Hollywood
Eminent filmmaker Chantal Akerman, who became the voice of the inner woman, is dead
New Delhi, 7 October: Renowned filmmaker Chantal Akerman, who presented her last film No Home Movie on her own mother Natalia at Locarno last month, is dead.
The Belgian-born, Paris-based director Akerman who figured among filmmakers who have delved deeply into the psyche of the woman died on 5 October at the age of sixty-five.
According to Isabelle Regnier of Le Monde, Akerman committed suicide.
Born in 1950, she is also remembered for one of the most original and audacious films in the history of cinema, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” which premi?red at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1975, the month before her twenty-fifth birthday.
Akerman presented monumentally composed, meticulously observed, raptly protracted images of a woman’s domestic routine; and that the pressures of women’s unquestioned, unchallenged, and unrelieved confinement in the domestic realm and in family roles.
In effect, Akerman transformed the visual styles and narrative forms, the dramatic syntax and artistic codes of the modern cinema, into a woman’s cinema. Her films include “Je, Tu, Il, Elle” (I, You, He, She) made in 1976, “News from Home”, “Toute Une Nuit” (One Whole Night) in 1982
She made one of the great cinematic coming-of-age dramas, “Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the Nineteen-Sixties in Brussels,” one of the great documentary self-portraits, “L?-Bas,” and, in 2011, an ecstatic, hallucinatory yet trenchantly political adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel “Almayer’s Folly.”
Akerman also made a wildly rapturous, sinuously erotic Proust adaptation, “The Captive,” which came out in 2000 and was premi?red at Cannes.
Her last film ‘No Home Moive’ is a video essay about her mother Natalia who was an Auschwitz survivor who died in 2014.
Akerman also served on film festival juries and lectured widely. In 2011, she joined the staff of New York’s City College full time.
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.
