The festival director of the London Middle East and North Africa Film Festival talks about the place of Pontecorvo’s film within the history of the region’s cinema and about its future.
Five years ago the remote Himalayan state of Bhutan turned from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy, making it the youngest democracy on earth. Looking back at the developments since the transition, the democratization of Bhutan was a success story despite a few shortcomings.
The seizure of an international gas-plant in Algeria follows closely the escalation of conflict in Mali. The response of western states to both reinforces the worldview of their Islamist adversaries.
As Israelis go the polls on 22 January, Israeli democracy is in real trouble. At least that’s the message from a group of Israeli security mandarins at the centre of the Oscar-nominated documentary film The Gatekeepers.
The dominant perception of suicide-attackers has paid too much attention to the unchallenged assumptions of past experts and too little to the clinical evidence, says Adam Lankford.
If the crisis continues, Syria risks not so much division into hostile states as happened in Yugoslavia, but control by warlords who will persecute the Syrian people.
The key principle of Republicanism is to minimise domination wherever it is found. The Zapatero governments in Spain showed how this idea can shape the policies of nation states. More work must be done to extend the principle to the global arena.
Just months into Xi Jinping’s tenure as Chinese Communist Party leader, one thing has become eminently clear – in both style and substance, Xi Jinping is no Hu Jintao.
With sectarian tensions, weak institutions and yet another political crisis possibly in the making, the situation in Pakistan looks more dire than ever.
The French-led military intervention in Mali both accelerates the war in the west African country and transforms its character. The prospect is of a long-term engagement that Islamist forces far beyond the region will see as an historic opportunity
The Arab monarchies must not be undermined by the Islamist movements, but rather should come to some sort of working arrangement with them.
