A clash of cultures and class
‘Rice’ throws together an ambitious, high-flying Indian-Australian business executive trying to seal the deal of the century with the government in Delhi and a struggling migrant Chinese office cleaner.
Hope rises as Rhodes falls
Malindadzimu starts as a sharp-tongued Zimbabwean-British mother-and-daughter clash and ends as a drum-beating, foot-stomping spiritual African rebirth.
African women dominate Arcola double-bill
African women dominate the double-bill at the Arcola’s outdoor theatre, and Nigerian and South African men don’t cover themselves in glory in either play.
The relevance of an arrest under the Immorality Act
Is this story relevant, asks Diane Page, director of the revival of Statements After An Arrest Under the Immorality Act, set in apartheid South Africa and revived at the Orange Tree Theatre.
Phones, guns and night-time Yazidi rescues
Sabaya is the first Yazidi thriller. And it has a particularly powerful —and upsetting — impact because it’s a documentary.
Gay asylum: mother tongue machinations
Silent Voice is a claustrophobic, intense documentary about a few tormented weeks in the life of a Chechen refugee whose face cannot be shown and whose voice cannot be heard.
No ‘Wow!’ moment, but an engaging show
With travel still iffy, the Royal Geographical Society’s Earth Photo exhibition offers a chance to glimpse aspects of the world without leaving London.
The twisting road to elsewhere
Lava starts as a migrant’s story and ends as an affirmation of black humanity. Sadly, both migration (“We didn’t have a lot, but had the means of making a home elsewhere”) and racism still need passionate advocacy.
Theatre’s back – and so is a 4,000-year-old epic
Changing Destiny opened its run at the Young Vic with an audience roar. Actor Ashley Zhangazha declared, “It’s great to be back” after 18 months without theatrical lights, and the theatre erupted with cheers and applause.
The waiting game
A small group of men watch resignedly, silently, as a Post Office van stops at the handful of homes on a bleak Hebridean island. An opera singer fills the soundtrack.
Meat, alcohol and women: young Gandhi’s struggle to learn and resist
The Overseas Student standing on the stage of the Lyric Hammersmith recalling his three years in London is Gandhi long before the earned the honorific Mahatma.
Nigerian film with a starring role for Lagos
The Nigerian twin brothers who directed Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) and the two lead actors are the stars of this fascinating film – and so is Lagos.
Old masters and new community curators show the way
Don’t be deceived by the hype: the Dulwich Picture Gallery bills Journeys as a collection of paintings that throw light on the nature of migration from the 17th century to today.
Reflections from the Middle East and North Africa
All is not what it seems at ‘Reflections: contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa’ at the British Museum.
Miniature epic about a monumental journey
‘Flight’ is an epic refugee story on a miniature scale.
A Bhutanese WeChat romance
Lipstick and love songs prove more alluring than Buddhist bells and a quiet Himalayan village life for a young Bhutanese monk in a new documentary, Sing Me A Song.
‘Your White Supremacy, like Kurtz’s, still haunts our modern world’
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a novel more quoted - often misleadingly, to make a contemptuous point about Africa - than read. But here’s a film that gives the book an original, urgent and powerful update.
‘We have been abandoned by every single President’
A crowd patiently waits in the town square for the President who has agreed to discuss complaints about post-conflict development. Finally a helicopter appears – and flies on because the President has changed his mind.
She looks at her sons in anger, thinking they’ll grow like their fathers, ‘that they’ll also rape’
Thousands of civilians around the world are caught in the crosshairs between army and rebels, with one set of armed men raping, pillaging and burning before abandoning the territory to the next bunch of brigands.
‘This film is dedicated to queer Africans’
The opening shots of I Am Samuel encapsulate the dilemma of this documentary about a gay Kenyan couple: its gentle opening moments are shattered by a shockingly violent public homophobic attack.