Latest news with #TheCircle
The Courier
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Courier
Ocean Colour Scene duo announce Dundee, Glenrothes and Stirling gigs
Ocean Colour Scene duo Simon Fowler and Oscar Harrison have announced gigs in Dundee, Glenrothes and Stirling. The pair will perform acoustic hits at the shows in November. It comes as the full band prepare to play at Slessor Gardens this summer as part of Discovery Festival. The duo will kick off their acoustic tour at Stirling's Albert Halls on November 13. They will play at the Whitehall Theatre in Dundee on November 18 before heading to the Rothes Halls in Glenrothes on November 19. The shows will feature some of the band's biggest hits, including The Day We Caught the Train and The Circle. Forming in Birmingham 35 years ago, the band have released 10 studio albums, four of which have reached the UK top 10 album chart. Tickets for each show cost £36.75 and can be purchased from Ticketmaster.
Express Tribune
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
From prison cell to Cannes
Jafar Panahi never set out to be a political filmmaker. "In my definition, a political filmmaker defends an ideology where the good follow it and the bad oppose it," the Iranian director says. "In my films, even those who behave badly are shaped by the system, not personal choice," he tells DW. But for more than a decade, Panahi has had little choice. Following his support for the opposition Green Movement protests, the director of The White Balloon and The Circle, was handed a 20-year ban on filmmaking and international travel in 2010. That didn't stop him. Over the years, he found new ways to shoot, edit, and smuggle out his films — from turning his living room into a film set (This Is Not a Film) to using a car as a mobile studio (in Taxi, which won the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlinale). Last week, Panahi stepped back into the spotlight — not through smuggled footage or video calls, but in person. For the first time in over two decades, the now 64-year-old filmmaker returned to the Cannes Film Festival to present his latest feature, It Was Just an Accident, premiering in competition to an emotional 8-minute standing ovation. Prison to the Palais The road to Cannes has been anything but smooth. Panahi was arrested again in July 2022 and detained in Tehran's notorious Evin prison. After almost seven months and a hunger strike, he was released in February 2023. In a stunning legal victory, Iran's Supreme Court overturned his original 2010 sentence. Panahi was legally free, but artistically still bound by a system he refuses to submit to. "To make a film in the official way in Iran, you have to submit your script to the Islamic Guidance Ministry for approval," he tells DW. "This is something I cannot do. I made another clandestine film. Again." That film, It Was Just An Accident, may be Panahi's most direct confrontation yet with state violence and repression. Shot in secret and featuring unveiled female characters in defiance of Iran's hijab law, the film tells the story of a group of ex-prisoners who believe they've found the man who tortured them — and must decide whether to exact revenge. The taut, 24-hour drama unfolds like a psychological thriller. Stylistically, It Was Just An Accident is a sharp break from the more contained, and largely self-reflexive works Panahi made while under his official state ban, but the plot remains strongly autobiographical. Thriller that cuts deep The film opens with a banal tragedy — a man accidentally kills a dog with his car - and spirals into a slow-burning reckoning with state-sanctioned cruelty. Vahid (Valid Mobasseri), a mechanic who is asked to repair the damaged car, thinks he recognises the owner as Eghbal, aka Peg-Leg, his former torturer. He kidnaps him, planning to bury him alive in the desert. But he can't be sure he's got the right man, because he was blindfolded during his internment. "They kept us blindfolded, during interrogation or when we left our cells," Panahi recalls of his time in prison. "Only in the toilet could you remove the blindfold." Seeking reassurance, the mechanic reaches out to fellow prisoners for confirmation. Soon Vahid's van is packed with victims seeking revenge on the man who abused them for nothing more than voicing opposition to the authorities. There's a bride (Hadis Pakbaten) who abandons her wedding, together with her wedding photographer and former inmate Shiva (Maryam Afshari), to go after the man who raped and tortured her. There's Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), a man so traumatised and so furious by his experience he doesn't care if the man they've caught is the right guy; he just wants vengeance. "Even dead, they're a scourge on humanity," he says of all the intelligence officers serving under the regime. As the group debates vengeance vs non-violence, alongside brutal descriptions of the beatings and torture they endured, Panahi inserts sly moments of humour and touches of the absurd. The hostage-takers cross paths with Eghbal's family, including his heavily pregnant wife, and suddenly find themselves rushing her to the hospital to give birth. Afterwards, as is tradition in Iran, Vahid heads to a bakery to buy everyone pastries. "All these characters that you see in this film were inspired by conversations that I had in prison, by stories people told me about the violence and the brutality of the Iranian government, violence that has been ongoing for more than four decades now," says Panahi. "In a way, I'm not the one who made this film. It's the Islamic Republic that made this film, because they put me in prison. Maybe if they want to stop us being so subversive, they should stop putting us in jail." No escape, no exile Despite a career defined by resistance, Panahi insists he's simply doing the only thing he knows how. "During my 20-year ban, even my closest friends had given up hope that I would ever make films again," he said at the Cannes press conference for It Was Just An Accident. "But people who know me know I can't change a lightbulb. I don't know how to do anything except make films". While many Iranian filmmakers have fled into exile - including Panahi's close friend Mohammad Rasoulof, director of the Oscar-nominated The Seed of the Sacred Fig, who now lives in Berlin — Panahi says he has no plans to join them. "I'm completely incapable of adjusting to another society," he says. "I had to be in Paris for three and a half months for post-production, and I thought I was going to die." In Iran, he explained, filmmaking is a communal act of improvisation and trust. "At 2AM I can call a colleague and say: 'That shot should be longer.' And he'll come join me and we'll work all night. In Europe, you can't work like this. I don't belong." So, even after his Cannes triumph, Panahi will return home. "As soon as I finish my work here, I will go back to Iran the next day. And I will ask myself: What's my next film going to be?"
Cosmopolitan
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Cosmopolitan
Netflix's Sneaky Links: Dating After Dark - Who is Spicy Mari?
Netflix just dropped the most exciting new dating show of the year, in the form of Sneaky Links: Dating After Dark. The premise of the series is simple: six singles check into a fancy motel in the hopes of finding love. But, instead of their potential soulmate walking through the door, they're met with their booty calls, aka, their sneaky links. The show is hosted by Chloe Veitch, a reality TV pro and Perfect Match, Too Hot to Handle, and The Circle alumni, and Spicy Mari, a dating expert. But who is Spicy Mari, and have we seen her before? Here's everything you need to know about the Sneaky Links co-host. Spicy Mari, whose real name is Maricela Soto, is a relationship expert at the Sneaky Links motel, whose role is a mix of dating coach and therapist. She has also appeared in The Love Experiment and Love Allways. She's not actually a certified therapist, but does apparently have a dating certification from the International Dating Coach Association. In her Instagram bio, she describes herself as a "magnetic matchmaker," while on LinkedIn, she states she has a "Master of Communication Management with a concentration in Entertainment Media from the University of Southern California, Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism." She is also the founder of The Spicy Life, a relationship consulting firm, whose "mission is to transform perspectives and fuel connections." On Sneaky Links, she hosts the nightly Link Lowdown. This is where the singletons have discussions about their progress, with conversations focusing on self-worth and boundaries within a relationship. When speaking on Too Hot To Handle contestant Harry Jowsey's podcast, Boyfriend Material, Veitch opened up about her time working with Spicy Mari. She said: "[Spicy Mari] is not one to be f***ed with. She is so good at her job, but she is so direct. She doesn't cut any corners." Veitch also spoke about the pair's dynamic on the show, explaining that she is the "big sister" to the contestants, while Spicy Mari "holds more of the respect title." Veitch expanded: "When she speaks, you listen, and take on her advice. So her aim for being on the show with me was just so that I didn't get an HR issue." Yes, Spicy Mari is on Instagram. Her handle is @spicymari, and she currently has 69.1K followers. Her grid is a mixture of Sneaky Links content, inspirational quotes, sweet family snaps, and footage from her The Spicy Life podcast. Sneaky Links: Dating After Dark is now streaming on Netflix.
Winnipeg Free Press
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Playing the team game
Small Ceremonies is the debut novel of Kyle Edwards, an Anishinaabe writer and journalist from Lake Manitoba First Nation and a member of Ebb and Flow First Nation. Edwards was previously named Emerging Indigenous Journalist by the Canadian Association of Journalists, and is currently a provost fellow at the University of Southern California. (In 2014, Edwards was the Vince Leah intern in the Free Press sport department.) Despite its title, the novel engages with big societal issues through vibrant, colourful characters. The novel takes place in Winnipeg's North End and explores the lives of urban Indigenous people, most of whom lack connection to a First Nation, except for one family displaced by flooding. The book's central characters are Tomahawk (Tommy) Shields and Clinton Whiteway, two Grade 12 students attending the fictional St Croix high school, where they play for the Tigers, the school's hockey team. The team has never won a game in living memory; this could be its last season, as the league plans to expel the Tigers, supposedly due to safety concerns of visiting teams. JEMIMAH WEI PHOTO Kyle Edwards' debut novel features a large cast of characters, each of whom are given an opportunity to speak their truth. The book takes place over Tommy and Clinton's final year of high school as the Tigers battle through loss after loss, getting close to victory but never quite tasting it. This is a symphonic novel with a large number of characters, each receiving their own chapter or chapters, reminiscent of katherena vermette's The Circle, where each participant in a sentencing circle is given an opportunity to speak their truth. In Small Ceremonies we hear from an unnamed omniscient narrator and 13 other characters. It can be difficult at times to keep track of the relationship between characters and the main plot of the novel, the further the narrative strays from the Tigers and their hockey season. However, these other voices provide a deeper understanding of the forces working against Tommy and Clinton. An important theme of the novel is the challenge faced by Indigenous youth from the North End as they attempt to better themselves. Some of the novel's most poignant moments come when Edwards describes the lives of criminally involved individuals and how pressure from others, bad choices, trauma and substance abuse come together in a potent mixture: 'to this day I can hear the cracking sound of his head hitting the ground, and as I darted toward my Corolla he stayed there, motionless and unconscious, and if I could do it differently today I believe I would stay there with him until help arrived. I have to believe it.' Another heart-wrenching chapter describes Tommy's alienation when he visits the University of Manitoba as a prospective student. As he approaches the campus, Edwards writes 'He knew nothing of the southern neighbourhoods of the city other than that's where richer people lived, and that's where the university was. He wasn't sure of the statistics, for all he knew he was wrong, but he was pretty sure no one like him lived out here, they were only visitors made to feel welcome.' However Tommy is resilient, as are many of the novel's characters, and later as he looks down at the Red River from a student residence, Edwards writes 'He had never seen the river from this high before, never fully grasped its size and beauty, how it appeared to be alive. He wondered where it began and why it was coming all this way and where it would take him.' Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. The large cast of characters also provides insight into the various perspectives that exist within Indigenous communities. We see the struggle to fit in experienced by Floyd Redhead, a St Croix student who is Afro-Indigenous. We also get to enjoy a success story via Tommy's sister, Sam, whose academic triumphs provide a needed injection of hope. Another character who is in many ways a success is Pete Mosienko, of mixed-race Indigenous and European heritage, who works at the Tigers' home arena and faithfully tends to the building and the ice despite the disappointment in his own past. As Tommy and Clinton careen through the hockey season, they encounter adults who help them and try to change the course of their lives for the better, as well as others who severely let them down. We see the impact of intergenerational trauma intersecting with systemic racism against Indigenous people, as illustrated by the continued lack of success of the Tigers, season after season. The hockey team's continued effort to buck the trend comes to embody the hopes of the entire community, which are very modest: one win would mean the world. Small Ceremonies The end of the novel may not satisfy all readers, as it feels a little rushed, and Edwards chooses stark realism over emotional fulfillment, allowing 'bad' characters to escape without consequence while 'good' characters pay the price. However, Small Ceremonies is an important and very moving read that brings attention to a part of our city where the stories of the people who walk the streets every day seldom enter the consciousness of those beyond the railroad tracks. Zilla Jones is a Winnipeg-based writer of short and long fiction. Her debut novel The World So Wide was published in April.
DW
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- DW
Dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi returns to Cannes – DW – 05/23/2025
The apolitical dissident director Jafar Panahi never set out to be a political filmmaker. "In my definition, a political filmmaker defends an ideology where the good follow it and the bad oppose it," the Iranian director says. "In my films, even those who behave badly are shaped by the system, not personal choice," he tells DW. But for more than a decade, Panahi has had little choice. Following his support for the opposition Green Movement protests, the director of "The White Balloon" and "The Circle," was handed a 20-year ban on filmmaking and international travel in 2010. That didn't stop him. Over the years, he found new ways to shoot, edit, and smuggle out his films — from turning his living room into a movie set ("This Is Not a Film") to using a car as a mobile studio (in "Taxi," which won the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlinale). This week, Panahi stepped back into the spotlight — not through smuggled footage or video calls, but in person. For the first time in over two decades, the now 64-year-old filmmaker returned to the Cannes Film Festival to present his latest feature, "It Was Just an Accident," premiering in competition to an emotional 8-minute standing ovation. A scene from 'Taxi' where the director is seen here at the wheel of a taxi with a passenger Image: Weltkino Filmverleih/dpa/picture alliance From prison to the Palais The road to Cannes has been anything but smooth. Panahi was arrested again in July 2022 and detained in Tehran's notorious Evin prison. After almost seven months and a hunger strike, he was released, in February 2023. In a stunning legal victory, Iran's Supreme Court overturned his original 2010 sentence. Panahi was legally free, but artistically still bound by a system he refuses to submit to. "To make a film in the official way in Iran, you have to submit your script to the Islamic Guidance Ministry for approval," he tells DW. "This is something I cannot do. I made another clandestine film. Again." That film, "It Was Just An Accident," may be Panahi's most direct confrontation yet with state violence and repression. Shot in secret and featuring unveiled female characters in defiance of Iran's hijab law, the movie tells the story of a group of ex-prisoners who believe they've found the man who tortured them — and must decide whether to exact revenge. The taut, 24-hour drama unfolds like a psychological thriller. Stylistically, "It Was Just An Accident" is a sharp break from the more contained, and largely self-reflexive works Panahi made while under his official state ban, but the plot remains strongly autobiographical. A thriller that cuts deep The film opens with a banal tragedy — a man accidentally kills a dog with his car — and spirals into a slow-burning reckoning with state-sanctioned cruelty. Vahid (Valid Mobasseri), a mechanic who is asked to repair the damaged car, thinks he recognizes the owner as Eghbal, aka Peg-Leg, his former torturer. He kidnaps him, planning to bury him alive in the desert. But he can't be sure he's got the right man, because he was blindfolded during his internment. "They kept us blindfolded, during interrogation or when we left our cells," Panahi recalls of his time in prison. "Only in the toilet could you remove the blindfold." Seeking reassurance, the mechanic reaches out to fellow prisoners for confirmation. Soon Vahid's van is packed with victims seeking revenge on the man who abused them for nothing more than voicing opposition to the authorities. There's a bride (Hadis Pakbaten) who abandons her wedding, together with her wedding photographer and former inmate Shiva (Maryam Afshari), to go after the man who raped and tortured her. There's Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), a man so traumatized and so furious by his experience he doesn't care if the man they've caught is the right guy; he just wants vengeance. "Even dead, they're a scourge on humanity,' he says of all the intelligence officers serving under the regime. Jafar Panahi at the Cannes Film festival 2025, his first visit in 22 years Image: Simone Comi/ipa-agency/picture alliance As the group debates vengeance vs non-violence, alongside brutal descriptions of the beatings and torture they endured, Panahi inserts sly moments of humor and touches of the absurd. The hostage-takers cross paths with Eghbal's family, including his heavily pregnant wife, and suddenly find themselves rushing her to the hospital to give birth. Afterwards, as is tradition in Iran, Vahid heads to a bakery to buy everyone pastries. "All these characters that you see in this film were inspired by conversations that I had in prison, by stories people told me about the violence and the brutality of the Iranian government, violence that has been ongoing for more than four decades now," says Panahi. "In a way, I'm not the one who made this film. It's the Islamic Republic that made this film, because they put me in prison. Maybe if they want to stop us being so subversive, they should stop putting us in jail." Filmmaking as the only option Despite a career defined by resistance, Panahi insists he's simply doing the only thing he knows how. "During my 20-year ban, even my closest friends had given up hope that I would ever make films again,' he said at the Cannes press conference for "It Was Just An Accident." "But people who know me know I can't change a lightbulb. I don't know how to do anything except make films'. That single-minded dedication is what kept him going, even at his lowest. "I remember just before I was given this very heavy sentence of 20 years, banned from making films and from traveling, and I thought: 'What will I do now?' For a little while, I was really upset," he recalls. "Then I went to my window, I looked up and I saw these beautiful clouds in the sky. I immediately got my camera. I thought: 'This is not something they can take away from me, I can still take pictures of the clouds.' Those photos were later exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in no way they can stop me from making films. If cinema is really what is sacred for you, what gives sense to your life, then no regime, no censorship, no authoritarian system can stop you." Jafar Panahi: 'There's no way they can stop me from making films' Image: Janus Films/Everett Collection/IMAGO No exile, no escape While many Iranian filmmakers have fled into exile — including Panahi's close friend Mohammad Rasoulof, director of the Oscar-nominated "The Seed of the Sacred Fig," who now lives in Berlin — Panahi says he has no plans to join them. "I'm completely incapable of adjusting to another society," he says. "I had to be in Paris for three and a half months for post-production, and I thought I was going to die." In Iran, he explained, filmmaking is a communal act of improvisation and trust. "At 2 a.m., I can call a colleague and say: 'That shot should be longer.' And he'll come join me and we'll work all night. In Europe, you can't work like this. I don't belong." So, even after his Cannes triumph, Panahi will return home. "As soon as I finish my work here, I will go back to Iran the next day. And I will ask myself: What's my next film going to be?" Edited by: Brenda Haas
