When director and screenwriter Clint Bentley decided to adapt “Train Dreams” for the big screen, he hoped he could captivate audiences with the tale of an ordinary man living in extraordinary times — the early 20th century. Now, that vision — starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones — is up for four Oscars, including the coveted best picture prize.Bentley’s gamble on the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson appears to have paid off.”It’s been overwhelming,” the 41-year-old filmmaker told AFP.”I wanted to give something to the audience with the film and take them on a journey. But you never know how it’s going to be received.””Train Dreams” tells the story of Robert Grainier (Edgerton), a reserved logger and railroad worker in Idaho, and his wife Gladys (Jones), over the course of his entire life.The Netflix film stands as both the story of the American northwest’s transition to the modern era and a beautiful meditation on love, friendship, grief, loss and hope.”It’s lovely that people are connected and seeing themselves in it,” said Bentley. “The story is really beautiful.””Train Dreams” was filmed in Washington state and has so far won several prizes during Hollywood’s awards season, especially for cinematographer Adolpho Veloso.”A lot of movies really helped me in my life. So it’s amazing to be a small part of a movie that is doing that to other people,” Veloso told AFP. “I feel like that’s the reason I wanted to do films in the first place, because movies were important for me, because I love movies,” said the 36-year-old Brazilian. “Train Dreams” won the top best feature prize at the Spirit Awards honoring independent films, as well as awards for Bentley and Veloso.At the ceremony earlier this month in Santa Monica, Bentley reflected on the challenges and rewards of taking on such an ambitious project with a limited budget, including the construction of a period locomotive… from plywood.”It was just a lot of steps along the way that all of us figured it out,” explained Bentley, whose first Oscar nomination came last year for best adapted screenplay for “Sing Sing.”He told AFP he especially values the Spirit Awards, because they offer important visibility to smaller films with scant resources, especially as they vie for Academy Awards with big studio projects.”It really gives them a boost in a beautiful way,” he said.

The young woman at the center of a landmark social media addiction lawsuit testified on Thursday that YouTube and Instagram fueled her depression and suicidal thoughts as a child, a decline in her mental health that the defense attributed to a dysfunctional family and offline troubles.Visibly nervous in her pink floral dress, Kaley G.M. told jurors that she became hooked on social media, starting with YouTube videos at the age of six.”I was at a young age and I would spend all my time on it,” Kaley testified when asked to explain why she thought she was addicted to YouTube. “Anytime I tried to separate myself from it, it just didn’t work.”Even when she was bullied on Instagram, she still stayed on the app. “If I was off, I would just feel like I was missing out.”Under cross examination, however, Kaley talked about feeling neglected, berated and picked on by family members, causing depression and anxiety that had nothing to do with social media.In the highly anticipated testimony, Kaley’s lawyer sought to portray her as an emotionally fragile user who was ensnared as a child by YouTube and Instagram and whose use of those apps caused her lasting harm.Kaley described scenes from her childhood in which her mother would have her leave her phone in the living room at night, only for her to retrieve it once her mom went to bed and return it before morning.”I would be really upset,” she said, when she was denied access to the apps.Her lawyer Mark Lanier said court records indicate that on one day she was on Instagram for 16 hours.She said her mother pushed her into therapy at around age 12, and that during the first session she said she could not engage with her family at home because of “excessive worrying because of social media.””I stopped engaging with them as much because I was spending all my time on social media,” she recalled.She also described her heavy use of filters on Instagram from a young age to make her eyes bigger and her ears smaller. The jury was shown a video in which she complained about being fat.Shown a banner featuring dozens of her Instagram pictures, Kaley said “almost all of them have a filter on.”When asked if her life, health, sleep and grades would have been better without social media, Kaley answered: “Yes.”But Kaley was also shown messages from her younger days in which she contended she did not feel safe in her home and was relentlessly yelled at by her mother.- Seeking job in social media -In a surprising twist, Kaley said she would like to become a social media manager and capitalize on the skills she has built since a young age.Kaley’s case is the first of three trials expected in the same court that will help determine whether Google and Meta deliberately designed their platforms to encourage compulsive use among young people, damaging their mental health in the process.The landmark trial is expected to last until late March, when the jury will decide whether Meta, which owns Instagram, and Google-owned YouTube knowingly designed addictive apps that harmed her mental health.Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand last week and pushed back against accusations that his social media company had done too little to keep underage users off his platform and had profited from their presence.The outcome of the Los Angeles trial is expected to establish a standard for resolving thousands of lawsuits that blame social media for fueling an epidemic of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and suicide among young people.Similar lawsuits, including some brought by school districts, are making their way through federal court in Northern California and state courts across the country.

It’s hard to recognize Ethan Hawke in “Blue Moon”: he’s short, bald, slightly greasy-looking and uncomfortable in his own skin.The role is a far cry from the dashing young leading man who wowed audiences when he broke through decades ago with 1989 coming-of-age drama “Dead Poets Society” and Gen X classic “Reality Bites” a few years later.But his portrayal of legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart, an alcoholic who drank himself out of one of America’s most famous songwriting partnerships, is a tour-de-force — one that has landed the 55-year-old an Oscar nomination for best actor.The dialogue-heavy chamber piece — basically a theatrical play on celluloid — is the fruit of Hawke’s decades-long collaboration with director Richard Linklater, which began more than 30 years ago with 1995’s “Before Sunrise.””The magic to the relationship is that it’s a little bit like riding a bike; you just don’t think about it,” Hawke told AFP.”He sent me this script and the two of us just both felt this is one of the most ice-hot pieces of writing we’d ever come across,” Hawke told AFP.”And we wanted to share it with the world.””Blue Moon” takes place almost entirely in the bar of a Broadway restaurant where Hart takes refuge during the premiere of “Oklahoma!” — the first major show his long-time collaborator Richard Rodgers created with Oscar Hammerstein.Robert Kaplow’s dense and literary script is utterly dominated by Hawke, who told one journalist he had more dialogue in the first 30 minutes of screentime than in the entirety of his last four films.But, despite a bit of camera trickery and some digital effects, it is the physicality of a diminutive, balding and unattractive man that was a more time-consuming challenge for Hawke — the work of a decade for a script he first read in 2014.”I didn’t think I needed to age into it, but Rick (Linklater) did,” Hawke told trade title The Wrap.”Rick knew that time was only going to help me. And funnily enough, it’s not just aging, not just your face cracking and falling apart. I thought I was ready when I was 40, but I wasn’t.”I got more and more interested in what people call character acting. And this part required all of it, everything I’ve learned over 30 some-odd years.”- ‘Mysterious’ -Hawke credits his lengthy partnership with Linklater — the pair announced last year they are working on a 10th feature together — for allowing him the space to strip back every vestige of vanity and build himself into this oddball lyricist.Over the course of 100 minutes, Hart reminisces about his souring collaboration with Rodgers (a flinty Andrew Scott), a pairing that gave the world songs like “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady is a Tramp” and the titular “Blue Moon.”A not-so-closeted homosexual, he also waxes lyrical about his infatuation with a young Yale student, played by a bottle-blonde Margaret Qualley, and shares drinks with “Charlotte’s Web” author E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy).Hart keeps up a steady stream of anecdotes and witty repartee, but increasingly the mask slips; underneath it all is the yawning realization that he is utterly alone.”Nobody ever loved me that much,” he says, echoing Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in “Casablanca.”Hawke’s Oscar nomination — his fifth after supporting actor nods for “Training Day” and “Boyhood,” and two others for best adapted screenplay for “Before Midnight” and “Before Sunset” — is the result of an experience on this film he said was “mysterious.””I don’t know how I could be so lucky. I really don’t understand how the universe works,” he told AFP of his work with Linklater.”It’s been one of the most thrilling collaborations in my life.”The Oscars take place on March 15 in Hollywood.

Mark Davis was just 13 years old when he perished in a juvenile detention facility for Black boys in the eastern US state of Maryland some 140 years ago.Today, his remains lie in an abandoned graveyard in the woods, covered by dead leaves and snow, along with the graves of some 200 other Black boys and teenagers held in conditions that researchers describe as inhumane.A team from Georgetown University is investigating their deaths at the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, a segregated juvenile detention facility in Cheltenham, Maryland, and memorializing them.Known as the Forgotten Children Initiative, the project aims to document the identities of the children buried here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mostly in unmarked graves, in order to preserve their legacies and locate any living relatives.”Some of those children that (were) just picked up for just truancy and just never made it back home,” said Tyrone Walker, who heads a reintegration program for former inmates at Georgetown. “What did they tell their parents? Or do their parents even know? They probably thought they ran away.”Walker, an African American who in the 1990s was himself a juvenile inmate at Cheltenham, added: “Nobody’s been brought to justice. Since this happened to young Black boys, it seemed like nobody cared.”- ‘Severely neglected’ – Opened in 1873, the privately operated detention facility housed petty delinquents and orphans, said Marc Schindler, a professor at Georgetown who leads the project. Some were held on loitering charges, while others were detained over their perceived “incorrigibility.”Officially, the buried children were listed as having died of tuberculosis, pneumonia, or exhaustion, between 1877 and 1939. All of them were Black, and researchers believe many actually died because they were overworked, underfed and denied proper care.Crystal Foretia, a former policy administrator at the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services (DJS), said the House of Reformation has a “vast history of physical abuse, forced labor, lack of educational opportunities.”Numerous testimonies, as well as reporting by the Baltimore newspaper the Afro-American, detail the terrible conditions in which these children were incarcerated and made to work in fields.According to Schindler, two boys who were kept in an unheated cell in freezing temperatures had their legs amputated due to frostbite, something that was not reflected in their death certificates. “Now we know that he was very, very severely neglected, if not abused, and that resulted in his death,” Schindler said of one of the youths.Rosie Clark, a Maryland volunteer who did some genealogical research on the Cheltenham burial site, asserts that many official documents were forged.”These death certificates were filled out by the people who were in charge,” she told AFP. “If a child was beaten to death, they’re not going to say it on the death certificate.”- ‘A crime scene’ – In the 1930s, the state of Maryland took over the facility, after the shooting of a Black minor by a white guard drew national attention. The modern facility now sits several hundred meters from the original site.”I had no idea that just across the fence, there was a crime scene,” said Walker, the former inmate. “This could have been me in one of those graves.”Nearby, a well-maintained veterans cemetery can be seen, its tombstones decorated with wreaths and flowers.”They recognize those veterans, rightfully so, but shouldn’t these children be recognized and honored in the same way?” Walker asked.He added: “I definitely want to see a memory project done and see the families involved. Many families never received the closure they deserved.”The Forgotten Children Initiative has already located the descendants of six of the buried children.Schindler has also identified dozens of similar sites across the United States, including one in Florida that inspired Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2020 novel “The Nickel Boys.”But the Maryland site is believed to be the largest in the country.Maryland’s DJS has just received funding to identify how many children were buried at the site and to restore their graves, and a bill has been introduced in the state legislature to create a commission of inquiry into the House of Reformation.