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Displacement Film Fund review – Cate Blanchett masterminds short film collection that brims with life and intensity

Rotterdam film festival
A set of shorts by film-makers from Afghanistan, Iran, Ukraine, Syria and Somalia are shocking, funny and mysterious in equal measure

With considerable chutzpah and elan, and in her capacity as producer and UNHCR Goodwill ambassador, Cate Blanchett has achieved a geopolitical film-making coup. In concert with festival authorities in Rotterdam, she has secured cash and commissioned short films on the subject of displacement from five directors – including Mohammad Rasoulof, now in exile from his native Iran due to his pro-democracy activism, in effect making his first public statement since the recent massacres and apparently expressing his fears that he may never go home again.

The films are far from solemnly earnest – this is an anthology of five brilliant miniature artworks. By turns shocking, funny, confessional and deeply mysterious, this is a tremendous collection; the constituent films of which benefit in some enigmatic way from being shown together. What Ealing Studios’s Dead of Night did for scariness, these films may have done for 21st-century exile.

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© Photograph: Displacement Film Fund

© Photograph: Displacement Film Fund

© Photograph: Displacement Film Fund

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Jack Kerouac’s 37 metre-long, first draft scroll of On the Road to be auctioned

The draft – one of the Beat Generation’s defining artefacts – will be part of a wider sale of pieces from the Jim Irsay Collection at Christie’s in March

Jack Kerouac’s original typescript scroll for On the Road – the 37 metre (121ft) long roll of paper on which he typed his defining Beat novel in a three-week burst – will go under the hammer at Christie’s in March, with a sale estimate of £1.8m to £2.9m ($2.5m to $4m).

The scroll is one of the centrepieces of the Jim Irsay Collection, one of the most extensive private collections of music, literary, film and sports memorabilia ever assembled.

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© Photograph: Christie's

© Photograph: Christie's

© Photograph: Christie's

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Groundbreaking director Reginald Hudlin: ‘It’s taken a lot of effort but the reward is always worth it’

The man who created House Party, wrote for the Black Panther comics, produced Django Unchained and briefly ran BET talks his illustrious career

Reginald Hudlin’s home office is a monument to an audacious American dream – the Black scion who grew up far from Hollywood glamour and rose to become one of the industry’s most adaptable storytellers. On the walls, a framed Black Panther comic page he penned glints under glass near a portrait of Jamie Foxx – a souvenir from Hudlin’s stint producing Django Unchained – and a piece of the Martin Luther King memorial that he was gifted while shooting the Disney sports drama Safety. “Look, I’m pleased with my life,” he tells me with a wry smile. “But honestly it’s taken a lot of trickery to get people to let me do these crazy things. It’s taken a lot of effort, but the reward is always worth it.”

Hudlin may be the nearest thing in Hollywood to a real-life Forrest Gump, given the things he’s done, the folks he’s worked with and the history he’s made. On Marvel Comics’ Black Panther graphic novel, Hudlin was the writer who repositioned the franchise as an explicit Black empowerment allegory, laying the foundation for Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster feature films. On the big screen, Hudlin has directed Eddie Murphy in Boomerang, Samuel L Jackson in The Great White Hope and Chadwick Boseman in Marshall.

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© Photograph: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

© Photograph: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

© Photograph: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

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Eggs, hats and unfettered ambition: what we learned about Melania Trump from her documentary

The first lady’s political goals, high-stakes clothes fittings and hints that she and Donald still have sex are just some of the highlights from Brett Ratner’s documentary

Melania’s appears an entirely airless existence, in which she glides solo about gilt corridors in silence, David Lynch-style, observed by tight-lipped heavies. All her staff dress in deference to her, mostly in black, but sometimes – as in the case of her interior designer – in a matching camel-coloured three-piece suit. Candidates interviewing for assistant roles have also got the memo, lining up in a sea of monochrome, with buttery hair and prominent cross necklaces.

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© Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

© Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

© Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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Wonder Man sur Disney+ : vous avez oublié qui était le Mandarin ? On fait le point

Wonder Man, la toute nouvelle série Marvel, met en scène un personnage plutôt important du MCU malencontreusement tombé dans les limbes : Trevor Slattery, plus connu sous le nom du Mandarin. Si vous aviez tout oublié de son existence (on vous comprend) et que vous avez besoin d'une piqûre de rappel, pas de panique : suivez le guide.

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Wonder Man sur Disney+ : vous avez oublié qui était le Mandarin ? On fait le point

Wonder Man, la toute nouvelle série Marvel, met en scène un personnage plutôt important du MCU malencontreusement tombé dans les limbes : Trevor Slattery, plus connu sous le nom du Mandarin. Si vous aviez tout oublié de son existence (on vous comprend) et que vous avez besoin d'une piqûre de rappel, pas de panique : suivez le guide.

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