SHORT SHOTS

Ukraine orchestra plays at contest

The Kalush Orchestra was aiming to “lift the spirits” of their fellow Ukrainians by riding a wave of public support to win the Eurovision Song Contest in the Italian city of Turin overnight. Their entry Stefania, sung in Ukrainian, fuses rap with traditional folk music and is a tribute to frontman Oleh Psiuk’s mother.

Naomi Judd ‘shot herself’

Naomi Judd, matriarch of the country music duo the Judds, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound a day before being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, her family said. Judd, 76, suffered from mental illness, her daughter Ashley Judd said. “Our mother couldn’t hang on until she was inducted into the Hall of Fame by her peers. That was the level of disaster that was going on inside her,” Ashley Judd, a 54-year-old actor, said. REUTERS

Film by Ukraine war victim screens

The final film by Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravicius, who was killed by Russian forces in Ukraine last month, will be shown at the Cannes Film Festival. Kvedaravicius was shooting a follow-up to his documentary, Mariupolis, about the conflict in the Donbas region when he was captured and killed.

His fiancee, Hanna Bilobrova, who was with him in the besieged city of Mariupol, brought his footage out of the country. Mariupolis 2, as it is known, will get a special screening out of competition at Cannes on May 19 and 20. AFP

Actress Joanna Barnes dies at 87

Joanna Barnes, whose many screen roles included the conniving fiancee of a divorced father in the 1961 film The Parent Trap and, 37 years later, the character’s mother in the remake died on April 29 at her home in California. She was 87.