc, if futile protective measures ordinary Ukrainians are taking against the threat of Russian bombardment. 

In the center of the Giardini, curators Iryna Miroshnykova, Oleksii Petrov and Borys Filonenko have recreated earthen mounds that served as barriers against 10th century invaders. Though long abandoned, overtaken by modern farming and sprawl, they proved effective against Russian tanks last spring. 

“These spaces, the fortifications, are a place to be quiet, to chill. But it is also kind of a reminder that somewhere, someone is fearing for their safety,” Filonenko said. 
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Salman Rushdie made an emotional and unexpected return to public life Thursday night, attending the annual gala of PEN America and giving the event’s final speech as he accepted a special prize, the PEN Centenary Courage Award, just nine months being after being stabbed repeatedly and hospitalized.

“It’s nice to be back — as opposed to not being back, which was also a possibility. I’m glad the dice rolled this way,” Rushdie, 75, told hundreds gathered at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, where he received a standing ovation.

It was his first in-person appearance at a public event since he was attacked last August while on stage at a literary festival in western New York.

Rushdie, whose attendance had not been announced beforehand, spoke briefly and dedicated some of his remarks to those who came to his help last year at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education and retreat center. He cited a fellow attendee, Henry Reese of the City of Asylum project in Pittsburgh, for tackling the assailant and thanked audience members who also stepped in.

“I accept this award, therefore, on behalf of all those who came to my rescue. I was the target that day, but they were the heroes. The courage, that day, was all theirs, and I thank them for saving my life,” he said.

“And I have one last thing to add. It’s this: Terror must not terrorize us. Violence must not deter us. La lutte continue. La lutta continua. The struggle goes on.”

Attacks against Rushdie have been feared since the late 1980s and the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, which Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned as blasphemous for passages referring to the Prophet Mohammad. The Ayatollah issued a decree calling for Rushdie’s death, forcing the author into hiding, although he had been traveling freely for years before the stabbing.

Since the attack, he has granted few interviews and otherwise communicated through his Twitter account and prepared remarks. Earlier this week, he delivered a video message to the British Book Awards, where he was given a Freedom to Publish prize.

Rushdie was clearly elated to attend the PEN America gala, but his voice sounded frailer than it once did, and the right frame of his glasses was dark, concealing the eye blinded by his attacker.

PEN galas have long been a combination of literature, politics, activism and celebrity, with attendees ranging from Alec Baldwin to Senator Angus King of Maine. Other honorees Thursday included “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels and the imprisoned Iranian journalist and activist Narges Mohammadi, who was given the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award.

“Dear writers, thinkers, and sympathizers, I implore you to help the Iranian people free themselves from the grip of the Islamic Republic, or morally speaking, please help end the suffering of the Iranian people,” Mohammadi wrote from prison in a letter read aloud at the ceremony. “Let us prove the magic of global unity against authorities besotted with power and greed.”

The host Thursday night was “Saturday Night Live” head writer Colin Jost, who inspired nervous laughter with jokes about the risks of being in the same room as Rushdie, likening it to sharing a balcony section with Abraham Lincoln. He also referred briefly to the Hollywood writers’ strike, which has left “Saturday Night Live” off the air since early May, saying it was “disorienting” to spend the afternoon on a picket line and then show up “for the museum cocktail hour.”

PEN events are familiar settings for Rushdie, a former president of PEN, the literary rights organization for which freedom of speech is a core mission. He has attended many times in the past and is a co-founder of PEN’s World Voices Festival, an international gathering of author panels and interviews held around the time of the PEN gala.
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Britain’s Prince Harry, his wife Meghan and her mother were involved in a “near catastrophic car chase” involving paparazzi photographers, a spokesperson for the prince said on Wednesday.

It occurred after the couple had attended an awards ceremony held in New York by the Ms. Foundation for Women, where Meghan was honored for her work.  

Pictures that have appeared on social media have shown Harry, Meghan and her mother, Doria Ragland, in a taxi.  

“Last night, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Ms Ragland were involved in a near catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two NYPD (New York Police Department) officers.”

Harry and Meghan stepped down from their royal roles in 2020 and moved to the United States partly because of what they described as intense media harassment.

The prince has long spoken out about his anger about press intrusion which he blames for the death of his mother Princess Diana, who was killed when her limousine crashed as it sped away from chasing paparazzi in Paris.

 
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