CANNES FILM FESTIVAL JURY : DEEPIKA PADUKONE HONOURS

Deepika Padukone is now on the Cannes Film Festival jury. After Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Sharmila Tagore and others, Padukone is among a select few Indian actors to serve on the prestigious panel.

Actor Deepika Padukone has officially become a member of the Cannes Jury, presided by French actor Vincent Lindon who won Best Actor at Cannes in 2015.

Jury for the film festival's 75th edition was unveiled on Tuesday. Joining Deepika on the panel are actors Rebecca Hall and Nommi Rapace, known famously for their roles in Iron Man 3 and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, respectively.

Also on the jury are Asghar Farhadi, Jasmine Trinca, Jeff Nichols, Ladj Ly and Joachim Trier. The jury will award the Palme d'Or honours at the closing of the yearly festival which will kick off on May 17 and come to a close on May 28.

Padukone is now among selected few Indian actors who have served on the Cannes jury, with the likes of Aishwarya Rai Bachan, Sharmila Tagore, Nandita Das and Vidya Balan being a member of the same before her.

Sharing the news on her Instagram Stories, Padukone posted her bio on the Festival's de Cannes website, which describes her as '' actress, producer, philanthropist and entrepreneur.'' Her film credits include Piku, Padmaavat and her latest, Gehraiyaan.

''Padukone is a huge star in her country. With other 30 feature films to her credit, she made her English language film debut as the female lead in xXx : The Return of Xander Cage, co-starring Vin Diesel. She is also the principal of Ka Productions, the production company behind Chhapaak and '83, in which she also starred, as well as the upcoming film The Intern.

Credits include Gehraiyaan Padmaavat, as well as the award winning and critically acclaimed, Piku.

In 2015, she set up the Live Love Laugh Foundation, whose programmes and initiatives aim to destigmatizes mental illness and raise awareness about the importance of mental health.

In 2018, TIME MAGAZINE named her in its list of 100 Most Influential People in the World.''

21 films are in competition at the Cannes Film Festival this year, among them are David Cronenberg's Crimes of  The Future and Claire Denis' Stars at Noon.

The out of competition film screenings include Tom Cruise's Top Gun sequel Maverick and Buz Luhmann directed Elvis biopic.

On the work front, Padukone has several films in the pipeline including Pathaan with Shah Rukh Khan, Fighter with Hrithik Roshan and Project K.

The World Students Society thanks News Desk, The Express Tribune.

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH RETURNS : ' RIOT '

 

London : Benedict Cumberbatch returns for 'riot'. The actor reprises the role in the sequel for 'Doctor Strange'.

Oscar nominee Benedict Cumberbatch reprises his superhero role in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, in the hotly-anticipated sequel which has fans guessing which Marvel characters might make surprise appearances.

The film, which begins its global cinema rollout on May 4, sees Cumberbatch's Doctor Stephen Strange travelling into the multiverse, allowing for different versions of himself.

This, fans say, allow for other Marvel comic book characters to make cameo appearances, just like in last year's Spider-Man : No Way Home film.

''It's just a riot, it's the usual mixture of pathos and humour and some issues that are relatable to all of us, and some extraordinary things,'' Cumberbatch told Reuters at a fan event in London last Tuesday.

''The fact the character is a gateway to a lot of other characters in quite a crowded film, but also to the epic nature to what the multiverse brings to the storylines means it really does deserve to be seen on a big screen.''

The film also stars Benedict Wong as Stranger's trusted friend Wong and Elizabeth Olsen at Wanda Maximoff, a role she played in several Marvel movies as well as series WandaVision. Xochitl Gomez debuts as Americas America Chavez, a queer character.

The Hollywood Reporter said last week the movie had been banned in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is illegal. Various outlets have since quoted an AFP report citing an official saying Saudi Arabia had asked Disney to cut ''LGBTQ references''.

The Saudi government communication office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters on Tuesday.

Asked about reports of ban, Cumberbatch said : ''Sort of expected, disappointing. It just makes it all the more important to have this inclusion. I would love to get to the point where this isn't a topic of conversation.''

The World Students Society thanks The Express Tribune.

BOOK REVIEW : THE WINDSOR DOSSIER

The Palace Papers : Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil by Tina Brown. In her new book, ''The Palace Papers,'' Tina Brown takes on a centuries-old institution of strong personalities, byzantine rules, a defining pecking order and mercurial public support.

I don't mean the monarchy. I mean the press.

Tracing how 21st-century journalism has helped reshape the wobbly contours of the British royal family, Brown is by turns chiding and comradely.

She is, after all, the English born, Oxford educated former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Talk and The Daily Beast, as well as a prolific freelance writer, intermittent broadcaster, conference organizer and general gadabout.

The House of Windsor has long been referred to as the Firm. But these days it seems more like a Blob : harder to corral than mercury spilled on Axminster carpet.

The presumed future queen consort, Camilla, will be anointed with the asterisk of a first marriage, to Andrew-Bowles, that produced two children.

One scion, Prince Harry, fled his official duties for the bland American luxury of Montecito, Calif; his uncle Prince Andrew has been stripped on his military titles following his embroilment in an international sex-trafficking scandal. [With typical brio, Brown refers to Andrew as a ''coroneted sleaze machine'' and a ''ghost royal.'']

Let's just say the cheating charts have gotten very complicated.

Any student of English history knows that zigs and zags in the palatial line of succession are nothing new. Brown was one of a cadre of top newswomen who commented for ABC during the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton in 2011.

The scale of the ceremonial operation was weighing ''heavily on our betoxed brows,'' Brown writes. She considered mentioning ''the unfortunate fate of previous queens called Catherine : Aragon - divorced; Howard - beheaded,'' before deciding this was probably more information than middle-American viewers would want.

The 1997 death in a car crash of Princess Diana, when Brown memorialized in a best-selling biography, ''The Diana Chronicles,'' 10-years later was an indelible blot. 

The paparazzi chasing the limousine were blamed and demonized after the accident, though Brown forcefully rejects here ''the now pervasive narrative that Diana was a vulnerable victim of media manipulation, a mere marionette tossed about any malign forces beyond her control.''

Indeed, Brown speculates that Diana, who eschewed protection from Scotland Yard and sometimes tipped off the paps herself to make lovers jealous, may have been almost complicit in her own demise, refusing to wear a seatbelt and perhaps even asking her drunk chauffeur to speed up.

''The Palace Papers'' is an apt title for what sometimes seems like a briefcase stuffed to overflowing with such conjecture, plus clippings, transcripts, observations, wry asides, literary references and trivial tidbits. [Speaking of paper, I can't unsee, somehow, that Charles is said to prefer something called Kleenex Velvet tissue, unavailable in the States.]

Not that Brown hasn't scuffed her own shoe leather. She queries the equerries; she tracks down former nannies and ladies-in-waiting.

She vividly conjures ''the fading walk-up flats in far-flung London postal codes of former courtiers and retainers'' : their tables crowded with ''tasteful knickknacks,'' their star carpets reeking of ''downward mobility and pointless, genteel sacrifice.''

Being Tina Brown, she is more often rubbing shoulder pads with the elite in the course of business : huddling under an umbrella with the historian Simon Schama en route to a 9/11 memorial, for example, or telling the sporty Mr. Parker-Bowles in 1981 that she neither hunted nor fished. [''Real intellectual, are you?' he said with a slight patrician sneer.'']

Proudly, she claims to have been the first, in The Daily Beast, to reveal the extent of Jeffrey Epstein's ''depredations.'' She congratulates herself, an energetic shower-upper, for turning down one invitation : to the now infamous dinner party Epstein held in Manhattan for Andrew, attended by Woody Allen; she asked the publicist if it was a ''predator's ball.''

The World Students Society thanks review author Alexandra Jacobs.

Headline, May 07 2022/ ''' '' HARVARD -DETAILS SLAVERY- HISTORY '' '''

''' '' HARVARD 

-DETAILS SLAVERY-

 HISTORY '' '''

HARVARD DETAILS ITS HISTORY WITH SLAVERY : The University is creating a $100 million fund to study and redress the past.

In one column are the names of more than 70 enslaved people at Harvard : Venus, Juba, Cesar, Cicely. They are only first names, or sometimes no names at all - '' the Moor '' or '' a little boy '' - of people and stories that have been all but forgotten.

In another column are the names of the ministers and presidents and donors of Harvard who enslaved them in the 17th and 18th centuries : Increase Mather, Gov-John Winthrop, William Brattle. These full names are so powerful and revered they still adorn buildings today.

The contrasting lists are arguably the most poignant part of a 134-page report on Harvard University's four centuries of entanglement with slavery and its legacy. And they are just an appendix :

The report by a committee of Harvard faculty members, released last Tuesday, is Harvard's effort to begin redressing the wrongs of the past, as some other universities have been doing for decades.

As part of the process, the university's governing corporation has pledged $100 million in part to create an endowed '' Legacy of Slavery Fund '' that would allow scholars and students to bring Harvard's connections to slavery into the light for generations to come.

Experts said the amount of money Harvard was committing for such a project was rare, if not unprecedented for an educational institution. It rivals the $100 million pledged by leaders of the Jesuit conference of priests for racial reconciliation and to benefit descendants of enslaved people at Georgetown University.

The report calls for spending the money in a multitude of tracks : By tracing the modern-day descendants of enslaved people at Harvard. By building memorials and curriculum to honor and expose the past. By creating exchange programs between students and faculty members at Harvard and those at historically Black colleges and universities, and by collaborating with tribal colleges.

It also calls for forging partnerships to improve schools in the American South and West Indies, where plantation owners and Boston elites made their intertwined fortunes on backs of the enslaved.

The recommendations are somewhat vague, purposely so, Harvard officials said, so that more care can be put into fulfilling them. Some descendants of the enslaved said talks had already begun to figure out how they could work together.

But the report carefully avoided treading on direct financial reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

Reparations ''means different things to different people, so fixating on that term, I think, can be counterproductive,'' said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the committee chair, a professor of both law and history, and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

She said one goal of the new endowed fund was to drive social mobility by closing gaps in educational opportunity. ''The university is committed to deeply meaningful and sustained remedies that will endure in perpetuity,'' she said. ''Those remedies are focused on leveraging our expertise in education, which is consistent with our mission.''

Some descendants of the enslaved at Harvard, like Jordan Lloyd, found the university's promises bittersweet.

Ms. Lloyd grew up in Boston wondering how her Black family had gotten there. While working as an actress, she paid her bills by waitressing at Harvard's repertory theater, never suspecting that she was walking the same streets as an ancestor, she did not know about, Cuba Vassall.

Harvard's report says Cuba Vasall was enslaved by Penelope Royall Vasall, sister of Isaac Royall Jr., the slave holding benefactor of Harvard Law School. The Royal family crest, with its sheaves of wheat, was a symbol of the law school until it was withdrawn in 2016, after 80 years, because of student protests.

The student paper, The Harvard Crimson, now practically makes a game of finding the Royall crest extant on some university property.

Ms. Lloyd, who now lives in Los Angeles and works in film, learned about her ancestor from Carissa Chen, then an undergraduate researching descendants of the enslaved under the tutelage of a Harvard history professor, Sven Beckert.

Dr. Beckert, in turn, had been inspired by an investigation of slavery at Brown University that was started in 2003 by Ruth Simmons, the first Black president of an Ivy League school.

Dr. Beckert and his students labored alone for three or four years, he recalled, until the Harvard administration first took notice around 2010.

Ms. Chen, a Rhodes scholar, contacted Ms. Lloyd in 2020, around the time of the protests over the police killing of George Floyd. Ms. Lloyd was sickened over police brutality, she said in an interview. Knowing with such scholarly where she came from made her feel better.

''I found a lot of peace and grounded-ness in it, and I was incredibly grateful,'' she said.

But she also felt anger toward Harvard for not doing more earlier.'' ''It feels like they are hopping on a bandwagon,'' she said, adding that she favors financial reparations and believes that what Harvard does will be a ''barometer'' for others.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Great Universities of the World, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Anemona Hartcollis.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Harvard then the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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