LOS ANGELES: With the American Film Institute’s annual luncheon Friday recognizing the best in film and television, Hollywood’s awards season is officially underway.
The schmooze-y celebration at the Four Seasons Hotel brought together the casts and creators of 2017’s most celebrated movies and TV shows, many of which are also in contention for the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday.
“Wonder Woman” director Patty Jenkins led the honorees in a toast, during which she quoted former Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (who is played by Meryl Streep in Steven Spielberg’s “The Post,” an AFI honoree and best picture nominee at the Globes).
“To love what you do and feel that it matters, how could anything be more fun?” Jenkins said. “We love what we do. It doesn’t always matter — and often it doesn’t — but sometimes it does, so it’s always worth it to try.”
With winners announced in advance and no trophies to accept onstage, the AFI Awards are an opportunity for collegial confabulation.
“This is a place to be together as a community,” said AFI president Bob Gazzale, “to consider the compendium and feel proud.”
Actors, writers, directors and executives embraced the chance to chat, with superstar mashups spontaneously erupting throughout the room.
“Insecure” creator and star Issa Rae greeted Universal Pictures chief Donna Langley. Jenkins was part of a woman-power trio, chatting with Reese Witherspoon and “Lady Bird” writer-director Greta Gerwig. Witherspoon and “Wonder Woman” star Gal Gadot shared a mutual admiration moment, with Gadot telling Witherspoon, “I’m such a big fan.”
Guillermo del Toro made Spielberg laugh. Actress Saoirse Ronan met “Master of None” writer and actress Lena Waithe. Tom Hanks posed for a photo with “The Big Sick” screenwriters Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, who playfully gave him posing tips.
Sterling K. Brown rearranged place cards at the “This Is Us” table so he could sit next to costar Chrissy Metz. Sam Rockwell did the same thing at the table for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” moving himself closer to actress Sandy Martin, who plays his mother in the film.
“Call Me By Your Name” stars Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet, both awards-season newcomers, stood together as they took in the celebrity-filled room.
Besides “Wonder Woman,” “The Post,” “Lady Bird,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “The Big Sick” and “Call Me By Your Name,” AFI named “The Florida Project,” “Get Out,” “Dunkirk” and “The Shape of Water” as its top films of 2017. Most are also up for best picture at the Globes.
AFI’s TV picks also overlap with Globes nominees. Besides “Insecure,” “’This Is Us” and “Master of None,” AFI chose “Big Little Lies,” “The Crown,” “Feud: Bette and Joan,” “Game of Thrones,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Good Place,” and “Stranger Things 2.” A special award was given to “The Vietnam War” TV documentary series.
Many luncheon guests will see each other throughout the weekend at the various events leading up to the Globes. Some went straight from the AFI lunch to the HBO Luxury Lounge, also at the Four Seasons, where celebs could load up on freebies.
Among the takers were Ever Carradine of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” who snagged an $880 UPPAbaby luxury stroller, “Modern Family” star Julie Bowen, who investigated her family tree with an onsite Ancestry.com historian, and “Veep” star Matt Walsh, who picked up a timepiece from WatchGang to wear to Sunday’s ceremony.
Saturday’s pre-Globes events include a tea party held by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and a fundraising gala to support Sean Penn’s J/P Haitian Relief Organization.
‘Wonder Woman’ director Patty Jenkins leads AFI Awards toast
‘Wonder Woman’ director Patty Jenkins leads AFI Awards toast
Kawthar Al-Atiyah: ‘My paintings speak first to the body, then to the mind’
- The Saudi artist discusses her creative process and her responsibility to ‘represent Saudi culture’
RIYADH: Contemporary Saudi artist Kawthar Al-Atiyah uses painting, sculpture and immersive material experimentation to create her deeply personal works. And those works focus on one recurring question: What does emotion look like when it becomes physical?
“My practice begins with the body as a site of memory — its weight, its tension, its quiet shifts,” Al-Atiyah tells Arab News. “Emotion is never abstract to me. It lives in texture, in light, in the way material breathes.”
This philosophy shapes the immersive surfaces she creates, which often seem suspended between presence and absence. “There is a moment when the body stops being flesh and becomes presence, something felt rather than seen,” she says. “I try to capture that threshold.”
Al-Atiyah, a graduate of Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, has steadily built an international profile for herself. Her participation in VOLTA Art Fair at Art Basel in Switzerland, MENART Fair in Paris, and exhibitions in the Gulf and Europe have positioned her as a leading Saudi voice in contemporary art.
Showing abroad has shaped her understanding of how audiences engage with vulnerability. “Across countries and cultures, viewers reacted to my work in ways that revealed their own memories,” she says. “It affirmed my belief that the primary language of human beings is emotion. My paintings speak first to the body, then to the mind.”
Al-Atiyah says her creative process begins long before paint touches canvas. Instead of sketching, she constructs physical environments made of materials including camel bone, raw cotton, transparent fabrics, and fragments of carpet.
“When a concept arrives, I build it in real space,” she says. “I sculpt atmosphere, objects, light and emotion before I sculpt paint.
“I layer color the way the body stores experience,” she continues. “Some layers stay buried, others resurface unexpectedly. I stop only when the internal rhythm feels resolved.”
This sensitivity to the unseen has drawn attention from international institutions. Forbes Middle East included her among the 100 Most Influential Women in the Arab World in 2024 and selected several of her pieces for exhibition.
“One of the works was privately owned, yet they insisted on showing it,” she says. “For me, that was a strong sign of trust and recognition. It affirmed my responsibility to represent Saudi culture with honesty and depth.”
Her recent year-long exhibition at Ithra deepened her understanding of how regional audiences interpret her work.
“In the Gulf, people respond strongly to embodied memory,” she says. “They see themselves in the quiet tensions of the piece, perhaps because we share similar cultural rhythms.”
A documentary is now in production exploring her process, offering viewers a rare look into the preparatory world that precedes each canvas.
“People usually see the final work. But the emotional architecture built before the painting is where the story truly begins,” she explains.
Beyond her own practice, Al-Atiyah is committed to art education through her work with Misk Art Institute. “Teaching is a dialogue,” she says. “I do not focus on technique alone. I teach students to develop intuition, to trust their senses, to translate internal experiences into honest visual language.”
She believes that artists should be emotionally aware as well as technically skilled. “I want them to connect deeply with themselves so that what they create resonates beyond personal expression and becomes part of a cultural conversation,” she explains.
In Saudi Arabia’s rapidly growing art scene, Al-Atiyah sees her role as both storyteller and facilitator.
“Art is not decoration, it is a language,” she says. “If my work helps someone remember something they have forgotten or feel something they have buried, then I have done what I set out to do.”
