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Third Star
Third Star - the debut feature from award-winning filmmaker Hattie Dalton - follows four friends in their late twenties, brought together by the terminal illness of James (Benedict Cumberbatch). On one final trip together, camping in West Wales, their friendship is put to the test and each of the men is forced to question their morality.
Third Star Website -
The Hepworth Wakefield
Award-winning architect David Chipperfield’s latest foray into museum design brings his uncompromisingly modernist approach to West Yorkshire in the intriguing shape of the Hepworth Gallery. Home to a permanent collection of work by Wakefield-born sculptor Barbara Hepworth, as well as Yorkshire-born Henry Moore, the gallery also has specially-designed spaces to host the work of leading contemporary artists – with an inaugural exhibition by renowned Irish artist Eva Rothschild.
The Hepworth Wakefield Website
Image c Iwan Baan -
The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam
Set after the brief yet bloody Bangladesh War of Independence, Tahmima Anam’s 2nd novel The Good Muslim, examines the repercussions of conflict through the stories of brother and sister Sohail and Maya Haque, both of whom make very different moral choices when Sohail decides to seek his future in his faith and Maya becomes a crusading doctor.
Tahmima Anam's Website
The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam was published on the 19th of May by Canongate. -
The Damnation of Faust at the ENO directed by Terry Gilliam
Maverick film director, surreal animator and founding member of Monty Python, Terry Gilliam has made his first foray into the world of opera, directing the previously little staged ‘The Damnation of Faust’ by French composer Berlioz at the ENO. We spoke to him about the challenges he faced, and the inspiration that lay behind his extravagant staging of the work. The Damnation of Faust is on at the Coliseum until the 7th June.
Terry Gilliam's Biography -
Prologue from The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam
1971, December
Eight days after the end of the war, Sohail Haque stands in a field of dying mustard. The petals of the mustard flower, dried to dust, tickle his nose and remind him of the scent of meat, which he has not tasted in several months. Underfoot,
the grasses spit and cry; overhead, the heavy-lidded eye of a midwinter sun. He has been walking for days, following the grey ribbon of road that leads south, towards the city. In one abandoned village after another, he has eaten banana leaves and drunk from ponds, kissing their surfaces, filtering moss through
his teeth. On the third day, a farmer told him that the war was
over.
Now, on his way home, he turns the name of the country around on his tongue. Bangladesh. In the distance, he sees a smudge against the flat.
A barracks. He circles the perimeter, his hand tight and moist around the handle of his rifle. No sound, no movement. He draws closer, walking low, his body at ease with
the postures of soldiering, haunches ready to spring, eyes darting to the edges of the vista, the finger hooked, ready. But this building is abandoned.
The retreating army has left its traces. He smells tobacco on
the furniture; he sees their uniforms hanging on the washing
line. He finds their plates, stacked neatly in a corner, their shoes,
pointing away from Mecca. He sees their prayer mats. He smells
them, soap and chalk and shoe polish.
On the bathroom wall someone has written ‘Punjab Meri Ma’ – Punjab, my mother. How these soldiers must have hated Bengal, he thinks, hated the way their feet sank into the mud,
the way the air closed around them like the hand of a criminal,
the mos quitoes, the ceaseless pelt of rain, the food that left them weak, sh**ting, dehydrated.
Now Sohail wonders if he should have reserved a little pity for these men. He feels the tug of an earlier self, a still-soft self: geographer, not guerrilla. In this mood of clemency he decides to lie down on one of the bunks with a half-smoked cigarette. It is the softer self who leads him to explore the room behind
the munitions store, who slides open the heavy metal door, who palms the wall, searching for a light switch – who is met with a sight that will continue to suck the breath out of him for a lifetime to come.
Credits
- Presenter
- Martha Kearney
- Participant
- Kerry Shale
- Participant
- Mark Forrest
