Latest news with #Pinch
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Tribeca Studios and OpenAI to Establish AI-Integrated Short Film Program (EXCLUSIVE)
Tribeca Studios has partnered with OpenAI to create an AI-integrated short film program for next year's Tribeca Festival. The year-long program will accept two filmmakers to make live-action shorts with OpenAI's tools and features. Those shorts are set to premiere at the 2026 festival, alongside a discussion about AI and film. In addition to access to OpenAI, the selected filmmakers will receive funding, training and mentorship through the program. More from Variety 'Wizkid: Long Live Lagos' Review: Nigeria's Global Pop Superstar Gets an Entertaining and Propulsive Documentary 'Pinch' Review: An Amusing Takedown of India's Patriarchal Structures 'Nobu' Review: Japanese Celebrity Chef Gets a Food Doc That Plays Like a Branded Advertisement 'At Tribeca, storytelling is at the heart of everything we do — and innovation is key to its future. Partnering with OpenAI allows us to be at the forefront of a new creative frontier, where AI is not a replacement, but another powerful tool in a filmmaker's toolkit,' Jane Rosenthal, Tribeca Enterprises co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. 'This collaboration reflects Tribeca's commitment to championing fearless artists who are willing to explore, experiment, and push the boundaries of their craft.' Tribeca Festival previously introduced another AI film initiative last year called Sora Shorts, which showcased five shorts created through the OpenAI model Sora. That program required participants to follow Screen Actors Guild, Writers' Guild and Directors' Guild parameters for AI usage. 'Filmmakers have always pushed the boundaries of storytelling, and this program is about supporting that spirit with tools to enhance traditional filmmaking pipelines,' Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI, said in a statement. 'We're proud to continue our partnership with Tribeca to help bring new ideas to life using OpenAI tools, and I am excited to see how filmmakers embrace the technology to support their creative expression.' Tribeca has not yet sent out invitations for submissions. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts? 25 Hollywood Legends Who Deserve an Honorary Oscar
Telegraph
10-06-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Our dream country home became our worst nightmare – here's how we rescued it
It had never been the intention of Russell Pinch and Oona Bannon to build a house in Devon. When they started looking for a property to buy, just over 10 years ago, they had something far simpler and more straightforward in mind. The couple, now in their early-50s and with two teenage daughters, are the husband-and-wife founders of the high-end furniture brand Pinch, which has become a British design success story since it launched in 2004. The company is known for its elegant and beautifully made wooden furniture, upholstery and lighting, which appear regularly on the pages of interiors magazines. Over the past 20 years, they have poured everything into their business, so the idea of buying an investment property arose to mitigate the fact that they don't have a pension. 'We're entrepreneurs rather than investors,' says Pinch. 'When it was suggested to us that we should really start thinking about getting a pension, we thought, rather than put our money into something that we'd have no control over, we could put that money to much better use. We own our house in south London, so we decided to remortgage and use that money to buy a one-bedroom flat that we could rent out, and then there would be something we could sell later on.' That was the plan. However, it all went out the window one Saturday morning back in 2014 when, while browsing the website of estate agency The Modern House, Pinch came across a piece of land in south Devon with an old barn and planning permission in place to build a modern home. 'The thing with one-bedroom flats in London is that they're very expensive,' he says. 'It was interesting to find that a field in Devon actually cost a bit less – and could be such an amazing project. So we just got carried away.' The field was being sold by a couple who had run a dairy farm on the land since the 1970s, and who had launched the UK's first organic ice cream company, Rocombe Farm, in the 1980s. When they retired, they decided to parcel off pieces of the land and convert the farm buildings into homes. The outline planning had been done by RIBA award-winning architect David Kohn, among whose previous projects is Stable Acre, a modern conversion of an old stable block, which Pinch and Bannon loved; it felt like a perfect fit. They went to view the land – just to take a look – but found that it was already under offer. 'Our first thought was, 'Phew, because it's four and a half hours' drive from London on a Friday night, so what were we thinking anyway?'' says Bannon. But when the other offer fell through, and the opportunity was there for them to buy the land and create their dream weekend home, they couldn't resist. This wasn't the couple's first property project: they describe themselves as 'project people' and had previously converted an old barn in France, doing all the work themselves, with the help of Pinch's father, over the course of four years – to the point of making all the doors and windows and pouring the concrete floors. But this time, they were going to leave it to the professionals. They collaborated closely with Kohn on the design of the house, so closely that Pinch built a 1:20 scale model of the entire house, complete with kitchen, bathrooms, flooring and miniature furniture, so that they could fully visualise how the house would look. 'With about 80 per cent of what David put to us, we were naturally aligned, especially when it came to materials and finishes,' says Bannon. 'With the other 20 per cent, he challenged us – but in a really good way. There are things he suggested, such as a curved internal window above a door, that we wouldn't have come up with on our own but which really make the house what it is.' Due to planning restrictions, they were unable to exceed the height of the original barn or extend the footprint by too much, so instead they opted to dig down 1.3 metres below exterior ground level. The final design included an internal courtyard, overlooked by a sitting room and library, with stairs leading down to a semi-subterranean kitchen with large windows looking up into the garden and the sky beyond, and further stairs leading up to the bedrooms and a gallery with internal windows overlooking the rooms below. 'It was a lovely few years actually,' says Bannon, thinking back to that time. 'We were daydreaming, really, about how we wanted to live.' They got more than a wake-up call, however, when the design was finally ready to go out to tender to contractors. 'We had a budget: we'd remortgaged our house to what we thought was an affordable amount, and it gave us a certain amount of money,' says Pinch. 'It was based on the original QS [quantity surveyor] report – it wasn't a back-of-a-fag-packet estimation,' adds Bannon. They had chosen every detail, down to the handles and the window finishes; yet when the quotes came back, they were wildly over budget. 'It wasn't a case of, 'Can we scrimp and save?' It was completely unbuildable,' says Pinch. One issue was that the cost of materials had suddenly gone through the roof, due to a cargo ship full of building materials sinking off the coast of Scotland. As Bannon puts it, 'You come to realise that there are so many unknowns with a project like this. Obviously, the cost of materials depends on the moment and that varies all the time.' So they started a process of 'value engineering', a means by which the cost of a build can be reduced – which, ironically, required a further fee – swapping poured concrete walls for breezeblocks, for instance, and wood-framed windows for stainless steel. Eventually they got to the stage where the build could begin, and things began to move relatively quickly. 'We've got amazing memories of coming down here and walking across this sort of half-built castle – it felt like it had ramparts,' says Bannon. 'We'd sit in this space, and you'd just be sitting under the open sky, but you'd be thinking, my bed will be here. It was such a special time.' The build took about a year, but their original dream of finally getting the keys to a finished home had been somewhat modified. Instead, all of their budget was swallowed up by the exterior of the building, so they got the keys to a beautiful but very raw shell, with no staircase, kitchens or bathrooms; with plumbing in the walls, but no taps. They spent the next year travelling down to Devon at weekends with their daughters, then aged 10 and 11, and staying at a nearby campsite so that they could build the kitchen, fit the bathrooms, lay the floors, paint the walls and do everything else that needed to be done. 'We knew every single square centimetre of this house intimately,' says Pinch. At the end of that year of work, they had reached the point where they could simply enjoy spending weekends in the house as a respite from their busy lives in London. 'It was feeling like it was an operating home for us that was all about the future,' says Bannon. Then one Friday night in November 2019, the story of the house took a completely unexpected turn. 'It had been raining a lot: proper Dartmoor weather, very intense and incessant,' Bannon recalls. 'Russell woke up in the middle of the night and said, 'What was that noise?'' When he went downstairs to investigate, Pinch walked into what was, he says, 'the weirdest, most dramatic scene. It was like something from Titanic. Water had got in under the concrete floor, which had risen to the point that the dining table was touching the light fitting. Because underneath the concrete there was polystyrene for insulation, and concrete is not designed to take pressure from below, only from above, so if water gets underneath it it breaks very easily. If it floods, the polystyrene floats, so the concrete floats. There were tins of food floating past; it was completely discombobulating.' As the house is part subterranean, it had been fitted with underground pumps, but these were unable to deal with the sheer volume of the water ingress. The couple's first instinct that night was to try to get the water out. 'We had an old cool box and a bucket, and we started trying to scoop it up and throw it out the front door,' says Bannon. 'I did that back and forth a couple of times, and then I looked up, and the water was just gushing down the steps that go up into the garden, like a waterfall. We were basically throwing the water into a lake.' At this point, it was 3am. They called Pinch's parents, who drove the two hours from their home in Gloucestershire to pick up the children, then called the fire brigade, who advised them not to get stuck in an upstairs room. The water rose for three hours, up to 70cm, then slowly the pumps were able to take back control, and managed over the next few hours to pump the water back out into the garden. But the catastrophic damage had been done. The next day, the shock fully hit them. The house was a complete write-off. 'You see those stories on the news about people's houses flooding but it's very hard to associate yourself with it,' says Pinch. Even several years later, it is still clearly a difficult memory. 'When you go through that, it is unbelievably stressful. You feel very alone, because who's going to help you? It's the middle of the night, there's no back-up. You're really on your own.' They spent the next several months feeling 'progressively more alone'. The contractor they had used for the build had (for unrelated reasons) since gone bust; the quantity surveyor had little confidence that they would be able to rebuild the house safely and protect it against future floods. It took a year for them to get the insurance money, with the help of an insurance litigator. Over that winter, the house flooded again, more than once; it was an unusually wet winter, and the water table was extremely high. Despite being 200 miles away in London, they knew every time this happened, due to security cameras they had installed at the house. 'I'd get a notification on my phone from the Blink app to say that the power had gone off, and I'd know the house had flooded again,' Pinch recalls. 'I remember a time when that happened during a meeting and you almost passed out from the stress of it,' adds Bannon. Eventually they were put in touch with an architect in Devon, who was able to find local drainage experts and mechanical engineers with a special interest in water management, so that they could go back to the building phase and start again, doing the painstaking work of repairing and making safe the outside of the house before they could start rebuilding it on the inside. It took a further year; a fraught process compounded by supply-chain delays caused by the Covid pandemic. This time, they installed a whole new system of flood defences. 'We did put in flood defences the first time,' says Pinch. 'But it's not an area that had flooded before. We got planning [permission] based on the fact that it's not on a flood plain. But it did flood, and we just knew that we needed to protect ourselves. We've built wells; we've built overflows for the wells in case there's a storm and the electrics go off; we've got detention lakes; we've got a moat. If this doesn't work, we're really in trouble.' To see the house now, furnished almost entirely with their own designs, along with some vintage pieces, its calming aesthetic belies that traumatic time, although the house still bears some scars, such as cracks in the floors here and there. 'We haven't totally whitewashed it out,' says Bannon. 'Those scars are part of the patina of life; they happened.' Yet now, more than five years on from the flood, the shock of the experience has eased. 'I remember there was a particular place where I stood that night, rooted to the spot with fear, and there was all this noise, water noise everywhere,' says Bannon. 'For a long time, whenever I stood in that place I would feel that feeling again, but I don't now. It's passed.' 'I used to get PTSD every time I saw a yellow weather warning on my phone, or if the security cameras went off because of a power cut,' says Pinch. 'It was extraordinarily stressful, but in the real scheme of things, people have a lot more to deal with than their second home flooding.' With time, they are able to look back at the experience with something like a sense of closure. 'I'd honestly say, it's still the best project we've done,' says Pinch. 'It's gorgeous and we love it.' 'It's a forever home,' says Bannon. 'You just float around this house. It has a sense of lots of different spaces being connected, surrounded by massive sky and birds of prey and all sorts of Disney animals outside. We've got teenage kids, we're running a business, we're busy all the time but when we get down here, I walk through that door and every cell in my body feels relaxed.' As for whether this experience has put them off future projects: 'We are still, and hopefully always will be, project people,' says Bannon. 'We bring design and daydreams into all that we do. But that experience taught us to be prepared – and to be prepared for things to go wrong.'
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Pinch' Review: Taut Debut Highlights One Woman's Response to Sexual Harassment — and Complicity
A large family enters a crowded train car. They spread out — busying themselves finding seats, settling in, placing luggage — when the youngest adult woman feels the unwelcome hand of a passing stranger. She whips around, but the man has already disappeared into the crowd, and when she tells a trusted female relative, the result is instinctive disgust, but only briefly. 'That just happens.' More from IndieWire Studio Ghibli at 40: Can an Ethical Animation Studio Still Exist, or Even Survive? 'Eddington' Trailer: Ari Aster's Western of Pandemic Paranoia Hits Theaters After Dividing Cannes This is not exactly a scene from Uttera Singh's 'Pinch,' but similar enough and entirely true. Her debut feature and 2025 Tribeca Festival premiere takes on a small piece of a big topic, delivering not only a gripping and nuanced narrative but an astutely told directing effort. Writer and director Singh plays Maitri, whose life takes a sharp turn when her landlord gropes her on a bus and she retaliates in kind. Soon, the incident involves Maitri's mother, their neighbors, and the small community living in their building, where the man serves as landlord and wields all the power. 'Pinch' is definitionally a film about assault; a woman being groped on a bus or pinched in a crowd is still wrong even if it's not rape, a point that Maitri makes explicitly. It's shocking, distressing, inappropriate, and worth condemning, and her conviction rattles everyone around her. Mother Shobha (Geeta Agrawal) begs her to forget about it — about something that happens to every woman at some point, she says — but the film doesn't fall into the trap of villainizing her. Singh writes Shobha with tangible empathy for the generation before her, for mothers and aunts who normalized sexual misconduct because they felt there was no other choice. She ends up being a critical confidante for Maitri as the film goes on, criticizing and comforting her in equal measure as only a mother can. The ensemble is equally strong, giving grounded performances that strengthen the community dynamic; Sunita Rajwar as a neighbor who comfortably walks over Shobha, Badri Chavan as Maitri's pal Samir (and the more successful vlogger among them), and Sapna Sand as Rani, the imperious wife of Maitri's attacker. Together, they embody societal notions of respect, stubbornness, and principle — the old Indian refrain of 'Log kya kahenge?' — and walking reminders of how treacherous it is to ignore and doubt survivors. Singh and cinematographer Adam Linzey opt for tight, tense tracking shots, placing viewers firmly in Maitri's mind and space as she navigates the ripple effect of her assault and escalating discomfort with hiding the truth. Raashi Kulkarni's score periodically deploys influences from Indian classical music, with an actor on screen to perform the rhythmic syllables. The film derives locational specificity not from city or region, but from the apartment building and local community, adding deliberate claustrophobia to the overall narrative tension. In a statement for the show's press materials, Singh expressed hope that 'Pinch' will start essential conversations between generations and genders, because no group can be tasked with liberating itself in isolation. In her hands, 'Pinch' is the kind of film that leaves the viewer invigorated instead of weary — and ready to follow the rest of Singh's career. 'Pinch' premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. The film is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best reviews, streaming picks, and offers some new musings, all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
India Gazette
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- India Gazette
Teaser of Uttera Singh's feature debut 'Pinch' unveiled
ANI 29 May 2025, 23:54 GMT+10 New Delhi [India], May 29 (ANI): The teaser of Uttera Singh's feature directorial debut 'Pinch' has been uneviled. The India-set mother-daughter dramedy, which Singh wrote, directed, produced and stars in, is all set to be screened at Tribeca Festival under Tribeca's International Narrative Competition. Interestingly, 'Pinch' has become the first Indian film to compete in the section in three years. In the film, Singh plays 'Maitri, a travel vlogger living with her traditional mother Shobha (Geeta Agrawal) in a tight-knit apartment complex. When an incident during a community pilgrimage gets swept under the rug, the mother-daughter duo must confront the emotional aftermath in a claustrophobic reckoning with truth, tradition, and the price of silence.' Speaking about the project, Singh said, 'In telling this story, I wanted to make a big deal out of what society often dismisses as 'small. There's a darker version of this film, but I leaned into comedy and energy to spark conversation - and to reflect the absurdity of silence around assault. 'Pinch' doesn't pretend to have answers. It insists on the questions.' Sunita Rajwar, Sapna Sand, Badri Chavan, Rajiv Neema, Jahnvi Marathe and Nitish Pandey are also a part of the film. (ANI)
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Jackrabbits' season ends in walk-off loss
OMAHA, Neb. (SDSU) — Omaha's Drew Borner hit a two-run single in the bottom of the 10th inning to finish off a 7-6, Maverick comeback victory against South Dakota State in an elimination game Thursday afternoon at the Summit League Baseball Championship at Tal Anderson Field. The Mavericks, who trailed 5-0 entering the sixth inning, improved to 20-29 overall and will face the loser of Thursday night's winners-bracket game between North Dakota State and Oral Roberts. SDSU had its season come to an end with a 16-36 overall record. SDSU had taken a 6-5 lead in the top of the 10th inning when Dagen Schramm drew a leadoff walk. Pinch runner Davis Carr advanced to second on a sacrifice bunt by Nicholas Werk and took third on a wild pitch. After Carter Sintek walked, Nolan Grawe lofted a fly ball to deep right-center for his fourth run batted in of the game with a sacrifice fly that scored Carr. Omaha's final rally of the game all came with two outs. After Jackrabbit closer Dylan Driessen retired the first two batters of the 10th inning, Paul Schuyler worked a walk and Cardel Dick followed with a single. A walk to Tyler Palmer loaded the bases, setting the stage for Borner, who lined a Driessen offering just inside the right-field line to bring home both Schuyler and Dick for the walk-off victory. Jackrabbit starter Caleb Duerr held Omaha without a hit through the first five innings, but ran into trouble in the home half of the sixth. Duerr opened the frame by hitting Sam Beck and Jackson Trout in consecutive at-bats and Henry Zipay delivered the first Maverick hit with a single to left field to play Beck. Tyler Bishop then stepped to the plate and clubbed a three-run opposite-field home run to right field to pull Omaha to within 5-4 and bring an end to Duerr's afternoon. Jake Goble came on in relief and worked perfectly through the Omaha lineup his first time through the order, but ran into trouble in the bottom of the ninth. Schuyler opened the inning with a single up the middle on an 0-2 pitch and pinch hitter Blake Stenger followed with a bunt single. Driessen then entered in relief and allowed another bunt single by Palmer to load the bases with nobody out. A sacrifice fly by Borner brought home the tying run and the Mavericks then re-loaded the bases on a walk to Sam Beck. Driessen then induced back-to-back groundouts to the left side of the infield with shortstop Carter Sintek throwing home for a force out for the second out of the inning and Grawe corralling a ball hit his way at third base for an unassisted putout third to get out of the jam. SDSU built a 5-0 lead with two runs in the third inning and by adding three more runs an inning later. Grawe delivered run-scoring hits in both frames, plating the first run of the game with his third-inning single and adding a two-run single in the fourth. Bryce Ronken added a run-scoring single in the third inning, while Sintek closed out the fourth-inning scoring by scampering home on a wild pitch. Both Sintek and Grawe tallied three of the Jackrabbits' 10 hits. Omaha's seven hits were spread among seven players. Duerr struck out two, walked one and hit the two batters over his five-plus innings of work. Goble added two strikeouts in his three-plus innings. Cameron Teinert pitched three scoreless innings of relief while Beck picked up the win after beginning the game at second base. NOTES SDSU claimed the season series against Omaha, 4-3 The Jackrabbits moved to 2-1 in Summit League tournament games against Omaha SDSU went 0-2 at the Summit League Baseball Championship for only the second time in 14 appearances, falling to 20-27 overall in tournament games The Jackrabbits dropped to 1-1 in extra-inning games in 2025 Ronken reached base safely for the 31st consecutive game Sintek finished the season with 78 hits, ranking him ninth on the SDSU single-season charts Sintek posted his 23rd multi-hit game of the season and ended the year with 102 total bases Grawe extended his hitting streak to 12 games and upped his SDSU freshman-record hit total to 69 Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
