The tug of home, the lure of the street
It’s street versus home in Ish, a coming of age story about a Muslim British Asian in the Bedfordshire town of Luton.
Phone calls from the Gaza apocalypse
Life Support is a doctors’-eye-view of the Israeli attack on Gaza. And what a visceral, appalling view it is.
Israel is off the rails, says brain-fry documentary
‘This film will fry your brain’, proclaims a new documentary, Planet Israel.
Photographer of protest
I was in two minds about the new biopic of Nigerian-British photographer Misan Harriman — exciting shots of political demonstrations but is it a little too adulatory? — until I read about right-wing cultural attacks on him.
How the Zeitgeist helped create Fridamania
Advance sales for the new Frida Kahlo exhibition topped 41,000, a Tate Modern record. At £25 a pop, it will be a commercial bonanza.
From Israel to Canada: yesterday’s soldier looks back with regret
What a tragically sad title for Itai Erdal’s monologue at the Finborough Theatre: Soldiers of Tomorrow.
When the aid worker met the Kenyan activist
What has Florence Nightingale got to do with the post-World War Two international development aid industry?
A Fine Idea joins the dots on the failure of aid
Theatre should make you think, but the Arcola is about to ask audiences to consider a particularly awkward and painful question: if you support international aid, do you really want to change the world — or do you just like the idea of helping?
A hen, a ghost in a vacuum cleaner and now talking canids
Films are getting odder. After a Thai drama about ghosts who inhabit vacuum cleaners (A Useful Ghost) and a people-smuggling drama seen through the eyes of a chicken (Hen), we now have Bouchra, a Moroccan mother-daughter movie acted by canids.
Project Black Planet fights its way through a thicket of jargon
Forget the academic jargon that infests the new blockbuster exhibition on Panafricanism at the Barbican and enjoy the fighting spirit, creativity, bite, diversity, drama and humour on show.
Chicken steals the show in people-smuggling drama
I felt sure that A Useful Ghost - a Thai love story about vacuum cleaners - was a shoo-in for the most unusual film of the year. Until I saw Hen.
A Jewish family, killing Nazis and supporting Palestinians
Is anti-Zionism antisemitic? If you think so, or perhaps have been accused of being antisemitic for supporting Palestinian protesters. Kaddish is for you.
Striking voices from the Asia-Pacific region
Instead of the grimacing Maori warrior or dancer you might expect at Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific, you are confronted at the exhibition entrance by a pot-bellied figure of a Polynesian security guard.
When Third Cinema was a power in the land
One of the glories of London’s mega-galleries and museums is their willingness to put on exhibitions about important subjects that are of interest to only a few people.
Dust to dust: A love story about animated vacuum cleaners
A Useful Ghost is almost certainly the strangest film you will see this year.
A father’s shadow - and the shadow of a Nigerian coup
The set-up is disarmingly simple: “Two young brothers explore Lagos with their estranged father during the 1993 Nigerian elections crisis, witnessing both the city’s magnitude and their father’s daily struggles as political unrest threatens their journey home.”
Try a taster at the Museum of Edible Earth
Museum of Edible Earth is, of course, a tasting exhibition.
Have you heard the one about six Palestinian stand-ups who walk into a theatre?
Six stand-up comedians on a tour of Palestine? You must be joking.
They are. And (most) audiences are laughing.
A British Indian-Pakistani romcom sparked by diabetes
Sweetmeats is an elderly Indian-Pakistani romcom set in London about past marriages, new love, food and diabetes. It’s a delight.
From boy to man in a flash in the Lord’s Resistance Army
“If I invited you to come with me on a journey, a story, will you come with me?” asks Okumu at the outset of Far Gone. Of course, the audience says Yes. But what a journey, what a story.