OVER THE LAST few years, our social world has become so painstakingly aware of the possibility of offending others, that something has been lost in our ability to be candid. This sensitive nerve in contemporary society is explored excruciatingly in The Teachers’ Lounge featuring Leonie Benesch. It’s on […]
IF YOU WERE a god and had every possible human proclivity at your fingertips, on a drawing board, which ones would you choose to embody your most perfect partner? Beautiful eyes? An ability to laugh? A talent for the spontaneous? Large feet? This is roughly the premise of […]
WHEN YOU ARE confronted with the idea of losing your person, you will turn into a demon if you have to. You will break heaven and earth with the hope that these combats may twist the path of the stars. Even if you know that you are just […]
“IF YOU WERE born in Morocco, but only lived there for two years, why do you still consider it your homeland?” This and other myriad, somewhat intrusive and philosophically complex questions put to adolescents are central to Maria Speth’s immersive documentary, Mr Bachmann and his Class, which will […]
STAND BACK FROM Agnieszka Holland’s film Charlatan, loosely based on the life of herbalist Jan Mikolášek (1889-1973) and the grand impression that it leaves sits like lead on your chest. Not that this is a bad – or inaccurate – thing. This intense portrait of, in large part, […]
THE KIDNEY. IT’S the one organ in our bodies designed to function as a kind of ‘spare’. We are born with two, but can survive on one, if we really have to. Hence the idiomatic association that takes the donation of a kidney all the way to the […]
THE IRAQ WAR of 2003 saw the United States on a mission to destroy weapons of mass destruction. It saw the violent death of many thousands of civilians and the start of a bitter insurgency. But it was also a war that from its very kernel was based […]
WHEN A GREAT classic is slipped between the covers of a festival of contemporary film, you may approach it with the eye of a novel ready to embrace its nuances and romances. But you also may wish to switch gear to reflect on its epic greatness and philosophic […]
THE ADJECTIVE USED to describe a persecuted community is dynamite. It can represent the psychological difference between your being able to recognise those someones in the community as people just like you, or “others” that are not like you at all, and therefore have nothing to do with […]
THE HORROR OF being a small child beset with enormous flaws is something that many a writer may attempt to portray because of the challenge of capturing its profound complexity that scoops up the contradictions of being human and holds it tight. Not every writer can succeed. Nor […]
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