
Guernsey's Victor Hugo Centre fundraiser reaches £2m
Les Miserables
Hugo lived in Guernsey for 15 years from 1855.Novels he wrote in St Peter Port included Les Miserables, Toilers of the Sea, The Man Who Laughs, The Legend of the Ages and Ninety-Three at Hauteville House.Plans for the centre include a series of six multimedia interactive galleries focusing on Hugo's life and works.Larry Malcic, chair of the Victor Hugo Centre Guernsey LBG, said: "This is a significant milestone towards the creation of the Victor Hugo Centre that demonstrates the generosity of islanders and a recognition of the benefits that the centre will provide for Guernsey. "The centre will celebrate not only Guernsey's most famous resident, but also the island's vigorous creative community and talented young people. "The theme of the centre is Guernsey as an island of inspiration – the island inspires many forms of creativity today, just as it inspired Victor Hugo in his time."
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BBC News
10 hours ago
- BBC News
Bristol in Pictures: Bristol City flag day, sunsets and A-levels
Bouyed by their opening-day win and blessed by sunshine, hundreds of Bristol City fans gathered in the city's West Street, in Bedminster, before Saturday's match with Charlton to mark the annual ritual of Flag cricketers made it four 50-over wins in a row on Friday night in the Severnside derby with Glamorgan, and the sunny weather has seen plenty of people escape the city for the nearby of Les Miserables got to walk the boards of the Hippodrome stage, and over at the Hen and Chicken it was Improv this and more is in our weekly image round-up from across Bristol. Go West: Bristol City fans gathered in their hundreds to mark Flag Day, the annual show of support before the first home league game of the season. Day's end: As unpleasant as the high temperatures have been for some, the hot days have finished with some spectacular sunsets, such as this one at Clevedon on Tuesday. No drink needed: As some people steer clear of boozy nights out, sober raving is taking off in Bristol for those who want the dancing without the drink. Take us back: It's only been a week since the last mass ascent at the 2025 Bristol International Balloon Fiesta and already thoughts are turning to next year and hoping these sights can be repeated. Four in a row: Gloucestershire made it four wins out of four in the Men's Metro Bank One Day Cup under the lights in Bristol on Friday night, beating Glamorgan by five wickets. Hear the people sing: Nearly 150 local people are getting to live their dream of being on the stage of the Bristol Hippodrome as part of a community production of Les Miserables, which is being staged to celebrate the musical's 40th anniversary. Under the lights: Bristol Rovers took on Cambridge United at the Mem on Tuesday, losing the league cup contest 2-0. Off the cuff: First Wednesdays of the month are improv night at the Hen and Chicken on North Street. This week it was the turn of the Beansville team, among others, to entertain the crowd. Colourful creations: Weston-super-Mare has once again been brightened up by multiple murals created as part of the Weston Wallz festival. To the trees: Ashton Court is the place to be for those who want to get active above ground with high ropes and more at the Adventure Bristol centre. Meeting up: Bradley Stoke residents had a chance to meet with Claire Hazelgrove MP and local councillor Ian Bolton at a monthly coffee morning.


The Herald Scotland
3 days ago
- The Herald Scotland
Eva Victor's film debut Sorry, Baby is a slow-burn treat
Four stars Following last year's handing of the opening night honours to a home-grown film – The Outrun, set and filmed mostly in Orkney – the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) turns for this year's curtain raiser to another story in which a young woman works through and deals with trauma and emotional turmoil. This time, though, we're in the north-east corner of the United States. Sorry, Baby is written and directed by actor and comedian Eva Victor in their feature debut. They also star as Agnes, recently appointed professor of English Literature at an unnamed university in a small, leafy town. Victor wrote the script in Maine and the film was shot over three weeks in Massachusetts, two states which are home to multiple private liberal arts colleges in multiple picturesque locations. Let's assume we're in one of them, close to a beach and a lighthouse (it features, a Virginia Woolf reference). We open on a chapter heading – The Year Of The Baby – and the arrival for a weekend stay of Agnes's former housemate, Lydie (British actress Naomi Ackie). Given that introduction, the news that Lydie is pregnant doesn't come as a surprise. But what starts like a mash-up of Alex Ross Perry's Queen Of Earth (gilded New Yorkers Elizabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston falling apart in a weekend cabin up-state) and pretty much anything by Whit Stillman or Greta Gerwig fast becomes its own thing as Victor draws us through Agnes's story by means of further chapter headings introducing flashbacks to her and Lydie's time as graduate students. The Year Of The Sandwich, for instance and, crucially, The Year Of The Bad Thing. Read more Barry Didcock The Bad Thing is a sexual assault by Agnes's PhD supervisor Preston Decker (the preternaturally creepy Louis Cancelmi). It's neatly and innovatively done through a series of static external shots of Decker's house. Agnes goes in, to discuss her thesis she thinks. The afternoon light fades, night comes on, a shaken-looking Agnes re-appears and stumbles to her car. Then an intense journey home, shot from a dashboard mounted camera. We only learn what has happened when Agnes tells Lydie in detail later, the camera hardly leaving her face as she squats in a bath. This decision not to show the assault (or is it a refusal?) but to concentrate instead on the aftermath, the fallout, the responses (from men and women) and the coping mechanisms required has seen respected film journal Sight & Sound fold Victor into a movement it's calling The New Reticence. Identified fellow travellers include American pair India Donaldson and Eliza Hittman, and Australian Kitty Green, who made acclaimed #MeToo drama The Assistant. It isn't a snappy label, though that's not the point. But into the mix Victor throws an element which should unbalance the film but somehow doesn't: humour. Agnes can't resist quips and one-liners, even when the circumstances seem inappropriate, even when the subject is awful. Meanwhile Victor-as-director is happy to throw their character into comic situations. It's laugh out loud funny at points. In the hands of another film-maker that inciting incident – the assault – would be used to provide propulsion and generate anger. Instead, Victor deploys a deliberately languid pacing in keeping with the overall indie feel. Not all the male characters are awful, either. Agnes meets a kindly sandwich shop owner during an anxiety attack (John Carroll Lynch) and falls into a sexual relationship with sweet and totally unthreatening neighbour Gavin (a welcome turn by Lucas Hedges). So perhaps we should add nuance, subtlety and complexity to Victor's implied reticence. These are strong foundation and bode well for the future. An under-stated opener for the EIFF then, to be sure. But Eva Victor's debut is a slow-burn treat which still packs a punch – even as it poses questions with no easy answers. Sorry, Baby screen as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival on Friday August 15. It is released in the UK on August 22 For tickets for Edinburgh Festival shows, click here


Scotsman
3 days ago
- Scotsman
EIFF reviews Sorry Baby Islands After This Death Redux Redux
Sorry, Baby | A24 Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Sorry, Baby ★★★☆☆ Islands ★★★★☆ After This Death ★★★★☆ Redux Redux ★★★★☆ Zodiac Killer Project ★★★★☆ The Edinburgh International Film Festival gets off to a curious start with Sorry, Baby, a black comedy about a literature professor in her late twenties navigating the aftermath of a sexual assault. Written, directed by and starring Eva Victor, it's a film that deftly deals with the darkness of its themes and understands the tonal juggling act required to pull this off with humour, even throwing in a little meta-commentary by having Victor's character Agnes teach a class on Lolita and the complex interplay that exists between form and content when the subject matter is intentionally uncomfortable. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Sorry, Baby | A24 But acknowledging such things is different from successfully pulling them off and it's the attempts at comedy that throw the film off balance. This isn't because the humour is inappropriate, more that it's so strained and irritating, overly reliant on the sort of cringe comedy that's surely worn out its welcome by now. It doesn't help either that several of the supporting characters border on caricature, perhaps to make Agnes's own quirky demeanour seem less mannered by comparison. And yet the moment the film stops trying to land biggish laughs, pivoting instead to what one chapter heading euphemistically calls 'the year with the bad thing', the film really starts to find its feet. Victor doesn't dramatise the assault; instead the film keeps us outside the scene of the crime as it's happening, then finds heartbreaking, sardonic, absurd and philosophical ways to return to it as Agnes processes it differently over the ensuing years, refusing to let the assault itself consume her identity or destroy her life. The more artful the film gets, the better it becomes. With his cigarette-ravaged voice and going-to-seed looks, Sam Riley makes for a suitably louche gumshoe-in-the-making in Islands, a Canaries-set mystery from German director Jan-Ole Gerster. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Riley plays Tom, an alcoholic tennis coach living an itinerant life on Fuerteventura, spending his days working at a resort hotel teaching tennis to tourists and his nights getting black-out drunk. This responsibility-free life is disrupted, however, by the arrival of a monied British couple, Anne (Stacy Martin) and Dave (Jack Farthing), and their seven-year-old son Anton (Dylan Torrell). Hired to give the latter lessons, he soon finds himself drawn into their world, not quite sure if he's met Anne before (she puts his sense of deja vu down to her former career as a minor TV actor), but curious enough about her to become first their de facto tour guide, then Anne's intermediary with the local police when her husband suddenly disappears. The film's mysteries are best left unspoiled, and in fact Gerster never quite reveals them himself, letting us intuit the deeper connections through Tom's hungover efforts to grapple with who these people actually are. It's an approach that Gerster slightly undermines by drawing the film out past its natural end point, yet Riley's shambling presence, Martin's icy reserve, and the psychosexual tension between them make this sun-soaked slice of neo-noir intrigue a pleasure to unravel. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad There's plenty to unravel too in After This Death, an even more out-there psychosexual mystery, this time revolving around a pregnant voice-over artist who embarks on a lusty affair with the frontman of an arty synth-rock band and finds herself embroiled in the weird machinations of fandom when his ardent cult following start invading her privacy in creepy and obsessive ways. Argentine writer/director Lucio Castro takes his time getting to the freakier parts, spending the first hour instead seeding oddball details about his equally enigmatic protagonists and letting their mutual attraction for each other flourish in amusingly frank ways. Played by Mía Maestro and Lee Pace, their performances certainly help hold this intentionally dream-like film together. Like an Argentine Juliette Binoche, Maestro's Isabel is full of carnal intrigue and mischief, and she's got plenty of chemistry with Pace, all rangy and rugged as Elliot, the naturally zealous rock star whose proclivity for living his life as a piece of performance art has transformed him into a reluctant messianic figure, like Eddie Vedder and Trent Reznor crossed with David Bowie and Kate Bush. It's weird and wild stuff — and the music and score are suitably strange too. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad From Silence of the Lambs to Zodiac to last year's Nic Cage freak-out Longlegs, serial killer movies remain a fascinating staple of the film industry, often an unexpected source of transgressive and inventive storytelling. Redux Redux and Zodiac Killer Project offer two interesting new spins on the genre, the first a robust piece of sci-fi pulp fiction, the second an experimental documentary that doubles as a sly deconstruction of our fascination with true crime as a whole. Screening as part of the festival's Midnight Madness strand, Redux Redux's irresistible high-concept premise involves a grieving mother hunting her daughter's killer across the multiverse in the hope of finding a reality in which she's still alive. That's the sort of juicy idea that can sometimes go awry, but US directing siblings Kevin and Matthew McManus keep things elegantly simple, offsetting their indie budget by rooting it in a recognisable world of diners and truck stops, and explaining the existence of the coffin-like box its protagonist, Irene, uses to zip between parallel universes as a bit of underground tech secured on the black market. We first meet Irene (a forceful turn from the directors' sister Michaela McManus) in the film's grizzly cold open, executing her serial killer target with the brutal proficiency of a combat veteran who's done too many tours of duty. It's clear she's already multiple kills in to her inter-dimensional revenge mission and the filmmakers proceed to take macabre pleasure laying out Irene's Groundhog Day-like purgatory as she encounters the same people again and again in slightly different ways. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad But they also smartly up the emotional stakes by having her save another potential victim of her daughter's killer. What follows is a slick and entertaining old school B-movie that punches far above its weight in both its ambition and execution. Zodiac Killer Project, meanwhile, playfully exposes the tricks of the true crime documentary boom currently feeding our seemingly insatiable hunger for serial killer content. It's the latest from Brit filmmaker Charlie Shackleton, who was, apparently, on the point of making his own entry into this genre with a documentary on former California Highway Patrol officer Lyndon E Lafferty, whose book, The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, detailed Lafferty's investigation into the man he believed to be the never-caught Zodiac killer. After starting pre-production, though, Shackleton lost the rights and, instead of ditching the project, opted to make this film detailing the documentary he would have made — using all the b-roll he'd already filmed, and describing in detail the shots, the approach and the details of Lyndon's investigation that are already in the public domain. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The end result is like watching a DVD commentary for a never-finished film, which sounds pretty niche, but is oddly illuminating and wryly funny. Whether or not Shackleton was ever really in the frame to make a straight-up true crime doc is also part of the fun; if you know his work — his excellent teen movie essay film Beyond Clueless, say, or his future 'lost film' The Afterlight — a salvaged documentary sounds very on brand. Either way, his fondness for the true crime genre as a whole shines through, even as he's exposing how cliché-ridden and problematic it has become. Edinburgh International Film Festival runs until 20 August. For more information and tickets visit: