Trio step out from behind pseudonym marketed as ‘Spain’s Elena Ferrante’ to accept €1m prize
A million euro literary prize has lured three Spanish men out of anonymity, to reveal that they are behind ultra-violent Spanish crime thrillers marketed as the work of “Spain’s Elena Ferrante”
The men had published under the pseudonym Carmen Mola, which roughly translates as “Carmen’s cool”.
Continue reading...When teenage LA punks the Linda Lindas went viral, they caught the attention of Amy Poehler, Jimmy Kimmel and original riot grrrl, Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, who joins them for a cross-generational chinwag
In May, the US punk band the Linda Lindas went viral with a performance of their no-holds-barred track Racist, Sexist Boy. Written in response to a real-life incident in which drummer Mila de la Garza was racially harassed by a classmate, the song alternates between sludgy punk and brisk, hardcore thrash, topped with cathartic, defiant lyrics: “You have racist, sexist joys / We rebuild what you destroy.” What made the performance even more striking was its setting among the usually hushed bookshelves of the Los Angeles Public Library.
On the back of that viral hit (currently at 4.3m views on Twitter), the teenage Los Angeles quartet – Mila and her sister Lucia (guitar), their cousin Eloise Wong (bass), and longtime friend Bela Salazar (guitar) – have signed to Epitaph Records, recorded their debut album, due in 2022, and released a snappy, and snappily titled, punk-pop single Oh!.
Continue reading...A gift of a camera inspired Belmaya Nepali to rise above poverty and abuse to make documentaries
Belmaya Nepali’s life changed for ever when, at 14, she was given a camera.
The British film-maker Sue Carpenter had come to Pokhara, a tourist city in central Nepal, to run a photography project with disadvantaged girls living in an institution. One of those girls was Belmaya.
Continue reading...Blackmail! Backstabbing! Boar on the Floor! I binged seasons one and two of the dazzling drama about a dysfunctional, super-rich family. Bring on season three!
My to-be-watched pile is worse than my to-be-read pile, but at least all the prestige shows I need to watch have ended. I will get to them, but there is no urgency. Not so with Succession, another award-laden entity, urged upon me by critics and friends. Two series have passed me by and now the third season of the epic tale of media baron Logan Roy and his clan is almost upon us. It is time to go in.
Continue reading...Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, who directed the acclaimed drama, reveals the struggle to portray his community ‘with dignity and compassion’
“I am Somali and I made this film for Somali people to watch a film in their mother tongue without needing subtitles,” says film director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed. Ahmed made his feature debut with The Gravedigger’s Wife, and after premiering in May at the Cannes film festival’s Critics’ Week, it made headlines as the first film from Somalia to be put forward for the Oscars.
“As a film-maker, I felt a sense of responsibility to tell the story of how I view my Somali community and to tell this story with dignity, tenderness and compassion – all the qualities I’ve been raised with,” says Ahmed, who was born in Somalia before moving to Finland as a teenager.
Continue reading...It was the day rampaging Trump supporters stormed the Capitol – and almost derailed democracy. Now, using footage from rioters’ cameras, an unsettling film takes you into the thick of the mayhem
When Dan Reed and Jamie Roberts began approaching networks about a film focused on the storming of the US Capitol – an attack on American democracy on the scale of 9/11, and all the more shattering for having come from within – they were met with a lack of enthusiasm.
“The response was, ‘Why do we need a documentary? Everyone knows what happened’,” says Reed, whose previous hits include Leaving Neverland. It is true the January insurrection – in which thousands of Trump supporters rampaged in protest over the “stolen” election, leaving five dead and 140 police officers injured – had been documented in real time. Authorities reviewed 15,000 hours of footage, making it the largest digital crime scene in history.
Continue reading...(Columbia)
The first single from her divorce-focused new album 30 is quintessential Adele: piano, romantic recrimination, and soaring vocal work
Adele’s statement announcing the release of her fourth album was published on social media earlier this week. In it, the singer doesn’t talk much about music, more about her emotional state during the album’s making, provoked, one assumes, by the breakdown of her marriage: “absolute mess and inner turmoil … consumed by grief”. She compared the album she made amid it to friends coming over with “a bottle of wine and a takeaway” and offering earthy, if astrologically based, advice: “It’s your Saturn return, babes, fuck it.”
It all sounds thoroughly grim, but it also has a hint of reassurance about it for her fans, who come to Adele in record-breaking numbers for relatable heartbreak – the musical equivalent of an old friend in the pub, tearfully relating the latest chapter in their reliably disastrous love life as they demolish a third glass of pinot grigio. For one thing, it underlines that she has fresh heartbreak to write about, which had been an issue with her last album, 25, on which she was forced to rake over the same relationship that had inspired its predecessor for material. For another, her fans might have cause to be alarmed by what the cover of Vogue refers to as “a new look, a new love, a new sound”. How reliably relatable can Adele now be, with her home in LA, her squad of Hollywood A-list pals, her three-times-a-day exercise regime and, the Vogue profile suggests, an employee on hand with a different pair of shoes should the singer want to change out of her heels? It’s a statement that, consciously or otherwise, sends out a message: “Business as usual babes, fuck it.”
Continue reading...The controversial film’s first Tasmanian screening was described as ‘like going to a funeral’. How will it be received in a town that won’t speak the killer’s name?
There were no posters advertising the Tasmanian premiere of Nitram at the independent State Cinema, which took place on Thursday night.
Justin Kurzel’s new film dramatising the lead-up to 1996’s Port Arthur massacre, opened to a quiet, small crowd in the mass shooter’s home town of Hobart. Its trailers were not included in any other scheduling, and the film’s opening lagged two weeks behind its national release.
Continue reading...For 70 years, the ramshackle Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem has been a site of displacement. Why is this ‘heritage of exile’ not enough for Unesco to grant it the status it gives Macchu Picchu and Venice?
The Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem doesn’t look much like your usual Unesco world heritage site. For a start, there are no souvenir stalls or swarms of trinket hawkers. Instead, cracked concrete walls covered with Arabic graffiti frame the entrance to a corner shop, where an old photocopier stands next to a few meagre shelves of provisions. A taxi loiters on a potholed street between piles of broken breeze blocks, while electricity cables and phone wires dangle precariously overhead.
But a new exhibition at London’s Mosaic Rooms sets out to argue that this ramshackle site of mass displacement should be considered worthy of the same protected status as Machu Picchu, Venice or the Taj Mahal. “We want to destabilise conventional western notions of heritage,” says Alessandro Petti. “How do you record the heritage of a culture of exile? When world heritage sites can only be nominated by nation states, how do you value the heritage of a stateless population?”
Since 2007, Petti has been working with Sandi Hilal, leading DAAR, the Decolonising Architecture Art Research collective, treading nimbly between the worlds of architecture, politics and development. For the last seven years, they have been working with Palestinian refugees in the Dheisheh camp to compile an unlikely dossier to submit to Unesco, arguing for the location’s “outstanding universal value” as the site of the longest and largest living displacement in the world.
They had screaming fans and transatlantic hits as part of the 60s’ British invasion – an unlikely result for a band of jazz and blues heads. Still touring as the Manfreds, they look back on one of the strangest catalogues in UK pop
In an office in the middle of Pinewood Studios, former members of Manfred Mann are discussing their EP The One in the Middle. It was recorded in 1964, at the height of their first flush of fame – between the first and second sessions for the EP, their single Do Wah Diddy Diddy had gone to No 1 in the UK and the US. But, in spite of that success, it is perfect evidence of how different Manfred Mann were from their contemporaries in what was then called the beat boom.
The EP features a version of Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man. With the greatest respect to peers like the Swingin’ Blue Jeans, you didn’t get a lot of repurposed hard bop from them. It also features a Bob Dylan cover, six months before the Byrds released Mr Tambourine Man and sparked a trend for taking Dylan songs in new directions. Manfred Mann, for their part, retooled With God on Our Side as a kind of epic southern soul-influenced piano ballad. And then there’s the title track, an extraordinarily early example of pop music in self-referential, meta mode.
Continue reading...Competition opens to find six young creators in sub-Saharan Africa who will be funded to produce movies for 2022
For Nelson Mandela they were “morsels rich with the gritty essence of Africa but in many instances universal in their portrayal of humanity, beasts and the mystical.”
Passed down through the generations, whispered at bedtimes and raucously retold by elders, folktales have long been a mainstay of African cultural heritage.
Continue reading...Skellefteå has wooden schools, bridges, even car parks. And now it has one of the world’s tallest wooden buildings. We visit Sweden to see what a climate-conscious future looks like
As you come in to land at Skellefteå airport in the far north of Sweden, you are greeted by a wooden air traffic control tower poking up from an endless forest of pine and spruce. After boarding a biogas bus into town, you glide past wooden apartment blocks and wooden schools, cross a wooden road bridge and pass a wooden multistorey car park, before finally reaching the centre, now home to one of the tallest new wooden buildings in the world.
“We are not the wood Taliban,” says Bo Wikström, from Skellefteå’s tourism agency, as he leads a group of visitors on a “wood safari” of its buildings. “Other materials are allowed.” But why build in anything else – when you’re surrounded by 480,000 hectares of forest?
Continue reading...Andreas Fontana’s debut feature is an unnervingly subtle drama about a Swiss private banker visiting clients in Argentina during the period of the military junta and ‘disappearances’
Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air. Andreas Fontana is a Swiss director making his feature debut with this conspiracy drama-thriller, shot with a kind of desiccated blankness, about the occult world of super-wealth and things not to be talked about. The title is a Swiss banker’s code-word in conversation for “Be silent”.
It is set in 1980 in Argentina, at the time of the junta’s dirty war against leftists and dissidents, and you could set it alongside recent movies including Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo (2018) and Francisco Márquez’s A Common Crime (2020), which intuited the almost supernatural fear among those left behind when people they knew had vanished and joined los desaparecidos, the disappeared ones. But Azor gives a queasy new perspective on the horror of those times, and there is even a nauseous echo of the Swiss banks’ attitude to their German neighbours in the second world war.
Continue reading...Regent’s Park, London
After decades of fun, noise, fame and money, the London art fair has found its soul. But there’s still plenty of outrage and sleaze at the grown-up Frieze
I was relieved when I finally found the hidden willies. At times, the first post-pandemic Frieze art fair is so relaxing you could fall asleep in one of its classy lounges. So it was good to see Lindsey Mendick flying the flag for subtle outrage. At the Carl Freedman Gallery booth I come across her lustrous, decadent ceramic vases, whose wounded sides spurt octopus arms. Mendick should be on next year’s Turner shortlist if the Tate has any desire to save its dying prize. Then Freedman showed me another detail. From one of the pots protrude penises like shiny wet worms. It turns out there’s sleaze at the new, grownup Frieze after all – you just need a longer attention span to find it.
The art world has looked into itself during the pandemic. And it’s found that art has to be be more than just fun and noise and fame and money … it has to be sustaining. But how does a cultural sphere that has spent decades celebrating shallowness suddenly find its inner light? At first sight, Frieze has simply gone numb with shock.
Continue reading...In a new exhibition, the female abstract artists between 1930 and 1950 whose work was sidelined at the time finally get their space in the spotlight
In 1934, the abstract painter Alice Trumbull Mason wrote her sister, Margaret Jennings, a letter, noting that she was eager to resume painting, which she had temporarily stopped in order to raise her children.
“I am chafing to get back to painting and of course it’s at least a couple of years away,” Mason wrote. “The babies are adorable and terribly interesting. I’m not saying anything against them, but … I can’t be just absorbed in them.”
Continue reading...A new trailer has surfaced for Home Sweet Home Alone, which looks to be a sequel that’s also a carbon copy of an original that doesn’t need bettering
The trailer for the Disney+ movie Home Sweet Home Alone is really quite something. In it, a large and chaotic family tie themselves in knots ahead of a holiday to Tokyo only to discover that, in their haste, they have accidentally left one of their children behind. While they scramble to return to their home, the boy is left to fend for himself – a danger that is only compounded when two sly burglars pick his home to be robbed. What follows is an orgy of cartoonish violence as the abandoned boy jerry-rigs a selection of household items to cause maximum damage to the intruders. Brilliant.
Basically, then, Home Sweet Home Alone appears to exist in order to answer one simple question: what if Home Alone was, um, Home Alone?
Continue reading...Star Trek actor, 90, says ‘I hope I never recover from this’ after becoming oldest human in space on Jeff Bezos rocket New Shepard
The Star Trek actor William Shatner declared himself “overwhelmed” at becoming the oldest human in space, at the age of 90, during a brief but successful second crewed flight on Wednesday of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship from the west Texas desert.
The Canadian, who for four decades played Captain James Kirk, the fearless commander of the USS Enterprise, broke down in tears at the landing site as he described to the private space company’s founder, the Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, the profundity of his almost 11-minute leap to the stars.
Continue reading...First came K-cinema, then K-pop and K-TV. Now South Korea’s young stars are conquering the world with K-art. But what do their dark visions say about their nation’s psyche – and ours?
Ohnim is having a blue period, just like Picasso. Over Zoom from a gallery in Seoul, the Korean rapper Song Min-ho, better known as Mino to K-pop fans but Ohnim in the art world, shows me a painting he finished the previous evening in collaboration with artist Choi Na-ri. It depicts a blue crouched figure, like a depressed version of Rodin’s Thinker. It may be still wet but will soon be shipped to London’s Saatchi Gallery for an art fair that showcases work by three of Korea’s biggest K-pop stars.
The meeting of K-pop and K-art is making the art world lick its lips. Businessman David Ciclitira, who set up the StART Art Fair at the Saatchi, says: “K-pop stars have immense reach through their social media. Guys like Mino, Henry Lau and Kang Seung-yoon, whose work will be in the show, have six to seven million followers each on Instagram. In Seoul, fans queue round the block just to see a work of art by any of them. Then they fight each other to buy. I don’t suppose it’ll be quite like that at the Saatchi Gallery, but you never know.”
Continue reading...The dystopian drama tops the streaming service’s charts in more than 80 countries, bumping aside recent Regency-era romp, Bridgerton
Dystopian South Korean drama Squid Game has become Netflix’s most popular series ever, drawing 111 million fans since its debut less than four weeks ago, the streaming service said Tuesday.
The unprecedented global viral hit imagines a macabre world in which marginalised people are pitted against one another in traditional children’s games. While the victor can earn millions in cash, losing players are killed.
Continue reading...This gorgeous and moving melodrama finds two women in 1950s Rio under suffocating family expectations – and sees what happens when they are defied
‘What do you want from life?” a husband drunkenly yells at his wife in Karim Aïnouz’s gorgeous and very moving melodrama set in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. The man’s wife is Euridice (Julia Stockler) and what she wants is to be a classical pianist. Her husband is angry and hurt: why can’t she just be happy in the kitchen? Adapted from a novel by Martha Batalha, this is the story of Euridice and her sister Guida (Carol Duarte): their inner conflicts and rebellion against the suffocating patriarchy of home.
The film beings a few years earlier: Euridice is 18 and applying to study music in Vienna. Her heart is broken when boy-mad Guida runs away with a no-good sailor to Greece, promising to write when she is married. Predictably, she returns with a baby bump and no wedding ring. There’s an appalling homecoming scene when their dad, a baker, violently shoves Guida out of the house; she’s nine months pregnant at the time (and the film never lets us forget that violence can be done to these women at any time of a man’s choosing). Unforgivably, Guida’s dad says that Euridice has left Rio and is living in Vienna. The truth is she’s up the road, married to an insightless oaf.
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