Palestine can be funny as well as tragic, as actor-comedian-writer Alaa Shehada showed by helping “open the door of stand-up comedy in Palestine” and commanding a stage with his one-man show The Horse of Jenin.

Apartheid ended 30 years ago but though it underpins the plot of The Moth the play has relevance today because racism is again being legitimised by politicians.

Fourteen years after the kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls by an extremist Islamic gang, and a decade since a theatrical response, Girls, was first performed in London, it’s back on stage.

Many leaders around the world promised “Never Again” after the Holocaust, but the promise has been broken several times, and in the case of the Rwandan genocide the world not only failed to stop the massacres but actively averted their eyes.

English has Cloud 9, meaning happiness. Thais also like 9 - kao. It’s a lucky number, it means ‘to progress’,  and is associated with the late King Bhumibol who reigned for 70 years.

Two new films show wildly different imagined Nigerian lives: one raucous, the other restrained.

The treasures displayed in the mini-Korea blockbuster at the British Museum are predictably and indescribably superb. But the modern works, though less classically beautiful, are worth looking at too.

A 12-year-old girl takes on India’s huge and environmentally destructive illegal sand mining industry in a new film drama, Our Share of Sand.

There are many reasons to see The Friend’s House Is Here.

A play about the Gaza genocide could be dramatic and harrowing or, as several productions have shown recently, it could humorous or fantastical. Palestinian-British writer Ahmed Masoud combines both in Application 39.

I told a friend about The Difficult Bride, a Bangladeshi body horror film in which the betrothed woman experiences disturbing omens such as snakes and snails and weird skin manifestations as she undergoes a series of beauty treatments ahead of her fairytale wedding.

“To be a journalist in Gaza is to be at the heart of hell,” says one of Agence France-Presse’s team of Palestinian journalists who produced on-the-spot reports throughout the onslaught that followed the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023.

“Based on true stories” say the co-directors of Variations On A Theme, but it’s hard to place the film in any category at all — other than quirky.

“Music is for thugs. You have to study medicine. You need to graduate, son.” But refugee Robert has other ideas, and Congo Boy tells the story of his bid to become a famous rapper.

“A feel-good story in a feel-bad place”, declares the trailer for No Good Men.

A Bedouin shepherd caresses a flower and sings to his sheep. It’s a rural idyll. But as he hobbles back to his home the field is behind him and a town veers into view.

No men, no weapons, no politics. They are the rules for the petrol shop in Yemeni-Scottish filmmaker Sara Ishaq’s debut feature The Station.