Sunday night at the 76th Cannes Film Festival was all about the world premiere of the Jude Law and Alicia Vikander Henry VIII period pic Firebrand, which received a royal response from the crowd in the Grand Theatre Lumiere with an eight and a half minute standing ovation.

Brazilian-Algerian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz directed the movie off a script by Henrietta Ashworth and Jessica Ashworth. The pic reps Aïnouz’s English language debut and it’s playing in competition.

Firebrand stars Oscar winner Vikander as Catherine Parr, the final wife of Henry VIII, a feminist force to be reckoned with who outlived the notorious king; the fate of his wives being either divorced, dead or beheaded. She is named Regent with the king warring abroad, and she’s done everything she can to push for a new future based on her radical Protestant beliefs. Law plays a royal on his way out, having returned from fighting with a dire condition on his right leg. Palace intrigue abounds entailing Henry squaring off with the Seymours brothers, one of them having their eye on Catherine, and the king ultimately fading.

Aïnouz’s track record at Cannes includes Invisible Life, which won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes in 2019, as well as, Mariner Of The Mountains which premiered in Cannes 2021.

FilmNation Entertainment handled international sales. Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions will distribute in Germany, Greece, Iceland, Middle East, Scandinavia, Turkey, all of Asia (excluding Japan), Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Other territories sold include Switzerland (Elite Film AG), Israel (Lev Cinemas), Spain, Italy and LATAM (Vertice Cine), and UK and Benelux (Black Bear Pictures). [Source]

Alicia Vikander is at this week’s Goteborg Film Festival to help promote the Alicia Vikander Film Lab high-school initiative, and because Scandinavia’s largest film festival, held in her home town of Göteborg, southern Sweden, has always been part of her life.

Established in 2021 by Vikander (“The Danish Girl”), the Festival and the Sten Olsson Foundation for Research and Culture, the three-year film training program is for local high-school-aged students, with the program made available to educational establishments in the Goteborg area since last January.

“We’ve managed to get it on the curriculum,” said Vikander who is the biggest star at this year’s festival and a fixture at the event, reciting an Honorary Nordic Dragon Award, for instance, in 2018. “It’s a project where I’ve been able to get a lot of it done remotely on Zoom,” she told Variety at Göteborg.

On Monday at the Festival, a gala will take place presenting films by this year’s students. 12 short films will be screened. The films are between two and five minutes long. Since the launch, film teachers from the Festival have been visiting schools selected this year, once a month, and Vikander has visited the schools twice during the school year.

The participating schools in 2022 are Kannebäcksskolan, Nordhemsskolan and Skälltorpsskolan – the school that Vikander attended. Each year, three to four new schools join the project.

“For a long time, I wanted to find a way to give back,” says Vikander who trained as a dancer at the Royal Swedish Ballet School.

“My mum would never have had the possibility, for example, to pay for dance. If you get into the state Ballet, the state pays for you, and they also paid for my violin lessons. I played with the Philharmonic at 13. Then I did my first film in the Philharmonic. I got all these possibilities. Even if you don’t have financial support in Sweden you can get a cultural education.”

Another reason the initiative took flight is because she has a long-standing relationship with the Göteborg Festival.
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The actress also opened up about experiencing an “extreme and painful” miscarriage before the birth of her first son.

Alicia Vikander explained that while it may look like celebrities have it all, being at the top of your career and commanding international fame can actually be extremely isolating.

The actress said in an interview with The Sunday Times that she found stardom to be a double-edged sword as “there was juxtaposition” between how things looked and what was actually going on for her behind the scenes. “In other people’s eyes, [when] I was at my height of fame, I was the most sad. I kept telling myself, ‘Take it in. It is incredible.’ But I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “There were all these first-class flights, five-star rooms. But I was always by myself.”

She added that shooting films on location can also be a “very lonely” experience. Vikander recalled that, in 2014, when she was filming Seventh Son, her first movie away from her family, “If I didn’t have my friends to call, it would have been difficult. I’ve seen what can happen to people in my industry.” She added, “Sometimes you go through things that are tough in life and if you have an office job you can step away for a bit. But there are times that myself or colleagues have been through something and, well, I can’t understand how they went on to the red carpet afterwards. To be met by people asking, ‘How are you doing?’ Given what they had just been through? Most people would not be able to step out of their house.”

But that loneliness began to abate when Vikander met her husband Michael Fassbender. The pair first met in 2014 on the set of their film The Light Between Oceans, in which they played husband and wife. They would go on to get married for real in Ibiza, Spain at the La Granja farmstead resort in October 2017, and in 2021 they welcomed their son who is now 17 months old. They currently live in Lisbon, Portugal.
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Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s Beckett, starring John David Washington, Boyd Holbrook, Vicky Krieps and Alicia Vikander, will open the 74th edition of Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival on August 4. Produced by Luca Guadagnino, the film follows an American tourist vacationing in Greece who becomes the target of a manhunt after a devastating accident. The pic will screen at the iconic Piazza Grande before debuting on Netflix from August 13. “There’s a piece of Locarno in the success story of Ferdinando Cito Filomarino. From the Pardi di domani to the Piazza Grande. The Locarno Film Festival as an incubator for talent, a training ground and finally as a launch pad for the most exciting filmmakers of the future,” said Locarno Artistic Director Giona A. Nazzaro. “Beckett is a thriller that gives an original and contemporary reboot to the lessons learned from directors such as Sydney Pollack and Alan J. Pakula. An action film with a humanist dimension and intense civil engagement, here underpinned by a magisterial performance from John David Washington. Political commitment and great entertainment are the two main ingredients for a Piazza Grande that aims to surprise audiences and reassert the centrality of film in all its forms.” [Source]

Former ballerina Alicia Vikander has deemed the focus put on dancers’ bodies “unhealthy”.

The Oscar winner studied ballet before finding fame as an actress, and has spoken about her experiences in a new chat with Elle U.K. magazine.

“Being in a leotard looking at your body in a mirror seven hours a day, six days a week and having people talk about your body in front of you and in front of other girls and boys… Growing up with that is not healthy,” she said.

“I was very lucky to go through ballet school without having an eating disorder. I don’t know how,” Alicia explained, noting that it was her mother who spoke to her every day about the dangers of a negative body image.

However, when the Swedish star stopped dancing, she struggled to accept her changing body.

“But when I stopped ballet, I continued to eat a lot and – it’s stupid because I was really thin when I was dancing – but I gained two or three kilos and I freaked out when I saw a photo (of myself) because my body had changed,” the 31-year-old shared.

“Like so many other girls I was like, I shouldn’t eat carbs. That was the first thing I heard about, so I stopped eating bread.”

It was only after landing the role of Lara Croft in 2018’s Tomb Raider, where she was required to train from 4am daily and gained around 5kg of muscle, that The Danish Girl actress realised the importance of diet and exercise.

“I’ve often thought to myself, if I were to have a kid, would I put them in ballet school? I do really treasure a lot of my work ethic and things that I got from that education, but it either makes you or breaks you,” she mused. “And it could have as easily have gone the other way (for me).” [Source]