Happy Monday, everyone!

Tonight in New York, Cate will be honored at the 47th Chaplin Awards but while we wait Film Comment has released the podcast interview they did with her discussing her most memorable roles. Cate also moderated a Q&A last night for the documentary For Sama.

Podcast

Every year, Film at Lincoln Center honors a luminary of the film industry with the Chaplin Award. This year’s recipient, the 47th, is an actress who has essayed some of the most iconic performances of the last quarter-century, and whose nearly superhuman versatility is matched by the consistency of her craft: Cate Blanchett. In an in-depth tribute essay, the scholar Amy Herzog writes that “Blanchett’s almost otherworldly range has generated certain tropes in reviews of her work: she is often described as ‘chameleonic,’ or said to ‘disappear into the character. But these takes, which suggest an innate and natural ability for imitation, or even an erasure of the self, don’t capture the careful calibrations of Blanchett’s craft.”

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Blanchett to dig into those calibrations and the process behind some of the most interesting performances of her career. We discussed her iconic turns in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok, and some deeper cuts, like her early roles in the Australian miniseries Bordertown and Tom Tykwer’s Heaven (which was written by Krystof Kieslowski).

— Film Comment

FOR SAMA Screening

Cate moderated a Q&A for the documentary FOR SAMA after a screening at Forest Row Townhall. The documentary is directed by Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts and has been nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2020 Academy Awards. The screening was originally scheduled in March 29th 2020 but was cancelled due to COVID lockdown. Cate has also previously hosted a screening of the movie in November 2019.

FOR SAMA is both an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her.

There is also campaign to end targeted attack on hospitals in Syria. You can check more information about #ActionForSama here.