Swiss tennis star Roger Federer has won a record 8th Wimbledon title, defeating Croatia’s Marin Cilic in straight sets, 6-3, 6-1, 6-4.
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Ray Phiri, a South African jazz musician who founded the band Stimela and became internationally known while performing on Paul Simon’s Graceland tour, died of cancer on Wednesday at age 70.

Phiri, a vocalist and guitarist known for his versatility in jazz fusion, indigenous South African rhythms and other styles, received many music awards in his home country. His death was met with nationwide tributes.

“He was a musical giant. This is indeed a huge loss for South Africa and the music industry as a whole,” President Jacob Zuma said in a statement.

Political parties also expressed condolences, saying Phiri’s songs resonated among many South Africans, particularly during the era of white minority rule that ended in 1994.

“An immensely gifted composer, vocalist and guitarist, he breathed consciousness and agitated thoughts of freedom through his music,” said the ruling African National Congress party, which was the main movement against apartheid until it took power in the country’s first all-race elections.

South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, said many people grew up with Phiri’s music. “In the 1970s, Phiri’s music spoke to issues that are still affecting our people today,” the party said.

Stimela’s best-known albums include Fire, Passion and Ecstasy and Look, Listen and Decide, and Phiri contributed as a guitarist to Simon’s Graceland album in the 1980s. The album evolved from Simon’s interest in indigenous South African music.
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“Don’t go to the pub tonight,” Irish pop musician Bob Geldof pleaded in the months leading up to Live Aid, the world’s biggest concert that took place on two continents, included 72 rock bands, and raised an estimated $125 million to feed starving Ethiopians caught in a historically severe famine.

“Please, stay in and give us the money,” Geldof said 32 years ago. “There are people dying now, so give me the money.”

The pictures of skeletal and dazed, malnourished children gathering in Ethiopian camps set up by aid agencies were alarming. In a 1984 report, BBC broadcaster Michael Buerk described the scene as “the closest thing to hell on Earth.”

​Geldof went to see for himself. In 1984, he organized “Band Aid,” writing and recording the single “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” and ended up raising about $10 million in famine relief.

The song also became a hit in the United States, prompting “We Are the World,” a song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie.

Inspired by the success of Band Aid and with no end in sight to the famine, Geldof decided to expand the project, coming up with a total rethink on charitable giving.

Why not, he asked himself, turn to his circle of wealthy rock ‘n’ roll pop stars to perform in a worldwide fundraising concert?

​It was the 1980s; it was the era of cable music channel MTV; digital entertainment didn’t exist. Given all that, Geldof’s vision was astoundingly ambitious — in fact, seemingly impossible.

The event was held on July 13, 1985, simultaneously in London’s Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, raising more than $104 million that day. According to Billboard, an unprecedented 1.9 billion people watched the event live on television. Among the acts: Queen, Led Zeppelin, The Who, David Bowie, Madonna, Phil Collins, Sting, U2, Dire Straits, The Cars. The list goes on and on.

​Aftermath

The emotional high of Live Aid — its newness, its success in raising so much money to help the starving in Ethiopia — did not come without criticism.

Several reports, including an investigation by Spin magazine and The Daily Mail newspaper, claimed some of the money intended to feed the hungry ended up in the hands of Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Geldof denied all the accounts.

“Produce one shred of evidence, one iota of evidence, and I promise you I will professionally investigate it,” Geldof is quoted in the Mail report. “I will sue the Ethiopian government, who were the rebels at the time, if there is any money missing, for that money back now.”

 
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A ticking sound runs throughout “Dunkirk” like an omnipresent reminder that time is running out for the 340,000 British and Allied soldiers marooned on the French beach and surrounded by Germans. It’s a tick-tock effect woven into the score that originated, fittingly, from Christopher Nolan’s own stopwatch.

Nolan is cinema’s great watchmaker: a filmmaker of Swiss precision capable of bending and shaping time to suit his grandiose, metronomed movies. Having already reversed time (“Memento”) and warped its fabric (“Interstellar”), Nolan set out to accomplish something different with “Dunkirk,” a movie that crosscuts three story lines (on land, sea and sky) from three different chronologies (one week, one day, one hour) during the famous evacuation. 

“I wanted to experiment with a new rhythm,” said Nolan in a recent interview. “What I wanted to do was take what I call the snowballing effect of the third act of my other films, where parallel story lines start to be more than the sum of their parts, and I wanted to try to make the entire film that way, and strip the film of conventional theatrics.”

When “Dunkirk” hits theaters next Friday, audiences will find a landmark war film but not a traditional one. Shot almost entirely with 70mm IMAX cameras from Nolan’s atypically spare 76-page script, “Dunkirk” is an often wordless, almost purely cinematic experience of dogfights in the air and close scrapes at sea. It’s an all-out assault — of tracking shots and montage — by one of the movies’ most maximal filmmakers. 

“I loved it,” said Nolan of shooting at Dunkirk, where much of the production took place. “The reality of being there, of being in nature, frankly, it frees you up as a filmmaker to just use your eyes, use your ears, and absorb it and try to capture what speaks to you.”

For anyone even vaguely familiar with today’s Hollywood, it’s obvious enough that a silent-movie-inspired epic about the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk — a seminal moment of retreat and survival for the British but an event not as dearly remembered outside the U.K. — isn’t your standard summer popcorn fare. But Nolan, the “Dark Knight” director, enjoys a rarified position in the industry, and the story of Dunkirk is one he’s wanted to tell since a dramatic sailing excursion across the English Channel in the ’90s .

“We’ve been talking about Dunkirk as a story for a very long time,” said Emma Thomas, Nolan’s wife and producer. “After `Interstellar,’ we were thinking about what we might do next and I think I reminded him of it and pointed him in the direction of a few books on the subject. He had a number of things that he was entertaining but then he came back to me and said, `I think I see a way into this story.”‘

Nolan acknowledges he feels “a massive responsibility” to use his stature to make something unique. Having grown up in awe of big, bold films like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Nolan believes that “cinema is working at its absolute best is when it’s a grand-scale film that really works and does something you haven’t seen before. That for me is always the brass ring.”

“Dunkirk” is certainly that, especially when imposingly projected on IMAX screens. But such scale today is usually reserved only for supposedly more bankable franchise films. Such a path no longer holds much interest for Nolan. Though the 46-year-old director grew up a major “Star Wars” devotee, directing one doesn’t interest him. 

“Um, I’m very happy to go watch them,” he said, laughing. “The cinematic landscape has changed since I started making Batman films. When we were doing the `Dark Knight’ trilogy, I think it was easier for a filmmaker in the position I was in to express a more personal vision of what they wanted to do in a franchise property.”

“Dunkirk” might not be an American story, but, Nolan said, “It needed to be made with an American studio budget.” One of the first things he did to prepare was borrow Steven Spielberg’s personal print of “Saving Private Ryan.”   

“You look at the horror that’s presented in that film, and as a filmmaker you go: OK, we don’t want to chase that in any way because he’s done it definitively. You also say to yourself: The tension that I’m feeling watching `Saving Private Ryan’ is not the tension I want for `Dunkirk.’ You say: We need this story to be about survival and suspense. What defines suspense is you can’t take your eyes off the screen. But what horror gives you is an aversion. You want to look away.”

Instead, Nolan’s model for sustained suspense was Henri-Georges Clouzet’s “Wages of Fear,” in which four penniless men drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin through the mountains. George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” a virtually perpetual car chase, also strengthened his resolve. “I was in the middle of writing the script when I saw that film and I took confidence from it,” said Nolan. “It’s not dissimilar in terms of the modulation I’m talking about.”

Other things went into making what Nolan called, “a relentlessly suspenseful experience.” He used a Shepard tone, in which ascending notes are subtly cycled to give the impression of a never-ending rise in pitch. He inserted the 50 pound-plus IMAX camera into the cockpit of a fighter plane, and controlled the camera from the ground.

“We just had the idea that we would put cameras where people wouldn’t normally put them,” said cinematographer Hoyt van Hoytema. “Chris always reminds me of some kind of a weird Renaissance genius. He knows so many things so much better than the people who are supposed to know better. He knows everything about film technology, lab technology. He would know your lenses better than you do.”

Viewers may find themselves breathless from the heart-stopping opening sequence only to find that it essentially doesn’t abate until the end credits. The clock — Nolan’s watch — keeps ticking.

“The films I’ve made, I’ve tried to grab ahold of what in most films is a subtlety,” says Nolan of time, which he calls an underappreciated element of the medium. “I’ve tried to take it and use it for the tool that it is.”

And in “Dunkirk,” time flies.
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A Spanish court has given permission for the remains of famed surrealist painter Salvador Dali to be exhumed as part of a paternity test.

The judge in Catalonia ruled the body will be dug up July 20.

A woman claims Dali was her father. She has given a saliva sample that will be used to compare her DNA with that of Dali’s.

Maria Pilar Abel, 61, alleges her mother and Dali had an affair in the fishing village where he lived.

Abel said she only wants to be recognized as the artist’s daughter and has no interest in collecting any money.

The Salvador Dali Foundation is appealing the exhumation order.

Dali, who died in 1989, is the world’s most renown surrealist painter. His picture melting watches, The Persistence of Memory, is an icon of surrealism.

He is also known for a long pencil-thin moustache and eccentric behavior.
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With peeling paint and crumbling plasterwork, an abandoned picture house and its renovation in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli is more than a dream for Qassem Istanbouli.

The 31-year-old has reopened three such cinemas, two in his home city of Tyre in southern Lebanon, and another in Nabatiyeh, and has transformed them into hubs for film, art and theater.

“When I embarked on this journey, I felt I shared this dream with people in my city who are eager to have a cultural life restored,” said Istanbouli, who shows films by directors such as Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch and Lars Von Trier.

Istanbouli, who was born in Tyre and studied fine arts and directing at the Lebanese University, initially relied on a bank loan and donations from the public for his projects but now gets financial support from the Lebanese ministry of culture, a Dutch NGO and the United Nations force in Lebanon.

Istanbouli’s dream is also driven by a family connection, his father used to repair cinema projectors, while his grandfather screened movies from Greece and the Palestinian territories, projecting them on a wall.

“This is a way to achieve my father’s dream,” he said.
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Before America put the first men on the moon in 1969, NASA astronauts prepared for their lunar missions on the volcanic terrain at a national park.

Lunar landscape

National parks traveler Mikah Meyer says he now knows why those astronauts visited Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in south-central Idaho.

“The area was the site of immense volcanic activity in the past,” he explained, so what’s left “is a kind of a ruins of volcanic rock…” — which, with its vast ocean of lava flows and islands of cinder cones, resembles the surface of the moon.

Mikah got a great 360-degree view of the surreal landscape after hiking to the top of the Inferno Cone – a massive mound of cinder that rises out of the ground like a black mountain.

“It looks like a mountain but it’s a cinder cone with this really loud, crunchy, sharp volcanic rock,” he said. “All throughout the park, whether it’s the big Inferno Cone or smaller volcanoes, you’re basically walking around on this black volcanic lava that was once magma and is now hard rock.”

Otherworldly encounters

Since much of the moon’s surface is also covered by volcanic materials, in 1969, NASA sent astronauts Eugene Cernan, Joe Engle, Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell to Craters of the Moon to learn the basics of volcanic geology before their lunar missions.

Becoming familiar with the materials would help them when collecting samples of different rocks on the moon, and, since only a limited amount of material (385 kilos total in 6 moon landings) could be brought back, it was important that they know enough geology to pick up the most scientifically valuable specimens and be able to describe the surface features they were exploring to geologists back on Earth.

In 1999, astronauts Mitchell, Engle and Cernan returned to Craters of the Moon to help celebrate the site’s 75th Anniversary, 30 years after training there. Alan Shepard had passed away in 1998.

A window into the past

Apollo 14 lunar module pilot Edgar Mitchell said their purpose and training “was to sample virtually all types of volcanic activity and the processes that go along with volcanism, because we had to be the eyes of the geological community on the moon and be able to accurately describe the various types of flows.”

He noted that the surreal lunar landscape was also quite beautiful. “It has this peculiar, eerie beauty, like these flows do here, that are magnificent. I mean, they excite your imagination.”  

Shuttle astronaut Joe Engle noted that it wasn’t known before the Apollo missions what kind of rocks were on the lunar surface, “so Craters of the Moon was one of the really valuable places to come and look at and study lava flows.”

Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, in December, 1972, described Craters of the Moon as “a spectacular place… an ideal place to study a high, broad range of the geologic impact.”

“The volcanic activity that occurred on the moon is not dissimilar to the kind of thing we have seen here… the geology that’s exposed here, it’s just an open window into the past and this is what we were looking for in trying to learn something about geology… and this is the kind of place where we were able to do something like that.”

Ancient rocks, new grass

Craters of the Moon formed during eight major eruptive periods between 15,000 and 2,000 years ago. Today its lava field covers 1600 square kilometers.

The site continues to be an important setting for space science research. In 2014, two research projects — FINESSE and BASALT — were launched at the park.

In the meantime, the lunar-like landscape continues to inspire visitors like Mikah. Looking out from the top of the Inferno Cone, he said, “You see the majestic contrast between the black dirt, the snow-capped mountains, and the older cinder cone which now have sagebrush and other grass and greens growing on them… it’s quite the beautiful juxtaposition.”

Mikah, who’s on a mission to visit all 417 units within the National Park Service, invites you to learn more about his travels across America by visiting him on his website, Facebook and Instagram.
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The charade only ended in the final years of Chuck Blazer’s life.

 

Stripped of his extravagances, soccer’s gregarious and greedy dealmaker was forced to admit to his years of corruption and confined to a New Jersey hospital.

The eccentric bon vivant who once strode across the global stage being flattered by sport and political leaders eager to capture his World Cup hosting vote died in disgrace on Wednesday at age 72.

However much Blazer elevated the status and wealth of soccer in North America over several decades, any achievements were polluted by the ravenous appetite of “Mr. 10 Percent” to seek bribes and siphon cash from deals into his personal account.

Blazer did go on to play a central role exposing soccer’s fraudulent culture, which led to FIFA President Sepp Blatter being toppled. But he turned only when presented with little option but to become a cooperating witness.

The impact of Blazer’s death on the FIFA prosecution in the United States —  where three South American soccer officials are set to go on trial in November — is unclear. Many of the more prominent figures who might have faced him as a star government witness have already pleaded guilty.

Any recordings Blazer made after agreeing to become an FBI informant and wear a wire could still come into evidence without his testimony, said Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney now in private practice.

Even if Blazer didn’t record the defendants, prosecutors could have tried to “call him to testify generally about the ways and means of the corrupt practices, as pseudo-corruption expert,” Heaphy said. But Blazer’s absence, he said, “is like one brick removed from the wall. It won’t make the edifice come crumbling down.”

Blazer was driving his mobility scooter on a Manhattan street in 2011 when he was stopped by U.S. government agents and threatened with arrest.

It was the failure to fill in tax returns for years that put Blazer on the radar of the Internal Revenue Service. He became a government informant in 2011, using his role on FIFA’s already-tainted executive committee to secretly record conversations with associates in soccer’s governing body.

Blazer swept up evidence that formed the foundations of a Department of Justice case against world soccer executives who embezzled cash from commercial contracts and sought payments in return for backing countries as World Cup hosts.

At a November 2013 court hearing where his treatment for rectal cancer, diabetes and coronary artery disease was disclosed, Blazer entered 10 guilty pleas. He admitted to sharing in a $10 million bribe scheme with others to support South Africa’s bid for the 2010 World Cup, and facilitating a kickback linked to Morocco’s failed bid for the 1998 World Cup.

Blazer’s guilty pleas were only unsealed by a New York court in July 2015 after the American investigation into FIFA exploded into public view with a raid on a Zurich hotel ahead of the annual gathering of soccer nations.

Since then, U.S. prosecutors have brought charges against more than 40 soccer officials, marketing executives, associates and entities, while the Swiss attorney general has been conducting parallel investigations.

“Chuck hoped to help bring transparency, accountability and fair play to CONCACAF, FIFA and soccer as a whole,” Blazer’s lawyers said in a statement late Wednesday. “Chuck also accepted responsibility for his own conduct by pleading guilty and owning up to his mistakes. Chuck felt profound sorrow and regret for his actions.”

While some sports executives try to shirk the limelight, Blazer relished the status gained through his 16 years on FIFA’s executive committee until 2013.

For a suburban soccer dad, Blazer gained unimaginable influence and access. Journeys into the heart of power across the world were cataloged on a personal website inspired by Vladimir Putin during a 2011 meeting with the Russian leader.

When he wasn’t traveling the world, Blazer was cutting deals from an office and apartment in Trump Tower where he lived a chaotic life surrounded by cats and a pet parrot.

Blazer started in soccer by coaching his son’s club in New Rochelle, New York, and joined boards of local and regional soccer organizations. He was the U.S. Soccer Federation’s executive vice president from 1984-86. He helped to form the American Soccer League, a precursor to Major League Soccer in 1998 before entering regional soccer politics.

 Blazer urged Jack Warner to run for president of CONCACAF in 1990. When the Trinidadian won, he made Blazer the general secretary — a position he held until 2011.

In 1991, Blazer created the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the organization’s national team championship that is played every two years, and he rose within FIFA to become chairman of its marketing and television advisory board.

Blazer turned on his boss, Warner, who also served with him on FIFA’s executive committee.

Corruption had been rumored for years within world soccer before Blazer provided evidence, accusing Warner and Mohamed bin Hammam of offering $40,000 bribes to voters in the 2011 FIFA presidential election.Bin Hammam, a Qatari who headed the Asian Football Confederation, had been the lone challenger to Blatter, who was elected unopposed to a fourth term after Warner and bin Hammam were suspended. Blatter was elected to a fifth term in 2015 before resigning after the raids in Zurich.

Blazer’s conduct was as corrupt as the actions of the people he accused.

Blazer pleaded guilty in November 2013 to one count each of racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy and willful failure to file a Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, and to six counts of tax evasion.

A separate CONCACAF investigation report released in 2013 said Blazer “misappropriated CONCACAF funds to finance his personal lifestyle,” causing the organization to “subsidize rent on his residence in the Trump Tower in New York; purchase apartments at the Mondrian, a luxury hotel and residence in Miami; sign purchase agreements and pay down payments on apartments at the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas.”

“His misconduct, for which he accepted full responsibility, should not obscure Chuck’s positive impact on international soccer,” his lawyers said. “With Chuck’s guidance and leadership, CONCACAF transformed itself from impoverished to profitable.”

While Blazer was banned for life from soccer by FIFA in 2015, he was awaiting sentencing when he died.

There were almost no public tributes from FIFA or CONCACAF after his passing; CONCACAF merely said it extended “sympathies and condolences” to Blazer’s family and loved ones. The only acknowledgement of Blazer’s death by U.S. Soccer was a comment in a news conference by national team coach Bruce Arena.

“I’ve known Chuck for a lot of years. He did a lot for the sport. Sorry about all the issues regarding FIFA,” Arena said. “But he was a good man.”
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China is trying to contain the awesome influence of social media celebrities, some of whom have tens of millions of followers that dwarf more Western media icons like Oprah Winfrey. For example, the top 10 Chinese celebrities on Internet have between 67 million and 90 million online followers.

Recent weeks have seen the closure of social media accounts of several celebrities while the Beijing Cyber Administration (BCA) shut down the accounts of 60 celebrity gossip magazines. It also asked Internet portals hosting these accounts to “adopt effective measures to keep in check the problems of the embellishment of private sex scandals of celebrities, the hyping of ostentatious celebrity spending and entertainment, and catering to the poor taste of the public.”

Analysts said the Chinese Communist Party (CPP) has reason to worry about the massive influence of celebrities, according to Bill Bishop, who runs the widely read The Sinocism China Newsletter.

Money and values

“The Party is really pushing hard on Socialist Core Values and very few of the popular Internet celebrities are paragons of those values,” he said. “Individual media creators are much harder to control, and one of the core pillars of the CCP is propaganda and ideological control,” he said.

Celebrities are an important tool for marketing and advertising, and thousands of companies depend on them to disseminate product messages. The size of Internet marketing by Chinese celebrities was estimated at $58 billion in 2016 and is expected to reach $100 billion in 2018, according to Beijing-based research agency Analysus.

Many of the social media celebrities come from the world of cinema, television, and sports. But there have been a large number of upstarts who have emerged from nowhere.

Their claim to fame is their ability to raise sensitive social issues, such as the neglect suffered by some so-called “leftover women” who have not found husbands. One such celebrity is Teacher Xu, a popular internet celebrity, who runs a hugely popular account on the WeChat platform.

Almost all celebrities make sure they do not cross the government’s policy line in their posts in texts and videos, said Mark Tanner, Managing Director of China Skinny, an internet based marketing company.

“Everyone in China knows that if you want to be a successful and effective voice in China, you need to toe the party line. So right to Pappi Chang to the little guys on the road, they know what to say and what not to say,” he said.

Analysts say the immense popularity of these high profile individuals is itself seen as a challenge to the authorities even if they do not take up political issues. A lot of what they talk about is indirectly connected to governance issues like the environment, and this is what bothers top officials.

Censor troubles

“Celebrities happen to hold a powerful microphone to speak to society, and in CCP leaders’ eyes, that alone is threatening no matter how non-political most of them may be,” said Christopher Cairns, a Cornell scholar.

The government also has things to worry at the technological level, where the popularity and content production of celebrities seem to be running far ahead of the government’s technical ability to control them.

“A lot of it has to do with lack of control. It is really hard for them to censure real time video. the software hardware for voice and video is just not there yet,” said Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China. “And still, a lot of the system depends upon real-time monitoring. So, there are a lot of vague rules in terms of censorship including harming feelings of the Chinese people.”

The censors are using other reasons to crack down on celebrities they don’t like.The BCA reportedly told executives of Internet companies the new cybersecurity law required websites “to not harm the reputation or privacy of individuals.”

The government has said the new law is necessary for security reasons, but many analysts fear it can be used to surpress freedom of speech on the Internet.

 
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A new exhibition in southern Poland shows the brutality of the Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz through the artistic work of its inmates. Some of the artworks are being shown publicly for the first time.

The “Face to Face: Art in Auschwitz” exhibition opened last week at the Kamienica Szolayskich (Szolayski Tenement House) of the National Museum in Krakow to mark 70 years of the Auschwitz Museum. The museum’s task is to preserve the site in the southern town of Oswiecim and to educate visitors about it. More than 2 million people visited the museum last year.

The curator of the Krakow exhibit, Agnieszka Sieradzka, said Wednesday it includes clandestine as well as commissioned drawings and paintings by Jews, Poles and other citizens held at Auschwitz during World War II.

“These works help us see Auschwitz as the inmates saw it and experienced it,” Sieradzka told The Associated Press. “We stand face to face with the inmates.”       

The Nazis sometimes ordered talented inmates to make paintings for various purposes. One such painting is a portrait of a Roma woman that pseudo-scientist Josef Mengele experimented on. Mengele ordered portraits like this from inmate painter Dina Gottliebova, a Jewish woman from Czechoslovakia.

The task helped Gottliebova survive. After the war, she traveled to the U.S. and started a family. She died in 2009 in California under the name Dina Babbitt.

Among the clandestine art is the so-called Auschwitz Sketchbook by an unknown author. It has 22 drawings of scenes of beatings, starvation and death. It was found in 1947, hidden in a bottle in the foundation of a barrack at Birkenau, a part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. It is the first time it is being shown to the general public. It is housed at the museum and only shown on request. 

Also being displayed is the original “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Sets You Free) gate top that was stolen and retrieved in 2009 and is now kept under guard at the museum. 

From 1940 to 1945, some 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews but also Poles, Roma and Russians, were killed in the gas chambers or died from starvation, excessive forced labor and disease at Auschwitz, which Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland.
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Introducing a brand-new, multimillion-dollar intergalactic adventure film based on a French comic book strip during a summer box office dominated by superheroes and sequels may be considered a big risk to take by an independent filmmaker.

But French director Luc Besson was so confident in his vision for adapting the Valerian and Laureline sci-fi comics into a film, he took his script and sketches to buyers at the Cannes Film Festival three years ago with the hopes of securing funding for the $150 million project.

“They all raised their hands because they loved the script, so we had almost 90 percent of the funding in one day,” Besson told Reuters.

Set in the 28th century where humans and aliens have found a home on the space station Alpha, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets follows two space agents, the cocky Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and the spirited Laureline (Cara Delevingne), trying to uncover the origins of a mysterious force.

They journey through the different environments and diverse population of Alpha, known as the city of a thousand planets where species include sea monsters, organic robots, winged reptilians and thuggish, bug-eyed ogres.

The film comes out in theaters on July 21 and is the fruition of Besson’s nearly 50-year obsession with the comic strip he discovered at age 10, setting him on a path to make films such as The Fifth Element and Lucy.

Lots of competition

The stakes are high for Besson’s EuropaCorp film studio as Valerian enters a box office saturated with superhero films such as Wonder Woman and Spider-Man: Homecoming and sequels such as War for the Planet of the Apes and Despicable Me 3.

Still, the director didn’t consider it a gamble.

“You take risks when you do a first-time director movie at $8 million and no cast. That’s a gamble,” Besson said, adding that Valerian’s theatrical rights had already been bought across nearly 120 countries.

Early reviews for the film have been mixed, with critics praising the vibrant visuals but criticizing the plot and performances.

Variety’s Peter Debruge said the film’s “creativity outweighs its more uneven elements.” Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy dubbed it a front-runner for the Razzies, Hollywood’s annual tongue-in-cheek “worst film” awards.

But Besson believes the audience will determine the success of the film and future installments.

“I wish they love the film because I’m dying to make another one because I love Cara and Dane,” he said.
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