AP Week in Pictures: Global

April 12-18, 2024

The flame for the Paris Olympics was lit at the birthplace of the ancient Olympic Games in southern Greece. Hardliners celebrated in Tehran after Iran attacked Israel with missiles and drones. Donald Trump became the first former U.S. president to stand trial on criminal charges when his hush money case opened.

This photo gallery highlights some of the most compelling images from around the world made or published by The Associated Press in the past week.

The selection was curated by AP photo editor Anita Baca in Mexico City.

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A fisherman is silhouetted against a setting sun as he fishes from a rocky area along the Beirut coastline, in Lebanon, April 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

Tea garden laborers leave at the end of their work day, in Marioni in upper Assam, India, April 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Anupam Nath)

Photographs of Ukrainian soldiers killed during the Russian Ukrainian war are displayed in the Saints Peter and Paul church in Lviv, Ukraine, April 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

A tanker truck sits abandoned in floodwaters in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, April 18, 2024. The United Arab Emirates attempted to dry out from the heaviest rain the desert nation has ever recorded, a deluge that flooded out Dubai International Airport and disrupted flights through the world's busiest airfield for international travel. (AP Photo/Jon Gambrell)

Police officers detain a protestor during a demonstration outside the parliament building during a protest against "the Russian law", similar to a law that Russia uses to stigmatize independent news media and organizations seen as being at odds with the Kremlin, in Tbilisi, Georgia, April 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Zurab Tsertsvadze)

A demonstrator attends a protest demanding a law to protect the rights of the transgender community outside the parliament Bundestag building in Berlin, April 12, 2024. German lawmakers went on to approve legislation that will make it easier for transgender, intersex and nonbinary people to change their name and gender in official records. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

President Joe Biden, right, and United Steelworkers Union International President, David McCall, step out from behind a curtain to greet steelworkers at the United Steelworkers Headquarters, in Pittsburgh, Pa., April 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Opposition leader and presidential hopeful Maria Corina Machado, who is banned from running for office, attends a rally where she asked supporters to keep the faith, in San Antonio, Venezuela, April 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Los Angeles Dodgers' Mookie Betts, left, is showered with a handful of sunflower seeds after hitting a three-run home run in a baseball against the San Diego Padres, in Los Angeles, April 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

Shakira performs with Bizarrap during the first weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif., April 12, 2024. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP)

A butterfly rests on a flowering Lantana plant, in San Antonio, April 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

A woman visits "Making Sense of Color", a Google Design Studio exhibition in Milan, Italy, April 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Sumo wrestler Jose Galindo warms up during the World Championship Sumo at Madison Square Garden in New York, April 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

A woman wearing a sweet girl cosplay mask strikes a pose during a flower watching or Hanami event, in the Japanese Garden of Bucharest, Romania, April 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru)

Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, center, speaks with Serena Williams, and other guests, at the 2024 Royal Salute Polo Challenge to Benefit Sentebale, in Wellington, Fla., April 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

Norwegian Crown Prince Haakon is seen through the opening of a large leaf while touring a rainforest-like conservatory built of glass and white steel known as the Amazon Spheres, in Seattle, April 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

A bucket of water is splashed on a woman during the Songkran water festival to celebrate the Thai New Year, in Prachinburi Province, Thailand, April 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Wason Wanichakorn)

Allison Polidor, a gun control advocate, is escorted out of a legislative hearing room by state troopers, as families waited to testify in favor of gun control measures, in Nashville, Tenn., April 18, 2024. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

Former President Donald Trump sits inside a Manhattan criminal court with his legal team on the first day of jury selection, in New York, April 15, 2024. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/Washington Post via AP, Pool)

Amateur wrestlers tangle in what is known as Soft Ground Wrestling, in Kampala, Uganda March 20, 2024. The open-air training sessions, complete with an announcer and a referee, imitate the pro-wrestling contests the youth watch on television. (AP Photo/Patrick Onen)

Chairs marked with images of the Bibas family, hostages held in Gaza, are placed at a Passover seder table, in the communal dining hall at Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel, April 11, 2024. For many Jews, Passover is a time to unite with family to eat and drink around what's known as a Seder table. But this year, when Passover begins on Monday, many families are torn on how to celebrate. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator dons a defaced Israeli flag during a protest calling for an economic blockade and demanding a cease-fire on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, outside the New York Stock Exchange, April 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Large cutouts representing Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Indian National Congress leaders, tower over supporters during an election campaign rally, on the outskirts of southern Chennai, India, April 15, 2024. Millions of Indians will begin voting in a six-week election that's a referendum on the populist prime minister who has championed a brand of Hindu nationalist politics and is seeking a rare third term as the country's leader. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

Demonstrators wave a huge Iranian flag backdropped by a building emblazoned with anti-Israeli messages, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024, a day after Iran launched hundreds of drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles in a revenge mission against Israel. The messages on the building read in Hebrew: "Your next mistake will be the end of your fake country.", and in Farsi: "The next slap will be harder.". (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Performers dressed as priestesses attend a practice for the Paris Olympic flame-lighting ceremony, in Athens, Greece, March 30, 2024. The flame for this summer's Paris Olympics is lit at the birthplace of the ancient Olympic Games in southern Greece in a meticulously choreographed ceremony. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

NEW YORK (AP) — The filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is walking down a path in Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, looking for the pond they sat beside while working on the script to the film“I Saw the TV Glow.”

Cemeteries aren’t often the chosen location for interviews but the place holds particular meaning to Schoenbrun. Built in the 1830s on a hillside overlooking New York Harbor, Green-wood is where Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed and Jean-Michel Basquiat are buried. But it was also a rural sanctuary to New Yorkers before any parks were built. People used to picnic here.

“It’s amazing that it’s here,” Schoenbrun says, smiling beneath a cloudy spring sky. “The level of seclusion compared to everything surrounding it is so crazy.”

For Schoenbrun, the draw isn’t the famous graves. Green-wood has for them been a safe haven for reflection and transformation. In their first year taking hormones, Schoenbrun met friends here who, while lounging on a hill, took regular photographs to capture their physical evolution. Schoenbrun’s first in-person meeting with Brigette Lundy-Paine, one of the stars of “I Saw the TV Glow,” was here.

Schoenbrun wrote the film in late 2020, just a few months into their transition. In that fraught moment of becoming, the script poured out in a manic rush.

“I remember staggering out of my bedroom after I finished it and walking up to my partner and saying, ‘I can only do that so many times’ — that level of spilling my guts on the page,” Schoenbrun says.

By the time “I Saw the TV Glow” was nearing production, Schoenbrun was no longer in the same head space. They came to Green-wood to make outlines and rekindle the “early transition terror” that had since passed.

“I was falling in love. I was having a more consistent feeling of comfortableness in my body in a way that I had never had,” Schoenbrun says. “And I was like, ‘(Expletive), I’m about to make this trauma movie.’”

“I Saw the TV Glow,” which A24 opens in theaters Friday, has since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival been hailed as an acutely intense psychodrama of self discovery. In 1990s suburbia, an awkward loner named Owen (Justice Smith) encounters Maddie (Lundy-Paine), a cool, prickly older high school student who opens his eyes to a “Buffy the Vampire”-esque TV series called “The Pink Opaque.” It stars a pair of young women in battle with a supernatural villain named Mr. Melancholy.

Their obsession with the show — particularly Maddie’s — takes on a feverish quality. “The Pink Opaque” becomes something like a portal to another, more authentic self. “I Saw the TV Glow,” radiating adolescent angst and shaking with the tremors of body dysphoria, is to Schoenbrun a parable of pre-transition.

“What I think ‘TV Glow’ is about is the very unpleasant process of committing to throw yourself off a cliff,” says Schoenbrun. “I think repression exists because you kind of know that if you unrepress, there are going to be consequences and your life as you know it is going to no longer be your life as you know it.”

“I Saw the TV Glow,” poised on that cliff of becoming, is at the forefront of a new vanguard for trans cinema. Films like Vera Drew’s “The People’s Joker,” Paul B. Preciado’s “Orlando, My Political Biography” and Alice Maio Mackay’s “T-Blockers” have crafted new movie forms and images that compellingly reflect trans experience.

“I Saw the TV Glow,” though, has been uniquely championed. A24, the boutique indie studio, is distributing. Emma Stone is a producer. Co-stars include Danielle Deadwyler, Phoebe Bridgers and Fred Durst. All of them ultimately responded to Schoenbrun’s unfiltered vision.

“I felt it had come from a really deep place in Jane. It was asking to be connected with. It was like an invitation,” says Lundy-Paine. “It was like: Are we going to completely bear soul, show whole? And we said, ‘Yeah.’ We allowed ourselves to go there.”

Schoenbrun, as they walk the rounding paths of Green-wood, is brightly talkative, self-deprecating and confidently insightful — particularly about their own journey. Schoenbrun, 37, grew up in Ardsley in Westchester. They worked in a local movie theater but were most captivated by the character evolutions of shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Before starting as a filmmaker, Schoenbrun often wrote for Filmmaker Magazine; it recently shot them for its cover. They were married for a decade before figuring out they were trans in April 2019 on a mushroom trip while struggling to write their feature film debut, “We’re Going to a World’s Fair.”

“I was really trying to figure out why I had such shame about making my own art. That was explicitly the goal of that trip," says Schoenbrun. “I was like: I need to figure out why I can work a day job and work really hard for someone else’s thing but why does the idea of sharing and advocating for my own thing feel horrible to me. Internalized gender shame was where I arrived in a very circuitous way.”

Gender, transformation and filmmaking remain innately connected for Schoenbrun. Their film tastes are wide but trend toward, they say, movies that seem impossible and films that suggest new possibilities. The gentle dramas of Kelly Reichardt, the body horror of David Cronenberg and the outlandishness of Tom Green's “Freddy Got Fingered” all come up as sign posts.

“How does cinema, how does art continue to become itself as hopefully human beings are doing the same in their fledging and flawed and destructive ways?” Schoenbrun says, smiling.

Smith, the 28-year-old actor of “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” and “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” was drawn to the odyssey of Owen’s arc.

“Usually as characters get older, they become more sure of themselves. This character becomes less,” says Smith. “It was one of the first films where I was like, ‘I really have to let go.’ I was having this parallel experience to the character who was so resistant to accepting themselves as enough.”

Schoenbrun now finds themself emerging as a filmmaker and as themselves at the same time. The 2021 Sundance premiere of “We’re Going to a World’s Fair,” about about a teenager immersed in an online role-playing horror game, was virtual. But it was still the most public Schoenbrun had been since transitioning. “That was starring in the school play in your underwear for me,” they say.

On both counts, the response has been validating. That doesn't mean that there won't be difficulties along the way. As they walk past seas of graves, Schoenbrun notes the high mortality rate for transgender people.

“You exist in a much more precarious space than you previously did,” they say. “The past is (expletive) you up because of all that lost time and the future is (expletive) you up because you can no longer feel stable in the narrative of, like, I’m going to be a grandparent some day.”

But it would be hard to see anything but liberation and hard-earned self-actualization in Schoenbrun. The doors of self-awareness might be just creaking opening for Owen in “I Saw the TV Glow” but they have been blown off the hinges by its maker.

“It has just been an incredibly moving few years of feeling things for the first time that I kind of knew about or had experienced as a ghost,” Schoenbrun says. “Trans people love ‘Under the Skin.’ I think that’s because of the feeling of finally entering the human race but as this alien experiencing things for the first time.”

An outsider viewpoint, though, might be highly desirable, even necessary for a filmmaker. As our circular route brings us back to the Green-wood front gate, Schoenbrun says they now feel not 37 years old but 23.

“It’s so, so incredibly beautiful,” says Schoenbrun, looking forward. “And I can’t wait to make a work about it.”

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun poses for a portrait on Tuesday, April 23, 2024, in New York to promote her film "I Saw the TV Glow." (Photo by Christopher Smith/Invision/AP)

This image released by A24 shows Ian Foreman in a scene from "I Saw the TV Glow." (A24 via AP)

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun poses for a portrait on Tuesday, April 23, 2024, in New York to promote her film "I Saw the TV Glow." (Photo by Christopher Smith/Invision/AP)

This image released by A24 shows writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, left, with actor Ian Foreman on the set of "I Saw the TV Glow." (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Justice Smith, left, and Brigette Lundy-Paine in a scene from "I Saw the TV Glow." (A24 via AP)

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun poses for a portrait on Tuesday, April 23, 2024, in New York to promote her film "I Saw the TV Glow." (Photo by Christopher Smith/Invision/AP)