‘I don’t buy and sell human beings,’ says Rick to the rival club owner hoping to get the pianist Sam. ‘Too bad,’ comes the reply, ‘that’s Casablanca’s leading commodity.’ Desperate men and women pay fortunes to people smugglers or have sex with them. Many are abandoned penniless, trapped and unable to return home, fearful of
Earlier this year I went as a reporter to cover Julie Walters’ return to her hometown of Smethwick, where she was talking to schoolchildren as part of the FILMCLUB charity’s Close Encounters programme. The town where Oswald Mosley was MP, and where Malcolm X once came to challenge racist election campaigning, remains a place struggling
When I worked in Berlin in 1998 the trendy record store in the city’s gay-friendly Schöneberg district had a category called “schwarz” music. It took up a lot of the shop and seemed a bizarrely useless generalisation, given the huge popularity of both imported and home-made Rap music. There was even a whole cluster of
We ran a version of this post by Samira Ahmed, the newsreader and reporter for Channel 4, on a previous incarnation of this blog. But with the Coen Brothers’ take on True Grit out next week, Samira has updated and extended it for us now. You can follow Samira on Twitter. here A long time