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America Ferrera Urges for Improved Latino Representation in Film

America Ferrera poses for photographers upon arrival at the Glamour Women of the Year Awards 2023 on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023 in London. (Scott Garfitt/Invision/AP)
America Ferrera poses for photographers upon arrival at the Glamour Women of the Year Awards 2023 on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023 in London. (Scott Garfitt/Invision/AP)
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America Ferrera Urges for Improved Latino Representation in Film

America Ferrera poses for photographers upon arrival at the Glamour Women of the Year Awards 2023 on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023 in London. (Scott Garfitt/Invision/AP)
America Ferrera poses for photographers upon arrival at the Glamour Women of the Year Awards 2023 on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023 in London. (Scott Garfitt/Invision/AP)

In a room filled with several influential Hollywood figures, “Barbie” star America Ferrera used her platform to address an ongoing industry issue: Latino representation in film.
“According to the numbers, the dominant narrative our industry puts into the world is that Latinos either don’t exist or they are poor, immigrant criminals,” the Emmy winner said before a gathered crowd Thursday at the Academy Women’s Luncheon.
The actor said she was taken aback after she learned that Hispanics and Latinos remained underrepresented in film over the past 16 years, according to a recent report by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
Despite the growth the Hispanic population in the US, Ferrera pointed out the study found that similar growth hadn't happened in film, The Associated Press reported. In last year's movies, the study found that more than half of Latinos appearing on screen were depicted as criminals.
“I’m personally devastated yet again,” said Ferrera, who is of Honduran descent.
Ferrera was the keynote speaker at the event held at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures with attendees including Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o, Kristen Stewart, Rita Wilson, Patty Jenkins, Eva Longoria, Lily-Rose Depp, Riley Keough, Leslie Mann along with Grammy and Oscar winner H.E.R.
Ferrera said the industry’s “system of dehumanization” has been felt in numerous ways in various communities, including Indigenous, Asian American and Pacific Islander, African American and LGBTQ+ communities.
“We must be resolute in our commitment to caring for all of us, to demanding opportunity, access, equal pay, investment and possibility for every woman,” Ferrera said.
The actor is known for her roles in “Superstore,” the “How to Train Your Dragon” animated franchise and “Ugly Betty,” which won her an Emmy in 2007, becoming the first Latina woman to win the best lead actress award. She also stepped behind the camera as an executive producer and director for Netflix's “Gentefied” and “I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.”
Over the years, Ferrera has been vocal about the lack of Latino representation in media. With her husband Ryan Piers William and actor Wilmer Valderrama, she helped create Harness, a nonprofit organization aimed at building community between activists and grassroots leaders who leverage the art of storytelling to empower change.
“What I know today is that none of us needs to do it alone," she said. “I know that together we can grow our collective possibilities, and strengthen a global community of women storytellers, artists and truth tellers.”
Thursday's event was held to bring together women from all facets of the filmmaking community. It was also a celebration of the Academy Gold Fellowship – a one-year program for two emerging filmmakers who will each receive $35,000 and mentorship.
Annette Bening, actor and former academy governor, introduced Erica Eng as the fellowship recipient. Eng is a fifth-generation Chinese American director.

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Nicole Kidman, Zendaya and Hovering Cars See Paris Fashion Week Go Out on a High

Zendaya attends the Nicolas Ghesquiere's Spring/Summer 2027 collection show for fashion house Louis Vuitton during Paris Fashion Week in Paris, France, October 6, 2026. REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier
Zendaya attends the Nicolas Ghesquiere's Spring/Summer 2027 collection show for fashion house Louis Vuitton during Paris Fashion Week in Paris, France, October 6, 2026. REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier
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Nicole Kidman, Zendaya and Hovering Cars See Paris Fashion Week Go Out on a High

Zendaya attends the Nicolas Ghesquiere's Spring/Summer 2027 collection show for fashion house Louis Vuitton during Paris Fashion Week in Paris, France, October 6, 2026. REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier
Zendaya attends the Nicolas Ghesquiere's Spring/Summer 2027 collection show for fashion house Louis Vuitton during Paris Fashion Week in Paris, France, October 6, 2026. REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier

Coco Chanel designed her postwar suit so women could move. Seven decades later, designer Matthieu Blazy has made it stretch.

Suits in a new “smocked tweed” anchored Blazy’s spring-summer 2027 collection for Chanel, shown Monday night at the Grand Palais beneath a flock of illuminated birds as Nicole Kidman, Dua Lipa and Pedro Pascal watched from the front row.

The fabric gives like sportswear, but the idea is old. Chanel built its name by changing how women dressed, and a year after his debut as its designer, Blazy is applying that principle to the house’s own uniform.

Louis Vuitton closed Paris Fashion Week on Tuesday evening with Zendaya in the audience and car sculptures hovering above the runway at the Louvre Museum. It was the final major show of a spring runway season that began in New York last month.

Blazy came from Bottega Veneta to succeed the longtime right hand of Karl Lagerfeld, Virginie Viard, who took over after Lagerfeld's death in 2019. Viard’s tenure brought record sales. Blazy’s has brought back surprise.

He loosens the house’s symbols rather than replacing them. Tweed stretches. Jackets go on over bare skin. Quilted bags slouch. Longtime clients still recognize the codes; newer ones are invited to play with them.

This season, he staged Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s life as an escape: from the corsets and stiff tailoring of her Edwardian youth, through the men’s clothes she borrowed, to the easy suits of her postwar comeback.

“It’s about the women within a woman,” Blazy said.

Kidman, who attended with her daughter Faith Margaret, also supplied recorded readings from Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.” Kidman won an Oscar for portraying Woolf in “The Hours.”

Kidman, Lipa, Pascal and Alexa Demie sang along to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” and the show ended with Britney Spears’ “Gimme More.”

On the Chanel runway Edwardian dress lingered in traces of boning, peplums and ruffled collars. Men’s formal wear was cut down into raw-edged vests and narrow skirt suits.

A pearl-stitched corset top worn with plain black trousers complicated the story of escape, making constraint part of the appeal.

The most beautiful pieces were dresses of layered, printed silk that tracked the sky from morning to nightfall, and 1930s-style sequined or beaded gowns that Chanel described as having the ease of a T-shirt.

Not everything landed. Pattern-on-pattern outfits and ballet tutus tipped into costume, and at 83 looks, the argument sometimes sprawled.

The birds made it more gracefully: swallows perched on buttons and jewelry, and a birdcage evening bag came with its birds already flown.

Model Dyanira Hurbuscher walked first and last, both times carrying the founder’s own 2.55 handbag from the house archives — freedom, with the past firmly in hand.

Vuitton lightens up Louis Vuitton offered a softer vision of the future — and another argument for giving the body room to move.

Nicolas Ghesquière, known for sculpted, futuristic silhouettes, loosened things up with gauzy shift dresses, cardigans, short jackets and soft tailoring. Delicate fabrics rippled as models walked, and slim trousers incorporated sheer mesh panels.

His taste for science fiction remained intact. An asphalt runway crossed the Louvre’s Cour Carrée beneath dozens of wedge-shaped concept cars raised on poles and decorated in the house’s Damier checkerboard pattern. Silver lamé gave some shift dresses a metallic flash.

Zendaya, a house ambassador, brought some informality to the front row, pairing jeans with the ruffled white lace jacket that she had worn to the Paris premiere of “The Odyssey.” Emma Stone, Saoirse Ronan, Blackpink’s Lisa, Sophie Turner and Catherine Deneuve also attended.

Paris loosens up Across Paris, designers made similar moves: mixing formal clothes with sportswear, bringing lingerie into public view and making elaborate decoration feel lighter.

Miu Miu worked the same seam from the opposite side, dressing sportswear up. Miuccia Prada paired pleated check skirts and blazers with running shorts and track tops. Shoelaces became belts, and guests watched from gym-style bleachers. Olivia Colman modeled a black leather skirt suit, joining Jamie Bell and Emma Corrin on the runway.

Sacai’s Chitose Abe, back on the women’s runway after a season away, set tough clothes in motion. Biker leathers broke into swinging fringe, silk tassels crowned military jackets, and prints of beads and rhinestones under sheer layers gave the look of embellishment without the weight. She finished by running to hug Pharrell Williams.

At Valentino, plain satin bustiers and knee-length skirts offered a more intimate kind of formality. Showing at the Sainte-Geneviève Library, Alessandro Michele compared unworn clothes with unread books in his notes: both “still speak to us of the lives we could have lived.” Alexander Skarsgård brought Icelandic sagas to donate.

Elie Saab took lingerie in a more nostalgic direction. Beaded slips and lace bralettes recalled the early 2000s, when Halle Berry won her Oscar in one of his gowns. Paris and Nicky Hilton sat in the front row.

Victoria Beckham’s pleated dresses hung from jewelry chains, taffeta raincoats looked weightless and wedge sandals had their heels hollowed out.

As with Blazy’s stretch tweed, the ambition was to make elaborate clothes feel easy to wear.

Entertainment

Eva Marie Saint, Oscar Winner of Hollywood Classics, Dies at 102

Actress Eva Marie Saint attends the 20th Annual Art Directors Guild Excellence In Production Design Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Sunday, Jan. 31, 2016, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)
Actress Eva Marie Saint attends the 20th Annual Art Directors Guild Excellence In Production Design Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Sunday, Jan. 31, 2016, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)
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Eva Marie Saint, Oscar Winner of Hollywood Classics, Dies at 102

Actress Eva Marie Saint attends the 20th Annual Art Directors Guild Excellence In Production Design Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Sunday, Jan. 31, 2016, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)
Actress Eva Marie Saint attends the 20th Annual Art Directors Guild Excellence In Production Design Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Sunday, Jan. 31, 2016, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)

Eva Marie Saint, the pale, willowy actor who won an Academy Award for her first movie, “On the Waterfront,” and starred opposite Cary Grant in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “North by Northwest,” has died. She was 102. 

Saint, whose acting work lasted well into her 90s, died at her home in Los Angeles on Tuesday, confirmed family representative Jeff Sanderson. 

Saint had one of the most spectacular debuts in Hollywood history, as the love interest of Marlon Brando’s tormented Terry Malloy in “On the Waterfront,” and her first trip to the Academy Awards was memorable too. Pregnant with her first child, Saint accepted her Oscar from Frank Sinatra and smilingly murmured a unique winner's speech: “I think I may have the baby right here.” (Her son, Darrell, was born two days later.) 

The award for the 1954 classic made her an instant star, but she soon astonished Hollywood with a firm independence that would mark her career. She refused offers of studio contracts and declined chances to follow up on her great success, explaining that she was taking time off to become acquainted with her new son. (A daughter, Laurette, was born in 1958.) 

In her first decade in Hollywood, Saint appeared in a mere seven films. She declined such top-level productions as “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” with Gregory Peck, “Summer and Smoke” with Laurence Harvey and “The Rainmaker” with Burt Lancaster. She credited her husband, TV and stage director Jeffrey Hayden, with persuading her to star in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest,” the classic 1959 thriller in which Saint plays a spy who seduces Grant, but ends up falling for him. 

“I vividly remember him saying, ‘Honey, I think you should find a quiet spot. I’ll take care of the children and I want you to really think about this and reread this script,’” she told Vanity Fair in 2014. “He was so right. And that’s what husbands are for.” 

Instead of being put off by her selectivity, studios continued offering her starring roles in such films as “Exodus” (with Newman), “Raintree County” (Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift) and “All Fall Down,” with Warren Beatty. 

She turned more to television in the 1970s and enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1980s as the mother of Cybill Shepherd in the hit sitcom “Moonlighting” and as Tom Hanks’ mother in the film comedy “Nothing in Common.”  

She won an Emmy for the 1990 miniseries “People Like Us,” and had roles in such 21st century movies as “Because of Winn-Dixie,” “Superman Returns” and “Winter’s Tale,” adapted from Mark Helprin's novel of the same name. In 2021, she played Marisa Tomei's aunt in the brief audio play “The Bus Ride,” part of “The Pack Podcast.” 

Saint was married to Hayden for 55 years, until his death in 2016. 

That was her real name  

When Saint emerged in the public consciousness, many believed her theatrical-sounding name must have been invented. She was born with it on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey. The family moved to Delmar, a small town near Albany, New York, where her father was a Goodrich Rubber Co. manager. Eva's goal was to become a third-grade teacher like her mother, but at Bowling Green State University in Ohio she tried out for a play and won the leading role. 

After graduation she lived with her parents in Flushing, Long Island, and began hunting for acting jobs in Manhattan. After a fruitless year, she landed a two-line role as a telephone operator on a radio drama and soon was working steadily on soap operas and nighttime dramas, appearing for two years as Claudia on “One Man's Family.” Network television was booming in the early 1950s, and her looks and dramatic sense made her a favorite with casting people and producers. 

A critical turn in Saint's career came when she auditioned before Elia Kazan and was accepted into the Actors Studio, which shaped a generation of method-actor stars. She credited acting coach Lee Strasberg with helping her overcome her shyness. 

“Lee Strasberg, when he got to know me a little bit, gave me a scene to do where I had to cry in front of my peers,” she told The Santa Barbara Independent in 2009. “I worried about it, I worked on it, I tried to use what I was learning at the studio. I finally did the scene, and I cried, and my peers were crying with me. It was just an incredible moment for me.” 

Saint was rejected for the single female role in the play “Mister Roberts,” but was hired to understudy the actor chosen, Jocelyn Brando, Marlon's sister. In six frustrating months Saint never got to substitute for Brando. She finally made it to Broadway in “A Trip to Bountiful,” which she had played on television. 

Kazan invited her to try out for the female lead in “On the Waterfront” by improvising a scene with Brando. She was told to try to stop a young man from entering her apartment. She told the Los Angeles Times in 2001: “All I know is that Marlon got in the door and turned on the music. We started dancing. He flicked my skirt. Kazan saw the sparks fly, and that's how I got the part.” 

Entertainment

Saudi Film Commission Set to Launch Fourth Edition of Saudi Film Confex 2026

Saudi Film Commission Set to Launch Fourth Edition of Saudi Film Confex 2026
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Saudi Film Commission Set to Launch Fourth Edition of Saudi Film Confex 2026

Saudi Film Commission Set to Launch Fourth Edition of Saudi Film Confex 2026

The fourth edition of Saudi Film Confex 2026 will be held on October 28 and 29 at JAX Film Studios in Riyadh under the patronage of Minister of Culture and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Saudi Film Commission Prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Farhan.

Held under the supervision of the Saudi Film Commission and organized by Benchmark, the event will take place under the theme "Industry Shapers' Edition," bringing together film sector leaders, decision-makers, professionals, and industry specialists.

The new edition will continue the Confex's role as a key catalyst for advancing Saudi Arabia's film industry and expanding investment and partnership opportunities across this vital sector, in line with the National Culture Strategy under Saudi Vision 2030.

The Confex serves as a specialized business platform that brings together the full spectrum of the film ecosystem, from production and distribution companies and technical service providers to investment entities, financing funds, educational institutions, and relevant government bodies. It creates opportunities to forge partnerships, sign agreements and exchange expertise across the industry.

The 2026 edition will take the form of a focused, two-day industry event designed for film professionals and sector stakeholders. It will serve two principal groups: executives and decision-makers, including corporate leaders and representatives of government entities and nonprofit organizations active in the sector; and industry professionals and specialists, including producers, directors, screenwriters, production and distribution companies, and creative and technical service providers.

The program will feature a conference with panel discussions, an exhibition showcasing companies operating across the film sector, and specialized workshops. These activities will enable participants to exchange knowledge and expertise and connect with organizations and companies working throughout the industry.

The 2026 edition builds on the Confex's track record of tangible partnerships. Across its first three editions, 94 agreements were signed with a combined value exceeding SAR1 billion.

Through the Confex, the Saudi Film Commission reinforces Saudi Arabia's position as a regional hub for film industry development and support, contributing to the growth of a thriving Saudi film sector capable of competing regionally and globally.