Dede Gardner was born in Chicago in 1967 and studied English at Columbia University. Seventeen years after her graduation, she worked as President of Plan B Entertainment, a production company started by Brad Grey.

At Plan B, Dede finds stories to make into films. Jeremy Kleiner, who is now co-president of Plan B, says Dede was his mentor (导师) before he joined her as a producing partner. “I’ve had the honor to work with her for almost 20 years,” he says. “She’s just a one-of-a-kind person in so many ways. She is very brave and views storytelling as the focus of her films.”

This year, Dede is the only woman to have won two Best Picture Oscars, for Moonlight and 12 Years a Slave. Before, together with Kleiner, she won seven films to Best Picture nominations (提名) including Selma in 2015, The Big Short in 2016 and Minari in 2021.

“Basically, whatever Dede does, it turns to gold,” says Jessie Buckley, one of the stars of Women Talking. “Dede has also changed the culture of making movies. She is always there to make the set feel comfortable when we are obviously coming across difficult things. She’s a great example to follow. She’s very careful with protecting the workers’ voice.”

Dede is actually exploring a much healthier and kinder way to make movies. She’s a producer who consciously thinks about creating a set where there is care. That includes making sure there are therapists (治疗专家) on set for all the workers in case there are emergencies happening.

How can having a childlike view of the world help the environment? Danish eco-artist Thomas Dambo combines a talent for recycling with a fairy-tale imagination to bring people worldwide closer to nature.

For the “Guardians of the Seeds” exhibition, Danish eco-artist Thomas Dambo built five trolls from discarded wood materials, which were appointed by Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens (CMBG) for its splendid riverside woodland.

The exhibition composed of the five trolls aims to give visitors an emotional connection with nature that will encourage them to become keepers of it. For the exhibition, Thomas came up with a story that a family of trolls hid 10 golden seeds to protect the old forest. Using a map that's provided, visitors follow clues to find where the seeds are hidden.

Besides using carefully selected recycling materials to produce his works, to challenge himself creatively, the artist allowed for a degree of production on-site. He gave a skinny troll named Birk a beard made from the roots of fallen trees. The fur of another troll Roskva is made from bark. Also, Gro, sitting with her eyes closed in a yoga pose, has a tongue made out of a nearby deserted planter.

“Thomas wants people to interact with them,” says Gretchen, president of CMBG. “He wants it to be a journey of discovery where you're walking along and all of a sudden this big magical being appears in front of you. These are friendly, happy trolls. They're not scary, mean trolls.”

Thomas hopes that “Guardians of the Seeds” gives viewers the same joy he gets from an occupation that he compares to a hobby. He says too many people lose their playfulness in their adult life. The key quality of his work is just its playfulness. One of his trolls sits on a real car on a hillside, appearing to cheerfully ride it. He wants to reactivate a childlike imagination in adults so they begin to see trash as objects that can be repurposed in practical and even picturesque ways. And he loves to entertain kids, too.

Nowadays, Mr. Dambo gets a kick out of seeking waste everywhere, hoping to find more stuff he could refashion into something amazing.

Milan Kundera, one of the biggest names in European literature in recent decades, has died in Paris aged 94 after a lengthy illness.

Born in 1929 into a Czech(捷克) family, he studied music with his father, who was a piano teacher and a student of the composer Janacek, and ensured Kundera received musical training at an advanced level. Kundera studied in Prague, becoming a lecturer in world literature. He joined the ruling Communist Party and initially he was an enthusiastic member. But his writing soon got him into political trouble. His first novel The Joke-a black comedy published in 1967-led to a ban on his writing in Czechoslovakia. In 1970 he was asked to leave the party after expressing support for the Prague Spring movement, the period of political movement crushed by the 1968 Soviet attack. Kundera’s political action led to his dismissal from his teaching post and his novels were removed from public libraries, and the sale of his work was banned until the fall of the Communist government in 1989.

For a short time he performed as jazz trumpeter, before emigrating to France in 1975 with his wife Vera, settling first in Rennes then Paris. He became a French citizen in 1981, two years after he was robbed of his Czech nationality, and eventually wrote in French. He soon secured a reputation as a ground-breaking author with The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The book was adapted for the screen in 1987. “It seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask,” he shared his impression of the adaptation with his friend and writer Philip Roth in The New York Times after watching it. “So that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties. ”

In 1985 he received the Jerusalem Prize-a prize given to writers whose works have dealt with themes of human freedom in society. And while he was a frequent competitor for the Nobel Prize for literature,the award remained distant.