Category Archives: Festivals

Alternative London porn festival changes location after protests

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Three-day event makes late move to secret location in wake of row between LGBT and feminist groups

A pornography festival in London this weekend has been forced to relocate after protests.

Faced with the prospect of a picket, organisers of the London porn film festival, which describes itself as “celebrating queer, feminist, radical and experimental porn”, pulled screenings from the Horse Hospital, an arts venue in Bloomsbury. The three-day event will instead be held at a new location disclosed only to ticket holders.

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Solange pulls out of Coachella 2019 due to ‘production delays’

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R&B star was due to do two Saturday performances at the Californian music festival

Solange has cancelled her Coachella performance a week out from the Californian festival due to “major production delays”, organisers say.

The R&B star was slated for two Saturday performances at the festival – on 13 and 20 April – but on Sunday night it was confirmed both would be cancelled.

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Celebrating Purim in Manchester – in pictures

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Orthodox Jewish children in fancy dress and adults take to the streets of Broughton in Greater Manchester to celebrate the annual feast of Purim, celebrated by Jewish communities around the world with parades and costume parties. Purim commemorates the defeat of Haman, the adviser to the Persian king, and his plot to massacre the Jewish people, 2,500 years ago, as recorded in the biblical book of Esther.

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In the Philippines they think about gender differently. We could too

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The labels we give ourselves can be helpful but restrictive too. Let’s embrace diversity by celebrating fluid identities

We were excited young filmmakers, sitting in one of our first pitch sessions, a panel of executives lined up against us. They had flicked through our script, looked at our mood boards and praised our song choice for the sizzle reel (Man! I Feel Like A Woman). Then the question dropped: “Which one of you is the alphabet person?”

I realised I was the only one holding my hand in the air. Then the guessing game began, as the executives ran through the letters – LGBTQIA+ – until they landed on one that gave them some understanding of who I am.

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Musician jailed over girlfriend’s drug death at Bestival

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Ceon Broughton imprisoned for eight and a half years for manslaughter of Louella Fletcher-Michie

A musician who supplied his girlfriend with a lethal dose of drugs and filmed her as she lay dying at a music festival has been jailed for eight and a half years.

Ceon Broughton, 30, gave Louella Fletcher-Michie, 24, the party drug 2C-P at Bestival in Dorset in September 2017. Jurors at Winchester crown court were shown footage in which Fletcher-Michie repeatedly shouts at Broughton to phone her mother but he dismisses her, telling her to “put your phone away”.

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Glastonbury festival bans plastic bottles

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Music festival will no longer sell single-use plastic water bottles in bid to cut waste

With its sea of discarded tents and litter-strewn fields, Glastonbury has become almost as infamous for the mountain of rubbish left in its wake as it is renowned for its music.

But this year, organisers are hitting back – by banning plastic bottles in a bid to stem the tide of waste.

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‘A shambles’: hundreds demand refunds from Fortnite Live festival

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Computer game-themed event near Norwich underwhelming and understaffed, visitors say

Hundreds of people have demanded refunds after a Fortnite computer game-themed festival was branded a shambles.

The two-day Fortnite Live event at Norfolk showground near Norwich had visitors queueing for hours to enter the site and collect wristbands on Saturday. Attendees complained that the attractions were underwhelming and understaffed.

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The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea review – Lynchian psychodrama in the sun

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Criminal undercurrents in a sleepy Greek backwater provide the pretext for a disquieting spectacle of strangeness

A drumbeat of anxiety and impending violence thuds insistently from this opaque, disquieting spectacle from Greek film-maker Syllas Tzoumerkas – who has previously directed challenging films such as Homeland (2010) and A Blast (2014) and was screenwriter on the excellent male-midlife breakdown satire Suntan (2016).

Tzoumerkas’s movie goes out on a creaking limb of weirdness. It’s a bizarre, occasionally almost Lynchian film, alienated and alienating, interspersed – initially, at any rate – with dream-visions of biblical scenes in the burning sun. Its borderline preposterous narrative may simply be the pretext for its tableau of strangeness and bacchanal of dysfunction.

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‘War on festivals’: second New South Wales music event cancelled in a week

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Mountain Sounds festival called off by organisers a week before event was due to take place on central coast

A New South Wales music festival has been cancelled just a week out from the event, and the organisers say it’s “another example of the government’s war on festivals”.

Mountain Sounds festival was due to be held on the central coast next weekend, but on Saturday the organisers announced it would not be going ahead.

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Juliette Binoche: ‘Harvey Weinstein has had enough’

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The actor has said she wishes ‘peace’ to the disgraced mogul’s ‘mind and heart’ and that the time has come for ‘justice to do its work’

The actor Juliette Binoche has called for an end to the public excoriation of Harvey Weinstein and said that the cases should now be left to the courts.

Speaking at the opening press conference for the Berlin film festival, where she is heading the jury, Binoche said that she had encountered no problems in her long relationship with the producer, who has been accused of multiple counts of sexual assault. He denies all incidents of non-consensual sex.

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Mauni Amavasya at the Kumbh Mela – in pictures

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Monday was Mauni Amavasya, the new moon day and most significant bathing day, particularly if it falls on a Monday. At the Hindu festival pilgrims bathe in the confluence of three sacred rivers to cleanse them of sin and liberate them from the cycle of life, death and rebirth

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‘Identity is a pain in the arse’: Zadie Smith on political correctness

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At Hay Cartagena festival author questions role of social media in policing personal development

The writer Zadie Smith laid into identity politics in a headline session at the 14th Hay Cartagena festival, insisting that novelists had not only a right, but a duty to be free.

Asked how she felt about cultural appropriation, she told an audience of nearly 2,000 at the festival in Colombia on Friday: “If someone says to me: ‘A black girl would never say that,’ I’m saying: ‘How can you possibly know?’ The problem with that argument is it assumes the possibility of total knowledge of humans. The only thing that identifies people in their entirety is their name: I’m a Zadie.”

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Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid facing possible subpoenas over Fyre Festival

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Subpoenas for financial information likely include Jenner and firms representing 25 models who starred in promotional video

Supermodels including Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Elsa Hosk and Emily Ratajkowski, are potentially steps away from facing demands to return sizeable payments they received for helping to promote the ill-fated Fyre Festival.

On Monday, a New York bankruptcy judge signed off on subpoenas submitted by the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy of the Bahamas music festival, which collapsed in chaos and discord before it had even got under way last April, requesting “information regarding the [Fyre Media’s] financial affairs from third parties”.

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Online fund for unpaid Fyre festival staff raises tens of thousands

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GoFundMe receives almost $80,000 for Bahamian workers who lost out in festival scam

Tens of thousands of pounds have been raised for Bahamian restaurant workers whose life savings were “wiped out” in a multimillion-pound fraud by organisers of the Fyre festival.

Maryann Rolle said her team worked round the clock preparing 1,000 meals a day for festival staff but went unpaid when it imploded spectacularly in April 2017.

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Fighting Fyre with Fyre: the story of two warring festival documentaries

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The failed music festival has inspired two new documentaries and a war off-screen over the morality of the film-makers involved

Scandal sells, or so it’s said, but few have captured the zeitgeist with quite the velocity as the rise and fall, in April 2017, of Fyre. The luxury music festival – a Bahamas-set Coachella with villas and supermodels, it promised – collapsed into financial fraud and memes of drunk twentysomethings scrambling for Fema tents and styrofoam tray meals, all direct to our screens.

Related: 'Closer to The Hunger Games than Coachella': why Fyre festival went up in flames

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