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Eurovision 2009 winner, world-famous singer-composer Alexander Rybak will perform at the Heydar Aliyev Palace in Baku, on February 28-29.

Azerbaijan's Honored Artist Sabina Babayeva will join Alexander Rybak on stage.

Belarusian-born Alexander Rybak became a household name across Europe after winning the Grand Final of the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest for Norway with the song Fairytale.

Fairytale went on to top the charts in many European countries, and the follow-up album, Fairytales, was released in 25 countries.

Since his Eurovision victory, Alexander has been touring both at home and abroad and has been involved in a series of different musical projects. He appeared at the Grand Final of the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest participating as part of the interval act in Stockholm. He wrote and composed That’s How You Write A Song, his entry for the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest.

The Azerbaijani short feature film “The Key” is slated to be featured in the short films program at the 16th Sofia MENAR Film Festival, scheduled to be held in Bulgaria from January 12-18, 2024.

The program also showcases films from countries including Japan, the USA, Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and Pakistan.

Having premiered at the 14th Go Short International Short Film Festival in the Kingdom of the Netherlands in April 2023, where it qualified for consideration by prestigious awards such as the Oscars, BAFTA, and European Film Awards, "The Key" has since represented Azerbaijan at international festivals worldwide.

Produced jointly by "OB Film" and "Epic Production", the film tells the story of Umid, a man who has safeguarded the keys - the last relic and symbol of his occupied house in Karabakh - for 26 years.

The scriptwriter and production director is Elshad Aliyev (ELsevər), with Javid Orujlu (Delee) as the cinematographer, Arif Niftiyev as the set designer, Elshad Rahimov as the editing director, Mehman Nadirov as the sound director, Orkhan Behbid, Senur Ahadov and Matin Alakbarli as the producers.

Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic “Oppenheimer” dominated the 81st Golden Globes, winning five awards including best drama, while Yorgos Lanthimos’ Frankenstein riff “Poor Things” pulled off an upset victor over “Barbie” to triumph in the best comedy or musical category, Report informs via the Associated Press.

If awards season has been building toward a second match-up of Barbenheimer, this round went to “Oppenheimer.” The film also won best director for Nolan, best drama actor for Cillian Murphy, best supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr. and for Ludwig Göransson’s score.

“I don’t think it was a no-brainer by any stretch of the imagination to make a three-hour talky movie — R-rated by the way — about one of the darkest developments in our history,” said producer Emma Thomas accepting the night’s final award and thanking Universal chief Donna Langley.

Along with best comedy or musical, “Poor Things” also won for Emma Stone’s performance as Bella, a Victorian-era woman experiencing a surreal sexual awakening.

“I see this as a rom-com,” said Stone. “But in the sense that Bella falls in love with life itself, rather than a person. She accepts the good and the bad in equal measure, and that really made me look at life differently.”

Lily Gladstone won best actress in a dramatic film for Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Gladstone, who began her speech speaking the language of her native tribe, Blackfeet Nation, is the first Indigenous winner in the category.

“This is a historic win,” said Gladstone. “It doesn’t just belong to me.”

The Globes were in their ninth decade but facing a new and uncertain chapter. After a tumultuous few years of scandal, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was dissolved, leaving a new Globes, on a new network (CBS), to try to regain its perch as the third biggest award show of the year, after the Oscars and Grammys. Even the menu (sushi from Nobu) was remade.

Honored Artist of the Republic of Azerbaijan Aygun Humbatova (Beyler) has died at the age of 48, the Ministry of Culture told AZERTAC.

"The Ministry of Culture and the entire cultural community express profound sadness at the passing of Aygun Humbatova (Beyler) in the Turkish capital of Ankara. We extend our deepest condolences to the family and relatives of the late artist. May Allah rest her soul in peace!" the ministry said.

At least 41 historical artifacts of Anatolian origin illegally taken out of Türkiye are being returned to the country from the US, Anadolu Agency reports.

According to the Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry, new additions have been made to the cultural assets that have been returned to Türkiye since 2021, with the cooperation and joint efforts over the past five years between the ministry and the US Manhattan District Attorney's Office.

Türkiye’s Deputy Culture and Tourism Minister Gokhan Yazgi and an accompanying delegation received the artifacts at the Turkish House in New York.

At the handover ceremony, Yazgi said that a "hard-working and dedicated team" within the relevant institutions of the two countries has been in constant contact for five years to prevent the smuggling of cultural assets.

"This team both corrects the mistakes made in time by ensuring the return of artifacts that were smuggled out of the country illegally and contributes positively to the international image of the US in this field," he said.

Reyhan Ozgur, the Turkish Consul General in New York, also expressed his gratitude to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, saying: "The return of these smuggled historical artifacts symbolizes the importance of correcting the mistakes made in the past."

Turkish Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, for his part, said on X: “We have received at the Turkish House in New York another group of our artifacts which were illegally taken from our country.”

“As a result of successful collaboration with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation unit, a total of 41 cultural assets, including bronze heads, busts and silver figurines, are returning home,” he said.

The total number of artifacts returned to Türkiye has reached 30,059, he added.

The artworks are planned to be brought to Türkiye at the end of the month.

At the headquarters of the Parliamentary Assembly of Turkic States (TURKPA), President of the Turkic Culture and Heritage Foundation Aktoty Raimkulova has met with TURKPA Secretary General Mehmet Sureyya Er.

Expressing gratitude for the invitation, Aktoty Raimkulova first of all congratulated the Republic of Türkiye on the 100th anniversary of its Republic Day. At the meeting, the president of the organization spoke about the activities of the Foundation, which implements projects aimed at protecting, studying and popularizing the rich culture and heritage of the Turkic world, strengthening historical and cultural ties between the Turkic peoples.

By emphasizing the existing cooperation between the Turkic Culture and Heritage Foundation and the Parliamentary Assembly of Turkic States, Aktoty Raimkulova expressed confidence in the further expansion of partnerships between organizations in the field of protection and promotion of culture and heritage of the Turkic world.

The meeting ended with an exchange of views on issues of mutual interest, as well as the implementation of joint projects discussion.

The multinational cultural element of "Craftsmanship of Mother of Pearl Inlay," jointly prepared by Azerbaijan and Türkiye was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) of Humanity in the 18th session of the Committee for Safeguarding of ICH, Report informs.

According to the National Commission of Azerbaijan for UNESCO, now Azerbaijan has 23 elements on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity:

- Art of illumination: Təzhib/Tazhib;
- Iftar and its socio-cultural traditions;
- Craftsmanship and performing art of balaban/mey;
- Craftsmanship of mother of pearl inlay.

An exhibition of Kazakh artists’ works and a gala concert of the country's masters of art have been organized at the Heydar Aliyev Center as part of the Days of Culture of the Republic of Kazakhstan in Azerbaijan.

Addressing the event, Kazakh Minister of Culture and Information Aida Balayeva noted that the exhibition is a visualization of the revival of two peoples, who are proud of their common roots and great past, who build a worthy future with joint efforts, and who aspire to peace and prosperity not only in their own countries, but throughout the region.

“I am confident that today's exhibition will fulfill the mission of spiritual rapprochement of the two fraternal peoples,” Balayeva emphasized.

Then the guests viewed the rich exposition of the exhibition. During the meeting, Speaker of Azerbaijan’s Milli Majlis Sahiba Gafarova was presented with a carpet depicting the Azerbaijani poetess, daughter of the last Karabakh Khan Khurshidbanu Natavan.

The event continued with a gala-concert with participation of Azerbaijan’s Minister of Culture Adil Karimli, Speaker of the Milli Majlis Sahiba Gafarova, Chairman of the Caucasian Muslims Office Sheikhulislam Allahshukur Pashazade, MPs, ambassadors as well as cultural figures of Azerbaijan.

No year-end best-movie list is definitive, because no year of movie going experience can be reduced to bullet points—nor should it be. Particularly now, when we can watch so many new movies without leaving our homes, the experience of watching has changed drastically, and in ways we may never be able to fully reckon with, according to Time magazine. When you finish watching a movie at home, you may still be thinking about it as you tee another one up, or head off to bed, or patter into the kitchen to make a sandwich. But a movie watched in a theater, in the company of other human beings, takes up space in a different way. As you drive away, or head to the bus or subway, a great movie—or even a terrible one—follows you. It expands to fill the air, rather than shrinking back into a little box. This is the space in which its greatness, or the overwhelming force of its mediocrity, is fully revealed to you.

You can watch a great movie at home and fully acknowledge its greatness: after all, streaming older movies, or watching them on physical media, is how most of us learn about movie history. But a year of new movies, whether you watch them at home or not, should be much more expansive than your living room. Following are 10 movies—plus a large handful of honorable mentions—that kept me thinking in the hours, days, and months after I watched them. These are the movies that followed me home.

10. Passages

It’s impossible to get through life without messing a few things up. But how much messing up is too much? At the center of Ira Sachs’ sometimes funny but also piercing Passages is a self-centered filmmaker, played in a dazzling performance by Franz Rogowski, who windmills through life with reckless disregard for the feelings of those around him, including his husband (Ben Whishaw) and the young woman who has temporarily entranced him (Adèle Exarchopoulos). At best, he’s exasperating; at worst, he inflicts deep and lasting pain. And still, you feel something for him. His electricity is also his curse, and as this love triangle unfolds, it may leave you feeling the charge and the anguish all at once.

9. Dreamin' Wild

There are two types of people in the world: those who view rock’n’roll dreams as small things you eventually grow out of and those who never stop living them, even if they confine their dream time to the spiral grooves of sides A and B. Bill Pohlad’s Dreamin’ Wild—based on real-life events, and starring Casey Affleck and Walton Goggins—is for the second group, a story about what happens when two people who sought pop stardom as teenagers get a second chance in middle age. Music can mean a lot in one lifetime: it can break dreams, but it can also mend them.

8. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

Movies dealing with the specifics of women’s experience are still a relative rarity on the movie landscape. How many studio execs are going to leap at the chance to finance a film about the onset of menses and—by suggestion—its lunar twin, menopause? Featuring a superb cast (including Rachel McAdams, Benny Safdie, and Abby Ryder Fortson), Kelly Fremon Craig’s adaptation of Judy Blume’s 1970 coming-of-age classic is largely about the confusion of adolescence—but also, more subtly, it addresses what it means for women to say goodbye to all that as they hit middle age. This is a great movie for young people, but maybe even a better one for those who find themselves look-ing through the far end of the telescope.

7. Killers of the Flower Moon

To watch Lily Gladstone (above) in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is to recapture a thread of history that has, until recently, eluded most of us. Scorsese has made a somber, poetic adaptation of David Grann’s account of how a group of greedy white men systematically murdered members of the Osage Nation in early 1920s Oklahoma. As Mollie Burkhart, a rich Osage woman whose family was gradually killed off around her, Gladstone gives face to a million stories that have been conveniently forgotten in modern America. Scorsese’s mournful epic also features bigger movie stars, like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. But Gladstone’s Mollie is the soul of his film, and he knows it.

6. Past Lives

In writer-director Celine Song’s stirring debut film, a Korean immigrant who has built a life for herself in Toronto and New York (Greta Lee) reconnects with the childhood friend she left behind years ago (Teo Yoo); her husband (John Magaro) stands by, a witness to the subterranean crackle of their connection. In any life, there are an infinite number of roads not taken—we can be on only one road at a time. Song’s movie is all about the mournful beauty of missed opportunities, a recognition of the truth that yearning is part of life. Without it, all we’re left with is false certainty, perhaps the greatest dishonesty of all.

5. Revoir Paris

The brother of French writer-director Alice Winocour survived the 2015 terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris; unable to communicate with him as he hid, she had to wait to hear if he'd made it out alive. In Revoir Paris, Virginie Efira gives a shattering performance as a woman who survives a similar, but fictional, attack—though the meaning of survival here is complex. Efira’s Mia can’t recall much of the horrific event; the experience was too traumatic. But over time, she finds her way back to life, and to feeling, by connecting with others whose lives were also broken by the tragedy. Without preciousness or platitudes, Winocour and Efira plumb the stark and sometimes painful truth of what it means to commit to the world of the living.

4. Priscilla

Elvis is everywhere, even 46 years after his death. But what about Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, the woman he met when he was a 24-year-old soldier stationed in Germany and she was just a girl of 14? Sofia Coppola’s film, adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, brings this story to the screen with infinite tenderness. Jacob Elordi plays Elvis, a great artist and a messed-up man who mistreated the woman he loved most. But the movie belongs to Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla, preternaturally self-possessed as a young teenager but both wiser and more resilient by age 27, when her marriage to royalty ended. Spaeny walks us through this extraordinary but also painful span of time in one woman’s life, one satin-slipper step after another.

3. The Zone of Interest

The everyday things many of us want and need—plenty of food, marital companionship, a safe and comfortable home —are the same things German SS officer Rudolf Höss, the longtime commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig wanted for themselves and their family. In Jonathan Glazer’s ghostly, ice-cold film—adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel—Sandra Hüller plays Hedwig, who runs her household with starched-linen efficiency, vaguely cognizant of the horrors being perpetrated beyond her garden walls but viewing them as an annoyance rather than an atrocity. Christian Friedel’s Höss is highly inventive when it comes to pleasing the higher-ups; his ideas are a fuel for evil. The Zone of Interest isn’t just a semi-fictionalized view of history. It’s also a story for the here and now—a reminder that happiness built on the suffering of others is no kind of happiness at all.

2. Maestro

Pledging your life to another person is not for the faint of heart. Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, less a biopic than a window into a complex, passionate marriage, is a modern rarity: an example of a starry, big-ticket production put to use in telling a truly grownup story. Cooper stars as conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, complicated and charismatic as both an artist and a man. Carey Mulligan gives one of the finest performances of the year, a portrait of both steeliness and human fragility, as the Costa Rican–Chilean actor Felicia Montealegre, who became Bernstein’s wife and the mother of his three children. This is grand-scale filmmaking that’s also bracingly intimate.

1. Fallen Leaves

A tentative romance between a woman who’s making the best of dreary workaday life (Alma Pöysti) and a metalworker whose perpetual drunkenness keeps him underemployed (Jussi Vatanen), plus a dog who helps his human bridge the expanse between loneliness and the contentment of solitude: those are the main ingredients of Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, and he works magic with them. Kaurismäki is the master of the deadpan humanist comedy, the type of picture that people may think of as merely odd or charming. Yet so much of life is made up of little revelations that form the core of who we are. This is Kaurismäki’s gift: to catch those moments, seemingly snatching them from the wind, and put them onscreen so that we, too, will know them when we see them.

A new enormous multimillion-dollar art storage—with a total floor area of one million square feet—is now being built next to South Korea’s Incheon International Airport as the country eyes the crown of Asia’s art hub amid local market expansion, according to Artnet News.

Tentatively called Arshexa Freeport, the project is developed by a consortium led by a Korean company called Arshexa. It claims the new art storage facility will be one of the world’s biggest, consisting five stories including a basement and 138 rooms in various sizes. Occupying about 470,049 square feet of the land under the Incheon International Airport Corporation, the art storage is expected to be completed in 2026 and Arshexa will have the right to operate it for the next 30 years after it opens.

The art storage will have a total investment of $283.3 million, Korea JoongAng Daily reported, and the consortium already involves eight companies. Arshexa has also inked an agreement with Luxembourg High Security Hub, which is adjacent to the Luxembourg Findel Airport, to consult on the development.

Construction is expected to commence in April next year, and the building of this gigantic storage facility is only part of an even more ambitious plan.

“The ultimate goal of the project is the establishment of an Art Hub to turn Incheon International Airport into a culture and arts airport,” Lee Woohyung, executive director of Arshexa, noted in an email.

“Art Hub aims to be an open space where art-related companies and individuals from any country around the world can freely visit and participate, and the construction of this storage facility is the first step of this Art Hub project,” Lee continued, adding that the project will include the building of exhibition facilities for galleries, museums, art fairs, and food and beverage outlets. Incheon International Airport will announce a blueprint and roadmap in the future, Lee said.

South Korea’s art market surpassed ₩1 trillion ($812 million) in 2022, a historic high, according to the Korea Art Market 2022 report published earlier this year. The growth was driven by the influx of new individual buyers, as well as an explosion of revenue share derived from the expansion of auctions and art fairs, most notably the successful launch of Frieze Seoul. However, South Korea accounts for just one percent market share by value according to the most recent edition of UBS Art Basel report.

Storage facilities are in demand in Asia among art professionals; cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Beijing are equipped with such spaces. While Hong Kong is a tax-free trading hub and is known for its smooth logistics, facilities in other cities where tariff is in place are mostly located in bonded areas but their standards vary, according to industry insiders.

South Korea currently has several art storage facilities including ones owned by local auction houses, but they are small, industry players said, adding that the service is questionable.

Lee noted that currently there are not enough supporting facilities such as storage and restoration to sustain rapid growth. But having a secure and technologically advanced art storage facility will benefit the country in the long-run, he added, especially when tariff for artworks is zero in South Korea and works by a living Korean artist or priced under ₩60 million ($46,201) are tax free. For works priced above that amount or not conceived by a Korean living artist, a 22 percent tax is levied on a maximum of 20 percent of the work’s sale price.