Posts Tagged ‘AppleTV’

Bread and Roses (2024)

Dir: Sahra Mani, US 2023 90′

Breaking news from Afghanistan: the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice has decreed that women’s voices are now considered awrah, a term connoting nakedness or ‘that which must be covered.’

Female voices may no longer be heard in public: particularly by other women, who must refrain not only from singing songs, but even from reciting the Quran in the presence of females. “When an adult female prays and another female passes by, she must not pray loudly enough for them to hear,” the Minister, Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, declared. “And how could they be allowed to sing if they are not even permitted to hear each other’s voices while praying?”

In some areas of the Western press this immemorial edict, only now unearthed by the diligent scholarship of the Taliban (whose name, after all, translates as “students, or seekers of knowledge”), is being called “bizarre” and “absurd”. But it’s perfectly rational from the Taliban’s perspective. For the twenty years in which they were out of office, they had to watch as a generation of Afghan women benefited from a reasonable measure of education and freedom, and aspired to an entirely new range of goals.

The new declaration of awrah is very obviously calculated to mute this group and prevent them from spreading their knowledge to younger cohorts (one suspects that speaking, rather than singing, is the real issue here). A curtain must be drawn across their experience, and the possibility of different forms of life and thought expunged from the record.

Bread and Roses focuses on three women whom the Taliban would very much like to silence. They are representatives of those whose condition improved before the American military pulled out in 2021 (a decision made during the Trump administration, but enacted by Joe Biden) and who are now fighting against the shameless war of revenge being waged by the Taliban against half the country’s population.

Indomitable but kindly activist Taranom Seyedi is forced to leave the country and eke out life in a meagrely appointed safe house in Pakistan: cold, penniless, lacking proper washing facilities, and surrounded by hostile wild animals. “We are the future presidents of our country,” she reminds the women with whom she shares the house. One day this may come true, but right now it seems a far-off dream.

The gentle and reserved Sharifa Movahidzadeh previously worked as a government employee, but is now reduced to the boring pursuit of sewing garments to pass the time and staring out across the cityscape of Kabul from the roof of her family house, where she is mostly confined.

The term “bright spark” could have been specifically coined for the intensely likeable Zahra Mohammadi, who makes wearing colourful clothing and perfume part of her rebellion. Despite coming from a conservative background, she qualified as a dentist and started her own practice, but now the Taliban has closed down all female-run enterprises. Zahra begins to organise activists on her former premises; she is arrested and sees women she knows tortured so badly that they are virtually unrecognisable.

The courage and dignity of all three women is outstanding, but it begs the question – why should anyone be obliged to lead lives that require such massive reserves of fortitude? Why can’t they simply… live, like the rest of us?

The film shows women protesting against the closing of schools, and water cannons and tear gas being used against them. it shows armed Taliban fighters brutalising defenceless demonstrators, and threatening to kill a woman who has been arrested for continuing to speak. If the moral imbecility of all this isn’t enough, a few simple statistics illustrate the insanity of the regime on a merely practical level.

Afghanistan has the highest fertility rate in Asia, with 4.5 children being born on average to every Afghan woman. The current population (around 35 million) is estimated to reach 47 million by 2025, and 76 million by 2050.
The country’s Gross Domestic Product declined by more than a quarter in 2021 and 2022, and there’s no sign of any significant recovery on the horizon.
Meanwhile the rate of participation in the labour force among males is 69.1%.
Among females, it’s 4.8%.

But it would be wrong to think that disaster is inevitable, or even that the Taliban are the natural rulers of Afghanistan: a highly complex nation riven with tribal and ethnic divisions. Their first period of control lasted just five years, and one can only hope that their second will not only be shorter, but also their last. Bread and Roses is an important document, and it should be seen.
@_i_a_n_l_o_n_g_

In selected UK cinemas | Apple+ TV | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN EYE 2023

The New Look (2024) Apple TV+

Dir: Todd A Kessler | Cast Juliette Binoche, Ben Mendelssohn, John Malkovich | Drama series 2024

A slick new series on Apple sashays back to fashionable post war Paris emerging from German occupation and in need of a fashion boost

In an all star International cast Juliette Binoche is the biggest surprise. She is English speaking Coco Chanel alongside Ben Mendelssohn as Christian Dior. John Malkovich is Lelong Balmain

Bristling with intrigue the series cleverly combines wartime thriller elements with a more lightweight look at the birth of haute couture in a shocking story of how fashion icon Christian Dior and his contemporaries including Coco Chanel, Pierre Balmain, and Cristobal Balenciaga navigated the horrors of World War II and launched modern fashion.

The New Look is filmed exclusively in Paris by Todd A Kessler and will make its global debut on Apple TV+ with the first three episodes onWednesday 14th February 2024, followed by new episodes weekly

On Apple TV+, followed by one episode every Wednesday through April 2024

 

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020) Apple TV

Dir: Werner Herzog | Doc 97′

Close encounters of the cosmic kind are the focus of Werner Herzog’s latest documentary as he joins up again with volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer (Into the Inferno) for a peripatetic odyssey into the world of asteroids and meteorites that could fall to Earth and one day destroy us. Captured on the pristine camerawork of Herzog’s

collaborator Richard Blanchard, whose wizardry makes this all the more astounding.

Arcane and sometimes darkly amusing in its fervent boy’s own adventure style of cosmology – you wonder whether Ulrich Seidl has been involved – this is another of Herzog’s mammoth undertakings and the protagonists get very excited about their subject, often waxing lyrical – in the case of the ‘Brothers of the Stone’: “meteorites have a meaning and it’s up to us to interpret what this is”.

Werner Herzog is obviously deeply worried but remains chipper while communicating his concern about this planetary devastation through a series of eager talking heads compered by Oppenheimer himself. There is Bavarian four-times cancer surviver Jan Braly Kihle (straight out of Im Keller), Jon Larsen, a Norwegian violinist with a penchant for cosmic dust (“Cosmic dust looks eternity in the eye, it is the oldest thing that exists on earth”); Brother Guy Consolmagno, a jolly Jesuit astronomer who heads up the Vatican Observatory; and Paul Steinhardt an expert in natural ‘quasicrystal’ whose field experience had hitherto not extended beyond the lawns of Princeton University but he bravely undertakes to locate and prove these crystals had actually been formed in space.

But the principle concern of Fireball is the exploration of things that fall from space, and the myriad artistic rituals and myths associated with these “visitors from darker worlds”. In tones that can only be described as conspiratorial and febrile, Herzog delivers a killer statement: “We do not know what in the future is coming at us, eventually destroying us” but “untold numbers are still on their way.”

Although Fireball may at first seem rather glib and ridiculous the film soon takes on a more contemplative vibe laced with moments of sheer joy and wonder – visually speaking. We visit no fewer than 17 of the planet’s most remote  geographic corners, not to mention university laboratories and  government facilities. In Mecca we experience the religious fervour when pilgrims are able to touch the famous Black Stone in the Kaaba (here Herzog relies on footage from ‘a believer’). In Mexico (where people believe that shooting stars transport the souls of the departed) we join a Mayan ceremonial procession featuring a fireball on the famous Day of the Dead. But most impressive of all are the sites where asteroids have actually wreaked palpable damage. An enormous crater in Australia has inspired local native aboriginal artist Katie Darkie to create some highly colourful paintings. And according to local folklore another 300 asteroid purportedly fell on a field in Alsace back in 1492. But the most extraordinary comes later.

Occasionally even Oppenheimer seems fazed by the boyish enthusiam of the experts, especially one who hands him a meteorite called ‘The Dog House’ that apparently fell on a dog’s kennel in Costa Rica (luckily the dog lived to bark again). Apparently heavier meteorites landed in the same region the ground underneath was totally destroyed and turned to glass: “if you were sitting there having a cup of tea, you would undoubtedly be turned to glass” he reflects joyfully. Elsewhere in the same Arizona facility, Oppenheimer gets rather flirty when he meets a highly attractive female meteor expert who giggles excitedly when he points out that some of the samples look like the work of Barbara Hepworth. “We’re all stardust – eventually”; she retorts, and at this point Herzog cannot help joining in the cheeky banter.

In a crater in Rajasthan – near to 11th century Hindu Temples — geochemist Nita Sahai comments that meteorites actually contain protein. “What do you think of Panspermia?” asks Oppenheimer rather sheepishly. Nita answers gamely that Shiva is a god of both creation and destruction in the Hindu religion.

Narrating, Herzog judiciously keeps a firm control on pacing, cutting away from experts who are getting over-excited. From India we move to Chicxulub Puerto on the Yucatan Peninsula, where the most cataclysmic asteroid hit ever occurred over 66 million years ago leaving a hole 30 kilometres deep. Although dinosaurs were destroyed in the event, mammals made it through the catastrophe and were able to regroup – although the crater was not discovered until the 70s.

What is certain is that “a big one is going to hit us fairly soon”. That’s the view of a couple of scientists in Maui who have got it covered when it comes to watching out for these ‘unwelcome visitors’, using telescopes equipped with the world’s largest digital cameras. Luckily NASA is also active in this regard with their Planetary Defence Coordination Office responsible for letting us all known when the moment of doom finally arrives.

Fireball includes footage from recent feature films picturing the arrival of unwelcome celestial visitors and a final sequence that sees Herzog back on top form as a master documentarian in a film that needs to be seen to be believed. MT

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