Variety reports that the upcoming Jim Jarmusch film, FATHER MOTHER BROTHER SISTER, is set to premiere in competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival (13-24 May 2025). In the part MOTHER, Cate Blanchett plays a therapist named Emily who is navigating complex family dynamics with her sister played by Vicky Krieps and mother played by Charlotte Rampling. This is Cate’s first film in competition at the festival since Todd Haynes’ CAROL (2015) co-starring Cannes Best Actress winner, Rooney Mara.

On BLACK BAG related news, Cate is on Las Culturistas and Subway Takes podcasts. BLACK BAG is now in cinemas, so please go see it!

Cate and Thomas Ostermeier spoke to Zeit Online during the press night of THE SEAGULL. Cate is also featured on BBC Sounds’ Artworks podcast where she talks about her turn as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Liv Ullmann, you can listen to the episode here. She is also starring on her first radio drama for BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4.

Cate is among the 400+ signatories on a letter to the White House concerning AI Copyright Laws, more on this below.

Father Mother Brother Sister

A month before Cannes Film Festival’s press conference, the official selection is still very much a work in progress, with little reliable information filtering through about which movies have already been invited. In fact, as of Friday — despite the volume of splashy prediction stories — it appears that only three films have so far been given a golden ticket to compete in Cannes. Variety can reveal that one of them is Jim Jarmusch’s anticipated “Father Mother Sister Brother“ starring Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver and Tom Waits.

Black Bag

These are the countries where Steven Soderbergh’s BLACK BAG is now showing, you can check your local cinemas: US, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, Australia, Brazil, Greece, Iceland, Portugal, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, Mexico, South Korea.

Other countries release date per each countries Universal Pictures/UIP websites or local cinemas: Argentina – 27 March   |   Singapore – 27 March   |   India – 28 March   |   Philippines – 2 April   |   Hungary – 3 April   |   Germany – 15 April   |   Spain – 16 April   |   Turkey – 18 April   |   Netherlands – 1 May   |   Poland – 9 May   |   Sweden – 9 May

The Seagull

Google translated from German to English.

She only sleeps four hours a night and expects to die early. She recently revealed this to the Guardian. But Cate Blanchett doesn’t seem at all exhausted as she walks through the corridors of London’s Barbican Theatre, just before midnight, looking for a quiet spot for the interview she promised us. From the floor above, we hear bursts of laughter that only the British (and Irish) can muster; the premiere party is in full swing up there.

Blanchett has just completed three hours on stage; next to her walks the theater director Thomas Ostermeier, who directed Anton Chekhov’s drama The Seagull with her in London. Ostermeier, who even at galas dresses like a craftsman from the Brecht & Sons firm (blue work jacket, cap), as if he expected to have to repair something broken even at the festival, has just asked the doorman at the entrance if he could leave his folding bike there overnight. The doorman replied that that was fine, but that he could not guarantee that the bike would still be there tomorrow. So Ostermeier carries the folded thing into his dressing room and locks it. The dressing room is windowless, like almost all rooms here in the Barbican, a brutalist fortress from the 1980s.

Finally, we find an empty room. In this bunker-like space, Blanchett now seems like a doctor who has just undergone surgery and is discussing its progress: relevant, without any desire to exude glamour. It’s striking how often she plays “high,” exalted women who experience their downfall over the course of the drama. In Woody Allen’s film Blue Jasmine, she’s a socialite in free fall (for which she won an Oscar); in Todd Field’s Tár, she’s a domineering star conductor experiencing the misery of posthumous fame; and now, in The Seagull, she’s the actress Arkadina—a vampire who feeds on admiration.

In interviews, Blanchett sometimes speaks of herself as if she were a lifelong love-hate partner, steeped in all the depths of her being, to whom she is simply chained. When I ask her whether self-aggression is one of the sources of her art, she responds by bringing another word into play: “You mean self-flagellation?” Self-flagellation? Yes, I ask. I sense an acid that seeks to corrode one’s own being in many of her characters. A distrust of oneself. At which she laughs and says, “I have a lot of self-hatred, don’t worry—a deep well from which I can draw.”

One must, she then says, play Chekhov’s characters to their full potential- — the playwright is crude and cruel, but he loves his characters. And in Arkadina, who unfortunately doesn’t develop further as a human being, “a woman in aspic, ” the cruelty is most evident.

Thomas Ostermeier adds that Cate Blanchett has nothing destructive about her; she’s no Arkadina, but a highly socially competent enthusiast of her art: “A fish out of water, that’s what she is on stage.” Ostermeier, artistic director of Berlin’s Schaubühne, is directing for the second time in London ; in 2024, he presented a very well-received version of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in the West End. He has now directed The Seagull for the second time in a short period of time; two years ago at the Schaubühne, and that Berlin production was dominated by actor Joachim Meyerhoff in the role of the great writer Trigorin. The London production is driven by entirely different priorities. Here, Trigorin’s life partner, Arkadina, is the central figure, and that is, of course, thanks to Cate Blanchett, the global star, the most famous artist Australia has ever produced.

Arkadina, in her embodiment, is a superheroine of self-expression. A rage burns within her that erupts whenever she has to watch others live. She gets migraines from being ignored. She becomes sharp, peevish, even suspicious when she’s not the center of attention: How can you bear it without me? Don’t you miss me at all? Thus, this character is completely dependent on others—on people she needs only as an audience.

Cate Blanchett’s performance even vibrates with a cocky anger—at the very idea of ??diventum. Her mockery of Arkadina, a character whose ignorance and arrogance she wraps herself in like a (fake) ermine cloak, is always palpable.

Here is a queen who asserts her throne. And when, out of shame or calculation, she has a breakdown, she lets herself fall like a cartoon character — already on the ground, you can almost see the strokes of movement flickering in the air, with which a nimble artist might depict the graceful fall.

Ostermeier’s production is a journey from light into darkness. The first act could be described as restless legs theater; a diverting director performs stretching exercises with the ensemble and audience. The stagehands wink and ally themselves with the people in the auditorium: Don’t worry, you don’t have to stay still here, we won’t either. An actor steps up to the stand microphone and calls out, “How about a little Chekhov?” before plugging in his guitar and singing a Billy Bragg song. Much of what should actually be spoken discreetly to the side is entrusted to the stand microphone, which carries every word all the way to the third tier of the enormous auditorium. Even little theater jokes are cracked, signaling that we can save ourselves the trouble of empathizing too deeply with the characters: “It’s the premiere today,” one actor says to another, “and you’re wearing that sweater backward!” But then the empathy slips up. The actors are just too good.

At the center of the otherwise empty stage is a green island where the gaze can rest: a plantation of corn stalks taller than a man, rustling in the wind and the stage rain, among which the characters disappear as they descend, as if swallowed by nature. Or the cornfield spits them out and exposes them. Thus, right at the beginning, Doctor Dorn slips out from between the tall stalks and fastens his belt, and Polina, the estate manager’s wife, scurries after him, heatedly: laughter. One learns without any fuss, as in a boulevard comedy, who is doing it with whom, or would like to do it with whom.

Because that’s what The Seagull is about : We see how people miss happiness, hurt each other, exaggerate, insult, and betray each other—and how, in the end, everyone feels cheated out of the most important thing. As if they hadn’t lived. The musical leitmotif of the performance is the Stranglers’ song “Golden Brown ,” a song about the effects of heroin — here it seems to serve as a warning against another drug, love. Its dealer and ultimate addict is Arkadina, a woman in whose shadow even her own son ultimately perishes. After the premiere, Thomas Ostermeier recounts that one of Cate Blanchett’s sons (she has four children) saw the performance and was impressed and thoughtful. Perhaps, one thinks, the son saw a mother he didn’t know. Perhaps he asked himself: If she can play it like that, doesn’t she also have it in her? Or did he even think that he was spared some bad things because they could be dealt with on stage? Blanchett’s husband is also in London; he stands at the premiere party at some distance from her, in shadow, determined to avoid even the reflection of her fame and merely mark the edge of the action, while his wife poses for the photographers with her pointed shoulder, like a breakwater. She’s already won two Oscars in her career. So it’s not far-fetched to ask her how she would have behaved if she had won a third on March 2, 2025, in Los Angeles. Would she have done as all the other winners did? They behaved like courtiers who didn’t want to fall from grace? Or would she have said something about the state of the United States? Her answer is evasive. As an artist, you have a platform on which you can express yourself. “In The Seagull , Trigorin says that art is useless. I don’t agree with that at all. I think it’s important— super-duper important!”

On this platform, she moves more confidently than anyone else. Since she doesn’t want to repeat herself, new possibilities for transformation must be constantly sought, for transformation is salvation (in Julian Rosefeldt’s film installation Manifesto, she makes her own form disappear in 13 different roles).

She imbues every character she creates with something wonderful and distinctive. As one example among many, let’s just mention how, in the role of conductor Lydia Tár, she lights a candle, turning even this small act into a conducting performance—while whispering “Shhh,” she signals the struck match to burn quietly.

A being dependent on reflection in others—that is Blanchett’s fundamental character, which she allows to shine through all her transformations. In her roles, one sees the alertness of a person who doesn’t know whether to trust the image reflected back. Therefore, what is commonly called madness is not far from her acting. Humanity, in its madness, explores theater thanks to the irreplaceable system of madness. Cate Blanchett is one of the greatest researchers in this mad science.

BBC Radio Drama

BBC Radio 4 has today announced a raft of exciting new commissions coming soon to Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. This includes The Fever, a 90-minute radio adaptation of the critically acclaimed play by actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, starring Cate Blanchett in her first major radio drama. In The Fever, Blanchett delivers a blistering monologue, playing an unnamed woman from a privileged background who falls ill in a civil war-torn country and plummets into a feverish self-examination. Surrounded by poverty, the tortured traveller’s thoughts turn inward, contemplating her ethical relationship with the world and impact her life has had.

The Fever – 19th April, 15:00 – 16:30

Woman – Cate Blanchett

Directed by John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett

Produced by Susan Roberts for BBC Radio 4

Sound by Catherine Robinson and Pete Ringrose

Hundreds Of Hollywood A-Listers Want To Stop AI Obliterating Copyright Laws

Paul McCartney, Ava DuVernay, Taika Waititi, Cate Blanchett, Natasha Lyonne, Alfonso Cuarón, Matrix co-creator Lilly Wachowski, Ben Stiller, Carrie Coon and Lily Gladstone are among more than 400 entertainment industry power players who want the Trump administration to hold the line when it comes to artificial intelligence and tech companies’ desire to weaken copyright rules.

“We firmly believe that America’s global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries,” the group wrote the White House Office of Science and Technology in an open letter that began circulating over the weekend.

“America’s arts and entertainment industry supports over 2.3M American jobs with over $229Bn in wages annually, while providing the foundation for American democratic influence and soft power abroad,” the 12-page letter adds. “But AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music, and voices used to train AI models at the core of multi-billion dollar corporate valuations.”

The Hollywood-heavy correspondence comes as tech lords OpenAI and Google jumped last week to Donald Trump’s call for an AI Action Plan by filing briefs outlining a wish list they said would ensure American dominance in artificial intelligence.

Sounds good in principal, but both companies’ lists included sections on copyright and IP workarounds they wanted given the copious amounts of data needed to train large-language models. As more than a few AI companies have learned, compensating rights holders, as well as meeting them in court, is expensive and complicated — and many in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are hoping Trump will let them dodge the efforts and costs.

Having come out of a pair of Hollywood labor strikes in 2023 that had AI protections at their core and facing massive looming shifts in the creation of culture and American soft power, the letter now made public respectfully disagrees with where OpenAI and Google are coming from. “For nearly 250 years, U.S. copyright law has balanced [a] creator’s rights with the needs of the public, creating the world’s most vibrant creative economy,” the missive says. “We recommend that the American AI Action Plan uphold existing copyright frameworks to maintain the strength of America’s creative and knowledge industries, as well as American cultural influence abroad.”

The letter:

We, the members of America’s entertainment industry — representing an intersection of cinematographers, directors, producers, actors, writers, studios, production companies, musicians, composers, costume, sound & production designers, editors, gaffers, union and Academy Members, and other industrious, creative content professionals – submit this unified statement in response to the Administration’s request for input on the AI Action Plan.

We firmly believe that America’s global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries. America’s arts and entertainment industry supports over 2.3M American jobs with over $229Bn in wages annually, while providing the foundation for American democratic influence and soft power abroad. But AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music, and voices used to train AI models at the core of multi-billion dollar corporate valuations.

Make no mistake: this issue goes well beyond the entertainment industry, as the right to train AI on all copyright-protected content impacts all of America’s knowledge industries. When tech and AI companies demand unfettered access to all data and information, they’re not just threatening movies, books, and music, but the work of all writers, publishers, photographers, scientists, architects, engineers, designers, doctors, software developers, and all other professionals who work with computers and generate intellectual property. These professions are the core of how we discover, learn, and share knowledge as a society and as a nation. This issue is not just about AI leadership or about economics and individual rights, but about America’s continued leadership in creating and owning valuable intellectual property in every field.

It is clear that Google (valued at $2Tn) and OpenAI (valued at over $157Bn) are arguing for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America’s creative and knowledge industries, despite their substantial revenues and available funds. There is no reason to weaken or eliminate the copyright protections that have helped America flourish. Not when AI companies can use our copyrighted material by simply doing what the law requires: negotiating appropriate licenses with copyright holders — just as every other industry does. Access to America’s creative catalog of films, writing, video content, and music is not a matter of national security. They do not require a government-mandated exemption from existing U.S. copyright law.

America didn’t become a global cultural powerhouse by accident. Our success stems directly from our fundamental respect for IP and copyright that rewards creative risk-taking by talented and hardworking Americans from every state and territory. For nearly 250 years, U.S. copyright law has balanced creator’s rights with the needs of the public, creating the world’s most vibrant creative economy. We recommend that the American AI Action Plan uphold existing copyright frameworks to maintain the strength of America’s creative and knowledge industries, as well as American cultural influence abroad. 
This statement is endorsed by the following individuals and groups—representing America’s commitment to both creative excellence and responsible AI innovation.

You can find the full list of signatories here.

Sources: Variety, BBC, Zeit