Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has thrown her weight behind the Zurich-premiering My Home of Wind and Sand, an important and affecting documentary following a young woman’s fight for her community’s independence.

From Austrian filmmaker Patrick Wally, who shot the feature over a 10-year period, My Home of Wind and Sand is a portrait of Sahrawi activist Najla Mohamed Lamin. She was born and raised in the refugee camps near Tindouf, Algeria, and has devoted her adult life to campaigning for Western Sahara’s liberation from Moroccan sovereignty. We follow Lamin from her studies in the U.S. to representing the Sahrawi people at the United Nations, where she argues for peaceful resistance as a generation born in exile (Spain withdrew its occupation of the region in 1975) grows older and angrier without resolution.

When armed conflict resumes after decades of ceasefire, the convictions that have shaped Najla’s public life are tested. And then, toward the end of the doc, comes a kick to the gut: The UN Security Council adopts a US-sponsored resolution describing genuine autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty as the “most feasible solution” to the conflict.

Lamin and Wally, whose sweet and unlikely friendship anchors this depiction of the Sahrawi people’s fight for justice, were celebrated at the Zurich Film Festival premiere on Tuesday evening, where they urged attendees to spread the word about the issue.

And Thunberg, who in January 2025 visited the Sahrawi camps with Lamin accompanying and translating for her, spoke plainly about what must change and called out the media for its silence. “This movie is so much about betrayal,” said the young activist. “First, it is the occupation and the violence in itself that somehow becomes viewed as normal. […] It’s not attractive enough to gain any media attention or clicks, which is yet another betrayal. And then it’s the whole international community, all the international organizations that people are putting their entire trust to, but are being met with nothing but betrayal.”

She continued, asking the audience to take Lamin’s story with them: “We do not talk about Western Sahara — people don’t even know about Western Sahara, and there’s just this extreme hypocrisy that makes me so, so angry and upset. While this story is, of course, incredibly inspirational, it is about perseverance, steadfastness, and continuing the fight as a matter of duty. I am convinced that Najla [and her community] do not want thank-yous or applause, but action. It falls on every single one of us in this room, especially us privileged people who have a platform or access to resources, to actually take that moral obligation to amplify the Western Saharan struggles. […] We will spread the word, and do everything in our power to ensure global solidarity and justice. Because otherwise, we are nothing more than hypocrites ourselves.”

Lamin reflected on seeing a decade of her life up on screen and paid tribute to the thousands of people — including her late sister — who will never have their voices heard. She said at Zurich’s Kinokoni: “Standing in Europe, in Switzerland, I think it’s very easy for us to think that we are completely separate from each other as nations, as cultures, as activists, as women, as men. ‘Oh, she lives in Africa. She has nothing to do with me. I live in Switzerland. I have nothing to do with the person in Gaza or in Sudan or in Congo.’”

The campaigner added: “But when you really sit with yourself, you do a little bit of research, or just take the courage to be honest with yourself… We’re only one small planet, and we’re not separated. We’re not different. Morocco cannot do what it’s doing without the support of Europe and the U.S., and Israel cannot do what it’s doing to the Palestinian people without the support of Europe and the U.S. […] Free European citizens, you have a very, very big responsibility to look back at your privileges, to look back at your government, at your interests, and see where [you] can make a difference.”

The room erupted into raucous applause as Lamin spoke. All she is asking for, she added, is a referendum where her people can decide their own future. Wally added: “I was so astonished of her story and how she tells it, and even [at] the first meeting, everything she told me… It was eye-opening for me. She had so much knowledge, and I learned so much from her that I wouldn’t have expected. So that’s why I tried to make a film about her.”

Lightdox is handling worldwide sales on My Home of Wind and Sand, a WyFilm production. The 22nd Zurich Film Festival runs Sept. 24-Oct. 4.

It is equally as intriguing as it is concerning that so much of Alex Schulman’s debut feature, Adult Supervision, is inspired by real-life events.

Like his protagonist, Bill, the first-time filmmaker — also a famed author, journalist and podcaster in his native Sweden — chaperoned a school trip to the Stockholm Archipelago in a bid to reconnect with his daughter. “We had such a close, close relationship when she was a child, and then all of a sudden, I just noticed that as I got into her room, she left it,” Schulman tells The Hollywood Reporter outside Zurich‘s Hotel Ambassador this week. “It was the saddest thing, and then I said to my wife, ‘I’m going to go on the trip because I need to get her back.’”

Thankfully, now 17, Schulman’s daughter has resurfaced from under the choppy waters of teen angst and rediscovered that precious connection with her father. But the aforementioned class excursion had already left a profound impact on Schulman. It not only served as the basis for an entire film about the particularly chaotic trifecta of paternity, masculinity and childhood trauma, but would also make an Oscar hopeful out of the newly anointed director, whose Adult Supervision — premiering at the Zurich Film Festival this week — has been selected as Sweden’s official pick for best international feature at the Academy Awards.

It also gave him the irresistible opportunity to work once again with Gustaf Skarsgård (son of Stellan, brother of Alexander and Bill), with whom Schulman once had a complicated relationship. “We were very bad friends because I have a podcast, and we were making fun of him on this podcast,” he begins.

The long-running Alex & Sigges podcast is, according to Schulman, the biggest pod in Scandinavia. So when this particular member of the beloved Swedish acting dynasty released a rap song, Schulman’s mocking of the video played out pretty publicly in the press. “I get so angry, offended, proud and sad and a little murderous,” Skarsgård reportedly told Swedish press about Schulman and his co-host Sigge Eklund some years ago. “And then I think: ‘But what the hell, come on, laugh at yourself a little and have a little distance. [And] fuck those two.’”

Schulman smiles as he talks about it now. “Gustaf was very angry, so he went out publicly and [said] what he thought about us, and then we had a war for a couple of years,” he explains. But in 2022, Schulman had written a monologic stage show, Comfort Reports, and was directing it at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre. He needed a heavyweight actor to lift the performance to the great heights he believed it could reach. “I thought, ‘There’s no one that can do it as good as Gustaf.’” But he couldn’t contact Skarsgård because the tension between them was so rife. “So I sent [the script] to the head of the theater, and Gustaf read it and liked it,” he says. “Then after being public enemies for so long, we met in this restaurant. I remember him coming in, and I rose from the table, and we just hugged. Then it was over.”

Adult Supervision marks Schulman and Skarsgård’s second collaboration. It follows Skarsgård as the anxiety-ridden Bill, who accompanies his daughter and her school friends on a remote trip, desperate to repair their icy relationship. He is joined by two fellow fathers: the secretly domineering Bobo (Fares Fares) and Pontus (Linus Wahlgren), who takes a fancy to one of the camp counsellors. The men believe themselves to be up for the task of handling an unruly class. But tensions quickly escalate and their grip on the situation begins to slip. As buried memories resurface, games turn into power struggles — and power into violence. Soon, no one can tell who’s in charge and who’s in danger.

Perhaps Schulman can do the best job at putting into perspective how authentic his script is: “You know the scene with the name [introduction] game, with the throw of the ball, and the students say, ‘I’m Leopold Dogfucker’? That actually happened.” Just as Bill does in the film, Schulman turned to his daughter and asked for the misbehaving kid’s name. “You can imagine that my daughter hated me. [She was] so embarrassed.”

It isn’t the only real-life event that Schulman wove into this deftly crafted portrait of authority, anarchy and the unpredictable nature of children. Adult Supervision opens with a school teacher showing parents anonymous screenshots from the kids’ Snapchat conversations, in which they hurl unfathomably vicious and antisemitic abuse at one another. Another scene on the trip depicts a student spraying an antiseptic cleaning bottle into his peer’s water, before Fares’ character comes and, in what he believes is an astute bit of discipline, slams his palm on the table so hard that the whole room stops. Many of these incidents were inspired by Schulman’s experience. “There were so many things happening on that trip,” he remembers. “And when I came home, I remember I was crying in my wife’s lap for hours. And then after a couple of weeks, I thought that this is a story that I want to tell.”

The director likens his own role on the trip to that of Bill, who is slowly driven to madness by worrying about a particular child, the class punching bag Kenneth (Olof Olingdahl). “I am very much like Bill in the movie. I’m not a conflict guy,” says Schulman. “And I always believe in discussing a conflict with kids, but that didn’t work.” He is admittedly relieved that Skarsgård was able to bring alive Bill’s gentle, yet neurotic nature. “It must be hard for an actor to play a person who’s struggling so much,” wonders the director. “And it’s a big challenge because he’s in almost every frame. It’s completely his movie […] and for me, I think it was obvious that [no one] in Sweden can do it as well as he did.”

Skarsgård’s performance completely anchors the gradual descent from decorum to disorder. He is a man acting out of parental responsibility, while carrying his own baggage from being bullied as a child himself. But Kenneth, to Bill’s dismay, is not your usual victim. “You see so many bullied boys and girls in movies that are just so one-dimensional,” says Schulman. “They’re bullied and they’re victims. But I know from being bullied when I was young, [that] I was also bullying. That’s how you survive, right? It’s very, very complex,” he continues. “I liked the idea of one thinking that this boy is a victim, but he’s also a perpetrator.”

The finished product is, oddly, very aesthetically pleasing. Schulman enlisted one of Joachim Trier’s most trusted cinematographers, Jakob Ihre, who also worked with Fares on HBO’s Chernobyl. Together, they came up with replacing bog-standard drone shots of the island with miniature models — fake trees and tiny cabins — which help evoke a sense of childlike play.

Adult Supervision has so far been described as a dark comedy, but it’s quite the mash-up of genres. Schulman blends light-heartedness and discomfort to create something of a thriller. Those moments of humor are, for Schulman, when all esteem for the art form went out the window. “When I write books, I can’t write comedy. I don’t know why. It’s so sad,” he explains. “Books are divine for me. I can’t soil them by writing comedy. When I started to write a movie script, I had no respect. So I could finally do the things that I wanted to do.” He did show the film to Ruben Östlund, he adds, who told him it was a relationship horror. That feels right for Schulman.

Perhaps a one-two with prolific auteur Östlund is standard practice for one of Sweden’s most famous journalists, but an ensuing Oscar campaign? Now that has stumped the self-assured Schulman. “I can’t even describe it,” he beams. “It’s crazy that I’m now going to L.A. to do screenings for Academy members.” He just about understands the hype: “It’s an arthouse movie, but it’s also quite commercial. It’s a perfect mix. And they test fun, those scenes. But almost all scenes are from my life in some way.”

Viewers will be relieved to know that the last few minutes — in which Schulman delivers us a shocking act of violence — are fiction. Producers weren’t immediately convinced, but the filmmaker was delighted to have final cut on his first feature and insisted that Adult Supervision had to go there.

And now, after its award-winning world premiere in the Next Wave competition at Fantastic Fest and a major screening at Zurich Film Festival, Schulman is slowly but surely relinquishing control. “I’m not nervous,” he says. “I love seeing the movie with other people, just to be there and to see where it works and [doesn’t]. But the last time I did it was in the test screenings, and then I could always go back to the editing room and fix things. And now I obviously can’t fix anything because it’s done.”

He has definitively caught the directing bug and has plans for a second feature (you might not be surprised to learn it’s another story inspired by a trip away for Schulman). With Adult Supervision, at least, this debut filmmaker has a whole nation behind him: “Now it’s the Oscars submission, I can go to festivals,” he grins. “And I might be able to do one more movie.”

Blame it on the rain? Broadway box office dropped by 11% last week as New York suffered a decidedly soggy Nor’easter weekend.

All but three of the 26 productions on the boards last week saw a drop in grosses from the previous week, with the total tally coming in at $24,093,388 (compared to $27,070,361 the previous week). Total attendance for the week ending September 27 was 209,194, also down 11% from the previous week.

Bucking the trend were School Girls; Or The African Mean Girls Play, which performed eight previews compared to the previous week’s seven (it opened last night to excellent reviews), grossing $322,044. That’s up $34,290 over the previous week.

Also up was Paranormal Activity, which had a largely comped gala performance the week before last, moving grosses for that week downward. For the week ending September 27, the spooky play grossed $871,364, a jump of $85,939 over the previous gala week.

But the biggest gain by far was made by Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which saw the return of the ever-popular Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy after a week off. Grosses for his return week were $1,573,469, a jump over the previous week of $607,271.

Top earner for the week was, hands down, Hamilton, riding high with the return of original cast member Christopher Jackson in the role of George Washington (through January 3). The musical grossed a whopping $2,608,571, easily besting runner up The Lion King‘s $1,700,873. Rounding out the Top Five were Harry Potter, MJ ($1,544,512) and Oh, Mary! with Bowen Yang in the title role ($1,458,262).

Hamilton, as usual, carried the top average ticket price at $243.50, with Oh, Mary! second at $204.15. The overall average for the 26 shows was $115.17.

Only Hamilton and Oh, Mary! were sell-outs for the week, although Chicago (with Reece Weaver as Roxie), Hadestown, Paranormal Activity and The Book of Mormon came close, with attendance at 95% of capacity or more.

New to the roster was non-prof Roundabout’s The Imaginary Invalid starring Bill Irwin at the Haimes, filling 94% of seats for three previews for a take of $183,153. Opening night is October 22.

In the 18th week of the 2026-27 season, Broadway has grossed season-to-date $565,480,589, down about 7% from last year at this time, with total attendance of 4,680,491 down 2% year-to-year.

All figures courtesy of The Broadway League. For more box office information visit the League’s website.