Director Spike Lee has joined the lineup of speakers for the CICLOPE Festival which is scheduled for November 8-10 in Berlin, highlighted by panels, talks, networking and an awards ceremony spanning around 30 categories including direction, cinematography, production design, editing, VFX and music, with a Grand Prix for best in show.
Guests and speakers at CICLOPE this year will include Andrew Thomas Huang, director of some of the most memorable Björk music videos, Lauren Greenfield, a founder of Girl Culture films, David Lee, CCO of Squarespace US, Lynsey Atkin, 4Creative UK exec creative director, Matthew Fone, owner of Riff Raff Films, and directing duo Rubberband. CICLOPE aims to support the development of talent across the world and also holds regional versions of its awards in South America, Africa and Asia.
“Spike Lee has always been a pioneer, an icon of our generation. He took his camera to fight a cause, so his films can not only be considered to be culturally, historically and aesthetically important, but absolutely essential for a better world,” said Francisco Condorelli, founding director at CICLOPE. “I´m sure Spike will bring a different perspective to CICLOPE, making a significant contribution to the intellectual and creative capital of our community.”
Best known for films such as Do the Right Thing (1989), Malcom X (1992), Inside Man (2006) and BlacKkKlansman (2018), the Oscar-winning Lee is also a celebrated commercials director, with campaigns for Nike that included the company’s 50th anniversary ad in 2022, starring Zimmie and Mars Blackmon.
The ad brought back the Blackmon character from his 1986 film, She’s Gotta Have It, pitting him against Zimmie from a more recent TV reprisal of the film. Sitting at a sliding chess table in Brooklyn Park, the pair play out the last 50 years of sporting history, while attempting to get a checkmate.
More than 67 million people watched Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate. That’s way up from June
An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a sharp increase from the June debate that eventually led to President Joe Biden dropping out of the race.
The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.
Tuesday's count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump's and Hillary Clinton's first faceoff in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.
With Harris widely perceived to have outperformed Trump on Tuesday night, the former president and his supporters are sharply criticizing ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. The journalists waded into on-the-fly fact checks during the debate, correcting four statements by Trump.
No other debates are currently scheduled between the two presidential candidates, although there's been some talk about it and Fox News Channel has publicly offered alternatives. CBS will host a vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance.
Tuesday's debate stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate uncorked a series of events that ended several weeks later with Biden's withdrawal from the race after his performance was widely panned.
Opinions on how ABC handled the latest debate Tuesday were, in a large sense, a Rorschach test on how supporters of both sides felt about how it went. MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes sent a message on X that the ABC moderators were doing an "excellent" job — only to be answered by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who said,... Read More