Hollywood
Cannes Film Festival stumbles over ‘Flatgate’ controversy
NEW DELHI: A day after actress Salma Hayek appeared on a panel at the 68th Cannes International Film Festival to talk about misogyny in Hollywood, the festival’s organizers banned women from wearing anything other than high heels on the red carpet.
A group of women, who arrived at a screening for Cate Blanchett’s latest film, Carol, were reportedly turned away because of their flat shoes, according to Screen Daily.
The New York Magazine in a tweet said this immediately set off a #showmeyourflats hashtag in solidarity.
It noted that actress Emily Blunt put it best, “Everyone should wear flats to be honest. We should not be wearing high heels anyways. That is my point of view. I just prefer wearing Converse sneakers.”
Actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan had also stressed on gender equality with Hayek at the discussion organized by UN Women. Aishwarya also did a shoot for L’Oréal Paris with Eva Longoria, Natasha Poly and Li Bingbing for L’Oreal.
The Cannes film festival began on 13 May and will conclude on 24 May.
Indian contingent at Cannes
Meanwhile, the red carpet for Gurvinder Singh’s Punjabi film Chauthi Koot and Neeraj Ghaywan’s debut feature Masaan, which are the Indian films in the official UnCertain Regard, was graced by Indian ambassadors of L’Oreal Paris — Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Sonam Kapoor and Katrina Kaif. Nandita Das was also present.
Film and theater veteran Shabana Azmi noted on how fashion was taking away the attention from cinema at the 68th Cannes International Film Festival. She said a film festival should be treated seriously and not as a fashion parade ground.
Azmi used her Twitter handle on 15 May to remind her fans and followers about the main motive behind holding a film festival. “2day Cannes seems to b a clothes parade! It’s a serious film festival guys not a fashion event. Hw abt focusing on films n filmakers (sic),”
Hollywood
Utopai Studios partners Huace to deploy PAI for long form content
Deal includes revenue sharing as Huace adopts AI engine across global ops
MUMBAI: Lights, camera… algorithm, the script just got a silicon co-writer. In a move that signals how storytelling itself is being re-engineered, U.S.-based Utopai Studios has partnered China’s Huace Film & TV Co. Ltd. to bring artificial general intelligence into the heart of long-form content creation.
At the centre of the deal is PAI, Utopai’s cinematic storytelling system, which Huace will deploy as a core engine across its production pipeline from development and creative iteration to global localisation. The partnership includes a large-scale annual usage commitment from Huace, alongside a usage-based revenue-sharing model, underscoring both ambition and commercial confidence on both sides.
For Huace, one of China’s largest film and television companies, the bet is not on automation alone but on scale with control. With distribution spanning over 200 countries and a presence across more than 20 international platforms, including Netflix and YouTube, the company brings a vast content ecosystem where even marginal efficiency gains can translate into significant output shifts. Its extensive TV IP library further positions it as fertile ground for AI-assisted storytelling workflows.
The choice of PAI follows what Huace described as a rigorous evaluation of existing AI tools, many of which remain limited to fragmented use cases such as video generation or editing. What tipped the scales, according to the company, was PAI’s ability to handle long-form narrative complexity maintaining continuity, structure, and creative coherence across entire story arcs rather than isolated clips.
Utopai, for its part, is using the partnership to anchor its international expansion strategy, pitching PAI as an enterprise-ready system built for customisation, privacy, and regulatory adaptability across markets. That positioning becomes particularly relevant as global media companies increasingly scrutinise how AI integrates into proprietary workflows.
The timing is notable. Earlier this month, Utopai upgraded PAI to support three-minute 4K video generation and advanced multi-shot sequencing features designed to tackle one of AI storytelling’s biggest hurdles: consistency across scenes.
What emerges is not just another tech collaboration, but a glimpse into how the grammar of filmmaking could evolve. Because if stories were once crafted frame by frame, the next chapter might just be coded scene by scene.
