“In the film, Verna, Pakistan’s most popular and highest-paid actress, Mahira Khan, plays a teacher who is abducted and raped repeatedly by the son of a regional governor. After failing to get justice from the police or the courts, the teacher takes matters into her own hands. Pakistan’s Central Board of Film Censors banned the film for its ‘edgy content,’ which the board said was ‘maligning state institutions.’ But a public outcry, fueled by extensive news coverage and a social media campaign, #UnbanVerna, bore fruit when an appellate board lifted the ban.”
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Dissident Tibetan Filmmaker Gets U.S. Asylum After ‘Arduous And Risky Escape’ From China
Dhondup Wangchen, who interviewed Tibetans about life under Chinese rule for his documentary Leaving Fear Behind – and was jailed after the smuggled film was shown at festivals abroad – was reunited with his family in San Francisco on Christmas Day.
Zentropa, Lars Von Trier’s Film Studio, Had A Very Creepy Workplace Culture (In Denmark, No Less)
“The image of Denmark that travels around the world is that of a peaceful, progressive, liberal, educated country on the cutting edge of feminism,” writes Danish journalist Anne Mette Lundtofte. And Zentropa, founded by Lars von Trier, is Denmark’s international flagship in the media world. Lyndtofte was initially “captivated” by Zentropa’s “militant transparency” – open plan offices, glass walls, outdoor swimming pool. “But, the more I visited Zentropa, the more I saw behavior that made me feel uncomfortable – both as a woman and as a Dane.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 12.27.17
The Year in CultureGrrl: Kicking the “*!%&@” Out of Plan B (for “Blog”)
Once again, art-lings, allow me to offer you my Best Wishes for an Art-Full New Year, along with CultureGrrl’s Top 20 Stories for 2017, in chronological order, with an emphasis on the controversies that we’ve been following and exhibitions that caught my eye. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-12-27
A Book That Brings Her Back Alive
Mary Beach’s Electric Bananas, the brilliant posthumous collection put together by her daughter Pam Plymell, uncovers a writer who has the kind of … read more
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2017-12-27
Credo
I’m not nearly as good as I should be about answering my reader mail, especially during stretches of time when my life becomes more complicated than usual. So I spent an hour on Christmas afternoon … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2017-12-27
Has The Tide Turned On Fortunes For Britain’s Independent Bookstores?
According to new figures from the Booksellers Association, in 2017 the number of independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland grew, rather than shrank, for the first time since 1995. The growth is minuscule – this year, the total number of independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland increased to 868 stores, up one on 2016 – but the BA believes that independent booksellers’ “fortunes are reversing”, ending the yearly decline recorded since 1995, when numbers stood at 1,894.
Why Were This Year’s Pop Music Charts So Scrambled?
“The most obvious explanation was that the newfound dominance of digital streaming scrambled the entrenched hierarchies, elevating voices that had long puzzled or offended gatekeepers. With physical and digital album sales as well as track downloads all in free fall, and hip-hop and R&B setting the pace for streaming, major labels and major stars alike were often left scrambling to earn the honors that once came so easily. Because the rules and norms of this era are still coalescing, the systems could also be gamed and manipulated.”
How Gender-Swapping Is Improving Our Appreciation Of Shakespeare
“We are going to be interested in the dynamic changes in how a play resonates by having this kind of diversity in the casting; we’re going to find there are more flavours, more experience.”
The Role Words Play In Our Brains
“Words are really not so different from sofas and armchairs. They are external objects that do things in the world and, like other objects, they produce effects in our brains and thus eventually, through us, in the world. The only real difference is that, when it comes to what we call thinking, words are an awful lot easier to juggle around and rearrange than bits of furniture.”
How Dance Can Change The Person You Become
“What I know is that dance has made me aware of both emotional and physical empathy. I never fathomed that playing such a wide array of parts in ballet would be a kind of unexpected “cognitive behavioral therapy” that would change patterns in my relation to the real world by forcing me to constantly reevaluate myself and update my perceptions.”
Can Pop-Up Art Clinics Help People Be Healthier?
”You’re doing the art sitting next to people and you start talking to each other. It creates community and is therapeutic in the sense that the hospital becomes less sterile—it gives it a sense of beauty and helps people feel more at peace and connected to others.”