Palestine
Oslo, National Theatre review - informative, gripping and movingTuesday, 19 September 2017
Documentary theatre has a poor reputation. It’s boring in form, boring to look at (all those middle-aged men in suits), and usually only tells you what you already know. It’s journalism without the immediacy of the news. But there are other ways of... Read more... |
Destination Unknown review - Holocaust survivors go backThursday, 15 June 2017
Destination Unknown is a passion project 13 years in production, a documentary featuring moving interviews with a dozen Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution. Elderly men and women describe what happened to them and their families during the war. We... Read more... |
Speed SistersTuesday, 22 March 2016
It’s a fair bet that when Lewis Hamilton and his Formula One colleagues are driving to practice sessions they don’t have to queue for 90 minutes at a military checkpoint. This was just one illuminating vignette of the daily grind shown in Amber... Read more... |
Crossing Jerusalem, Park TheatreSaturday, 08 August 2015
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not been very prominent in the news recently, but that doesn’t mean that it has gone away. As Julia Pascal’s 2003 play reminds us, religious and cultural tensions can go deep. Very deep. At the centre of her... Read more... |
DVD: Night Will FallFriday, 06 February 2015
The quotation from which this film’s title is taken runs thus: “Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall.” It’s drawn from the voiceover of a documentary called German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey that was... Read more... |
DVD: When I Saw YouFriday, 29 August 2014
Like its title, this film is surprisingly open in its capacity for possibility. It's ironic that this blossoming branch – When I Saw You – is set in the stilted habitat of a refugee camp in Jordan. It’s a sweet film that gets to the heart of the... Read more... |
Opinion: The Tricycle were right over the UK Jewish Film FestivalFriday, 08 August 2014
Imagine an industrial disaster that manages to kill, maim or make homeless a significant percentage of the population of a densely populated city. Then imagine the effects of that disaster for years to come: the catastrophic physical and... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Pianist Saleem and Violinist Nabeel Abboud AshkarSunday, 03 August 2014
Saleem (born 1976), having dropped the "Abboud" from his name, is one of the world’s most individual top pianists: his recent disc of Mendelssohn concertos with Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester is bound to make my “best of year”... Read more... |
Prom 4: World Orchestra for Peace, GergievMonday, 21 July 2014
This was a rare outing by the World Orchestra for Peace, which has performed fewer than 20 concerts since the death of its founder Sir Georg Solti in 1997. UNESCO had designated this BBC Prom as "The 2014 Concert for Peace", the definite article... Read more... |
The Honourable Woman, BBC TwoFriday, 04 July 2014
Janet McTeer has admitted that she had to read Hugo Blick's screenplay for The Honourable Woman three times before she could understand what was going on. Therefore anybody hoping to drop into this as a casual viewer can expect to find the learning... Read more... |
When I Saw YouFriday, 06 June 2014
Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir excels at catching both individuality of character and wider background context in her second feature, When I Saw You. The initial background is a refugee camp in Jordan in 1967, where displaced families arrive... Read more... |
10 Questions for Director Annemarie JacirTuesday, 03 June 2014
In 2007 Annemarie Jacir made her debut feature, Salt of This Sea, the first film directed by a Palestinian woman director. Her follow-up, When I Saw You, is released this week in the UK, after festival acclaim that saw it receive prizes at... Read more... |
