Canadian-made film Blindness to open Cannes

The Canadian-made feature film Blindness will have its world premiere on May 14 as the opening-night gala film of the 61st Cannes Film Festival.

The news, which will be announced today, marks the first time in 28 years that a Canadian movie has been chosen for this prestigious slot that kicks off the glamorous 12-day festival in the south of France.

Niv Fichman, co-founder of Toronto’s Rhombus Media, led the charge to get the Canada-Japan-Brazil co-production off the ground.

The $25-million-plus Blindness, directed by Oscar-nominated director Fernando Meirelles (City of God), tells the fierce and fantastical story of a pandemic of blindness that eviscerates society.

Drawing on the past

AMSTERDAM — From the simple sketches in America’s turn-of-the-century Yiddish newspapers to Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust narrative Maus 70 years on, comic-strip art has long been used as a way to depict Jewish experience.

Jewish artists, as an exhibition at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum shows, also played a special role in the development of the genre, creating figures such as Superman, Batman and the Hulk, before pioneering the graphic novel.

Early Jewish immigrants expressed their struggles to integrate in the United States in the short comic-strip format, which began to appear in East Coast newspapers from around 1900.

In a strip on show from 1914 in a Chicago evening newspaper, just after the outbreak of the First World War, a youngster looks at a map of Europe and asks his father where Belgium is.

Total snaps up Synenco Energy

CALGARY — Oil sands junior Synenco Energy Inc. has found a buyer at last, announcing Monday that French super-major Total SA will acquire the company in an all-cash deal for around $478 million.

Calgary-based Synenco has been up for sale since last May, when the company said it couldn’t afford to build its Northern Lights oil sands project — a $10.7-billion, 100,000-barrel-a-day oil sands mining and upgrader development that’s 60-per-cent owned and operated by Synenco.

“Significant new capital would be required to develop Northern Lights,” said Synenco chief executive Mike Supple in a conference call. “These resources are more valuable in the hands of a company with the capital to develop them.”

Total will pay $9 a share for Synenco, a 16-per cent premium to the company’s closing price on Friday of $7.79 per share. The boards of both firms have approved the deal, and Synenco has agreed to recommend that its shareholders accept the offer.

Magic finish off Raptors

ORLANDO — With the shadow of Dwight Howard rising over him, Chris Bosh tried a fade-away jump shot and kept fading. He faded so far that he ended up flat on his back, his shot well short, his opponents sprinting in the other direction.

The team built around Bosh, the Toronto Raptors, lost 102-92 last night to the Orlando Magic, losing also their best-of-seven first-round playoff series 4-1 and ending a confounding season that started in the preseason in Italy with high hopes and ended in Orlando with a heavy dose of NBA reality: The Raptors aren’t good enough.

Bosh had a strong series but he saved his worst for last, scuffling on his jumper — “I missed a couple of easy ones early on and that made me a little passive, just a bit,” he said — while at the other end, Howard was gobbling up rebounds, making the backboard shake on his trademark put-back dunks, and ruling the glass like some Japanese movie monster.

Some slept, some stood before deadly derailment in China

ZIBO, China (AP) — Some passengers were sleeping, but others were standing in the aisle waiting to get off when their high-speed train derailed, toppling into a ditch “like a roller coaster” and slamming into another train. At least 70 people died and more than 400 were injured.

China reacted swiftly to its worst train accident in a decade, sending top officials and soldiers to Zibo, the site of Monday’s pre-dawn crash in eastern China’s Shandong province, and sacking two railway officials.

The official Xinhua News Agency said heavy cranes were used to move the wrecked rail cars and the line reopened to traffic early Tuesday, about 20 hours after the crash.

An investigation panel set up by the State Council, or Cabinet, said speeding was responsible for deadly collision, Xinhua reported Tuesday. Authorities had earlier been quoted as saying that human error was to blame.

Prime-time U.S. shows finally available online

Big-time U.S. television programs are finally becoming available to Canadians online, starting with a deal announced by CTV and ABC.

The two networks announced on Friday that full streamed episodes of ABC series Desperate Housewives, Lost and Grey’s Anatomy would be available for viewing on CTV’s website for 28 days after their initial broadcast. The shows will be supported by advertising.

Other less popular series are already available in a number of ways.

Chinese artists painted into a corner

BEIJING — It was the maddening mobs of tourists that finally drove Fu Lei from the art studio where he had been quietly painting his quirky and surrealistic canvases for the past six years.

Back in 2002, he was one of the first Chinese artists to find refuge in the 798 district, a jumble of abandoned military factories where cheap rents and empty spaces had allowed an underground art scene to emerge.

The bohemians were an odd sight in the factory buildings, attracting gawking stares from the passing migrant workers, but 798 was the perfect place for Mr. Fu and his friends to work in peace.

When the artists attracted the attention of the Chinese authorities, they had to endure a wave of police raids and demolition threats by government officials, who failed to grasp the cultural value of a low-rent district of studios and galleries.

But in the end, it was 798’s unexpected commercial success that ultimately killed its soul and forced the artists to flee.