One of post-apartheid South Africa’s contributions to global culture is an affirmation of ubuntu* – an indigenous concept which emphasises the folded-togetherness of human being. Karen Press’s new collection, which finds poetry in subjects as diverse as Jacob Zuma and the war in Iraq, is mindful of our collective failure to put this principle into Read More
Searching for Sugar Man is a documentary by Swedish film maker Malik Bendjelloul that charts the heart-warming and astonishing story of the Detroit folk singer Sixto Rodriguez. Hailed as the Latino Bob Dylan, Rodriguez was virtually unknown in his home country; but in apartheid South Africa, he was bigger than Elvis. After recording his début Read More
A Simple Life tells the story of Chung Chun-Tao also known as Ah Tao, a maid to the Leung family for over fifty years. While working for Roger Leung, who works in the film industry, Ah Tao suffers a stroke, leading her to move into a care home. During the film, we see Roger’s memories Read More
Sarah Polley’s directorial debut Away From Her (2006) faced up to the story of an ageing couple’s love undone by Alzheimer’s – it dealt in the corrosive effects of time. Take This Waltz is her second film, and tells of a young couple broken by choice – it deals in the causes and consequences of Read More
Alamri: Bismilah. First of all thank you for granting me this interview in your house and thank you for this lovely food. Tislami [Thank you]. Congratulations on your recently published book, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution. Reading it reminded me of your first novel In the Eye of the Sun; I was struck by its Read More
Although there are two “Suites”, of five and eight sections respectively, and a page-length prose poem (“West-Coast Colloquy”), the keynote of this volume is minimalism: short free-verse lyrics, many with short lines. It’s a common form in post-1960s poetry; one which hopes to imbue language with intensity through terseness, and invite us to focus on Read More
Nominated for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize in 2011, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions restores complexity, colour and light to a world which had turned fifty shades of grey. Jacqueline Saphra writes with disarming honesty about sex, control, femininity, gender roles and relationships. Above all, these are intensely personal poems. The first section on childhood Read More
Canadian director Guy Madden has described Keyhole as his most narrative-driven film to date. In spite of this claim, the film frequently dispenses with the sort of narrative conventions that allow a plot to be followed easily by any audience. It is a film that combines seemingly disparate elements such as American gangster films, Greek Read More
A young child goes missing. This is a headline that has appeared all too often in recent times and rarely with a happy ending. Cinema goers might have such a caveat in mind when they sit down to watch Bart Layton’s The Imposter. The film documents the true story of serial confidence trickster Frédéric “The Read More
Following the overwhelming success of Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning film A Separation in 2011, an earlier and much more quiet Farhadi film, About Elly, has now gained a UK release; and I am personally thrilled that it has. The plot revolves around a group of middle-class friends who reunite on a beach holiday which Sepideh (Golshifteh Read More