Features

Now that summer has arrived, we get an entire set of challenges mixed in with the blessing of warmer weather.

The blessings

Summer is a joyful time of year because we have happier weather and longer daylight hours. It’s also known to be the time of year when it’s easier to lose unwanted weight — our body temperature is higher, which increases our metabolism. A higher metabolism means we burn more calories. It’s also easier to get active in the summer months when enjoying outdoor activities ranging from hiking to walking, depending on our fitness level and lifestyle. We are also less likely to reach out for comfort foods to stay warm or combat seasonal depression. 

The challenges

Hydration: It doesn’t take long to get dehydrated in the summer months. Dehydration leads to headaches, migraines and issues like kidney problems for those who already have renal issues. It is essential to keep that water bottle with us when we leave the house and remind ourselves to drink throughout the day. I start my day with two glasses of water before I even have my coffee. This sets the tone for the rest of my day and I feel much more energetic when I’m well hydrated before leaving the house. Experts say that if you wait to drink your water when you feel thirsty, then you are already dehydrated so it’s best to be proactive and make it a habit to choose water above any other beverage. This way, we’re more likely to get our eight glasses a day. Besides keeping our kidneys in good health and flushing the toxins out of the body, drinking enough water helps the skin feel and look younger. Who doesn’t want that! 

Ice cream: The second challenge I have in the summertime is ice cream and other cool and refreshing sugar-loaded treats. There’s nothing more joyful than an ice-cream cone on a hot summer day. You feel like a kid when you enjoy this old favourite that reminds us of our precious childhood memories. I still remember what that delicious ice cream tasted like when I was a kid and my siblings and cousins and I would visit the ice-cream factory near our house and enjoy that pure vanilla taste. If you’re not drooling already from this description, you are probably not a desperate dieter and can move on! For the rest of us, childhood memories tied to food items are a challenge we must learn to conquer. 

We can do many other joyful things that remind us of fond childhood memories that have nothing to do with food. We can focus on those rather than on food memories. We can also train our minds not to attach too much emotion to the foods we eat. We should control food instead of it controlling us. You’ll know when a food item is controlling you when you cannot stop at one serving. Popcorn can be one of those dangerous foods that you can’t stop after a cup or two. Another one in this category for me is nuts. Even though they are a source of healthy fats and are loaded with many vitamins and minerals, I must be extra careful and count them out only to eat one serving instead of ten! 

Body shaming: Another challenge I have is that summer clothes have no mercy! At least in the winter months we have the cold weather as an excuse to wear the sweater that covers the hips, thighs and buttocks. We don’t have that luxury in the summer and we can’t take cover! This means we truly have to practice feeling secure in our own bodies and appreciating that God has given us this one body to love and care for. The positive side to these challenges is that we get an opportunity to love ourselves enough to be ourselves. We don’t have to hide or take cover and we don’t have to feel ashamed just because we come in different shapes and sizes. What a boring world it would be if we all came out of the same mould and looked alike.

It’s time to embrace and love ourselves in the present because only when we can love ourselves can we truly care enough to take better care of our bodies. Better care means treating our bodies with kindness and respect. If you were kind to your body, would you deprive it of the water it needs to function properly? Is it kindness to sit on the couch for hours on end and deny your joints the pleasures of moving and stretching? You wouldn’t treat a guest or a friend like that, so why would you treat yourself like you’re your own worst enemy? 

Overthinking about food: Here’s to summer and sunshine as we enjoy spending time with family and friends! May we focus more on our relationships with the people in our lives, including our own selves, instead of keeping our focus on food and the number on our scale. What we focus on grows; fixating too much on food can make us obsessed with it every hour of the day, wondering what we will eat and when and where we will eat it. May we resolve to live like we did when we were carefree children and never obsessed about our meals. We were more focused on playing outside and staying active; food was secondary.

Here’s to living in freedom from the captivity of food addiction and feeling lighter and joyful this summer!

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
New York: Anchor Books, 2020
Pp. 213

Following his success with “The Underground Railroad”, Colson Whitehead again mixes real history with his expansive imagination to create a new chronicle of the Black experience in America, called “The Nickel Boys”. Both novels have won the coveted US Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

Based on an actual, so-called reform school for boys in Florida, opened at the end of the 19th century, “The Nickel Boys” is mostly set in the 1960s, and follows the fate of Elwood Curtis, raised by his grandmother Harriet after his parents absconded to California. Growing up in the heat of the civil rights movement, he is bolstered by Harriet’s strict, but loving care and inspired by the writings of Martin Luther King. Harriet believes that one will face divine retribution for trying to surpass one’s station in life, but Elwood nonetheless begins to participate in protest marches. He self-educates himself alongside regular school, and a sympathetic teacher has just arranged for him to attend free classes at a nearby college when a cruel twist of fate lands him in the Nickel Academy for Boys instead. 

Elwood’s story continues on two prongs: Concrete and allegorical. The first means experiencing the all too real physical, sexual and psychological abuse enacted at the school, from malnourishment and non-existent teaching, to setting students against each other, and cruel, protracted beatings administered by sadistic white adults for arbitrary reasons. Some victims land in the school infirmary; others in a secret graveyard (like the mass graves recently uncovered in Canada on the grounds of boarding schools for Native American children). White boys at Nickel are also subjected to these punishments, but to a lesser degree. Perhaps Whitehead wants to remind that a system based on hate, fear and violence is bad for everybody, regardless of skin colour.

The author’s ability to convey these atrocities in matter-of-fact, understated prose makes the narrative more intense, credible, and horrifying than any melodramatic description could have done. Clearly, Whitehead intends to figuratively recreate the system at the school-cum-prison as a microcosm of the segregated, Jim Crowe system prevailing in the Southern states post-civil war. Like the school, this system used a combination of fear, deprivation and violence to keep Black people in a position not much better than slavery, thwarting their every effort to better their lives. Like during slavery, there were economic incentives for the white masters (school administrators) who sold off the state-provided food and supplies of the Black kids and hired them out to do unpaid labour for wealthy backers of the school. Last but not least, there were only hazy criteria for being released, adding to the students’ disorientation. 

In this system, “It was crazy to run and crazy not to run. How could a boy look past the school’s property line, see that free and living world beyond, and not contemplate a dash to freedom? To write one’s own story for once. To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one’s humanity”. (p. 148)

Elwood is an exception among the Nickel boys, many of whom have no family to go back to, were they to be released, and most of whom are illiterate. Some are easily recognisable as children of special needs. Most were incarcerated for minor offenses. “All the violent offenders, Elwood added, were on staff”. (p. 76)

The other prong of the story is a quasi-allegory with Elwood as the morally upright central character — the striver, the seeker, the pilgrim, who believes in justice and redemption — that it is possible for Black people to achieve their rights if only they do the right thing. Elwood’s only friend at the school, Turner, is a good person at heart but has been rendered totally cynical by his life experience. He serves as Elwood’s foil, openly ridiculing his naivete and adding a dose of harsh realism. “The blinders Elwood wore, walking around. The law was one thing — you can march and wave signs around and change a law if you convinced enough white people… Turner saw the college kids with their nice shirts and ties sit in at the Woolworths. He had to work, but they were out protesting. And it happened — they opened the counter. Turner didn’t have the money to eat there either way.” (p. 105)

The interplay between Elwood and Turner is edifying and heart-warming, especially as it is one of very few caring relationships in the story. It is also key to how the plot unfolds and is resolved. As one nears the climax of the book, and Elwood makes his ultimate petition for ending the corruption at Nickel, several possible endings suggest themselves, but Whitehead ends his tale in a totally unexpected way, perhaps striving to mirror the arbitrary irony that often rules Black people’s lives as a result of racism. 

In telling an old story in modern metaphor, it is significant that Whitehead quotes extensively from Martin Luther King so many years after his death: “Throw us in jail, and we will still love you… beat us and leave us half-dead, and we will still love you… be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.” (quoted on p. 172)

LONDON — As famous for his thrill-seeking lifestyle and publicity stunts as for his vast business empire, Richard Branson has set his sights on the stars as he prepares for lift-off on his first space flight.

Before this weekend’s mission on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Unity, the avowed Star Trek fan attributed his drive and taste for adventure to his mother Eve, who died from COVID in January. 

“I’ve always been a dreamer. My mum taught me to never give up and to reach for the stars,” said the London-born 70-year-old.

The Virgin group boss, whose net worth amounts to $5.7 billion (£4.1 billion, 4.8 billion euros) according to Forbes magazine, made his initial fortune in the record industry in the 1970s.

He has since launched a string of successful companies in sectors as diverse as railways and mobile phones, as well as Virgin Atlantic airlines.

But there have been plenty of missteps.

His failures include a short-lived attempt at Formula One racing, a stab at the soft drinks market with Virgin Cola, and a wedding company called Virgin Bride, which some said existed only because of the name.

‘Tubular Bells’ breakthrough

Branson was said to have been a below-average student who suffered from dyslexia, his headmaster at private school in southern England apparently telling him he would either go to prison or become a millionaire. 

He set up Virgin Records when he was just 20 and earned his first million pounds three years later, buying his own Caribbean island a few years afterwards. 

The record label’s breakthrough came with “Tubular Bells”, a 1973 instrumental album by the British musician Mike Oldfield, which sold millions of copies.

His mother was an air stewardess, so perhaps he was following in the family footsteps when he set up his airline in 1984.

But his business practices and publicity stunts since then have irked many.

In 2006, it emerged Virgin Atlantic and British Airways had engaged in price fixing, though his firm avoided any punishment because they tipped off the authorities.

And last year, he asked the British government for £500 million to help Virgin Atlantic weather the economic fallout of the COVID lockdown, despite having paid no income tax in Britain for more than a decade.

Politicians accused him of “milking the system”.

In 2012, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper compared him to the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “in that both believe the world revolves around them”. 

Ironic as Branson has tried and failed several times to become the first person to go around the world non-stop in a balloon.

‘Space is hard’

At the age of 28, Branson bought Necker Island, where he has hosted lavish parties and getaways for celebrities and political leaders including former US president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle.

Much of Branson’s publicity over the years has been based around his adventuring, in which he has tackled a number of records in speedboats, balloons and even an amphibious car.

These exploits brought him close to tragedy in 1998 when he and his co-pilot were forced to ditch their balloon in the Pacific Ocean after low pressure forced the craft down.

His efforts in recent years have focused on his space tourism company, founded in 2004 and based in the Mojave desert in California.

Branson, who was knighted in 2000 for his services to entrepreneurship, had hoped to join a commercial flight with Virgin Galactic as early as 2009.

But its timeline has been hit by a series of delays including a tragic crash in 2014 that claimed the life of a test pilot.

“Space is hard — but worth it. We will persevere and move forward together,” he said following the crash.

WASHINGTON — Azhdarchid pterosaurs were massive flying reptiles that soared across the skies in the age of the dinosaurs, using their long bills to pick out their prey of fish and other river animals. 

One of the most intriguing things about them has been the extreme length of their necks — estimated at up to three metres, which is longer than a giraffe's and raised questions about how the animals could support its weight without snapping.

By studying well-preserved vertebrae specimens excavated from Morocco, a team of scientists think they have the answer: a complex assemblage of extremely light yet weight-bearing spokes inside the bones.

Cariad Williams, first author of a new paper that appeared in iScience, told AFP that the team had an idea that the inside of the vertebral column housed a sophisticated internal structure. 

They sent the specimens off for CT scan, and "we just couldn't believe what we'd found — it is one of the most unique structures that we've ever seen," said the Phd student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

It has no known equivalent in the animal kingdom, either modern or extinct, and "I'm just surprised nobody found it sooner," added Williams.

The neural tube, which carries nerves through the backbone, is in the centre.

It connects to the outer walls of the vertebrae via fine bones called trabeculae, that are radially arranged and cross over each other, just like the spokes of a bicycle. 

These fine bones also run up and down the length of the vertebrae in a helix-like arrangement, adding further strength. 

The team then collaborated with biomechanical engineers whose calculations suggested that as few as 50 of the spoke-like bones increased the amount of weight the animals could carry by 90 per cent.

Co-author David Martill from the University of Portsmouth said in a statement that the discovery "resolved many concerns about the biomechanics of how these creatures were able to support massive heads — longer than 1.5 metres — on necks longer than the modern-day giraffe, all whilst retaining the ability of powered flight."

Relatively little is known about pterosaurs, and they have previously been dismissed as evolutionary dead ends, instead of being a research priority.

Yet the new findings show them to be "fantastically complex and sophisticated," and worthy of much deeper study, added Martill and the team.

By Briseida Mema 
Agence France-Presse

SHEQERAS, Albanie — Scents of sage, lavender and cornflowers rise from the meadows of Albania, which has seen soaring overseas demand for medicinal herbs since the coronavirus pandemic. 

In Sheqeras, at the foot of the Mali i Thate mountain in Albania’s south, it is the season for cornflowers, a plant traditionally valued for its ability to boost the metabolism and resistance to infections.

Early in the morning, before the heat of the day, dozens of women wearing broad-rimmed hats, hand-pick the magnificent signature-blue flowers that attract clouds of butterflies and bees.

The cornflowers are then dried in darkened rooms to preserve their colour before being shipped abroad.

For the past few years, Albania has been one of Europe’s top producers of medicinal herbs, mostly wild plants harvested in the foothills.

About 95 per cent are exported to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany or Italy.

Booming exports

Demand has been soaring since the coronavirus pandemic increased interest in herbs believed to strengthen the immune system and amid growing enthusiasm for natural and organic products.

“Every cloud has a silver lining,” says Altin Xhaja, whose company, Albrut, has, like many others in the sector, expanded areas under cultivation and intensified harvesting of wildflowers.

In 2020, Albania exported more than 14,000 tonnes of medicinal and aromatic herbs worth 50 million euros ($59 million).

That was 15 per cent more compared with the previous year, official figures show.

And the trend continues, with exports 20 per cent higher in the first three months of 2021 from a year earlier.

‘We have to be quick’

The boom is a windfall for one of Europe’s poorest countries which, with a population of 2.8 million people, is largely dependent on tourism along the Adriatic coast that has been hard-hit by the pandemic.

Nettle, wild apple trees, cowslip and other medicinal plants provide a living for some 100,000 Albanians, who have long used them themselves in traditional remedies.

“It’s a race against time. We have to be quick,” says Xhaja.

“Cornflowers are the most expensive at the moment; a kilo of dried flowers will go for around 30 euros,” he says.

Just next to the fields of cornflowers, a beautiful violet carpet of mallows can wait a bit longer before the harvest.

As dozens of workers busily select and sort plants at his factory in Lac, north of Tirana, Filip Gjoka says that the sector has also benefitted from tensions between Washington and Beijing.

“The trade war between the United States and China has forced many Western players to turn towards the Albanian market,” says Gjoka, who also heads the association of medicinal and aromatic herbs. 

Around 30 Albanian companies are authorised to export the plants used in herbal medicine due to their anti-inflammatory, anti-septic and even anti-stress properties.

They are used to make teas rich in vitamin C and antioxidants, oils or ointments.

‘Sage is my life’

The rocky plateaus in Albania’s north are home to sage, for which demand has increased by 40 per cent, prompting farmers to increase the area under cultivation.

“It was unforeseen. It had to be done quickly to be able to respond” to the demand, says farmer Pjeter Cukaj, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

“These plants provide a living for more than 50 per cent of families in the region,” he adds, crediting local sage, lavender and wild herbs with “magical powers” for the health.

But farmers complain about the difficulty in finding funding for expansion and the construction of storage and drying facilities, and say that any financial aid they do get comes in dribs and drabs. 

Professionals are also calling for a law for labels to guarantee quality, which would promote the sector’s growth.

“Everything is pure, without pesticides, without anything,” says Edlira Licaj, as she pulls weeds from around the sage along with a dozen other women.

“We do everything by hand,” she says.

Meanwhile, 91-year-old Drane Cukaj attributes her longevity to the sage infusion she drinks every morning.

“Life is in the meadows, sage is my life, my love, it has always made me happy,” says the mother of nine who also has 40 grandchildren.

Cukaj says she’s convinced that the wild herbs “help against the coronavirus”.

Still, that didn’t stop her from getting the jab — just in case.

By Francois Becker and Jürgen Hecker
Agence France-Presse

CANNES, France — The Cannes Film Festival opened Tuesday and quickly rediscovered its heady mix of glamour, politics and controversy, with the added shock of stars kissing without masks.

The world’s biggest film festival fell victim to the pandemic in 2020, and this year was still subject to social distancing rules.

While stars were allowed to walk the red carpet without masks, there was a strict no-kissing rule, but this was flaunted almost immediately as they started strutting up Cannes’ fabled staircase to the festival palace.

Festival president Pierre Lescure couldn’t resist giving two pecks on the cheek to Hollywood actor Jessica Chastain before repeating the offence with singer and former French first lady Carla Bruni.

He then bowed to kiss French actor and jury member Melanie Laurent, star of “Inglourious Basterds”, on the hand.

Even festival director Thierry Fremaux, who had insisted on the ban, allowed the maskless Korean director of “Parasite”, Bong Joon-ho, to give him a hug.

“COVID is still there, but it’s a huge sense of relief and excitement” to be at Cannes, US star Adam Driver told AFP before the beautifully eccentric musical, “Annette”, in which he starred alongside French actress Marion Cotillard, opened the festival. 

Fellow Hollywood star Jodie Foster summed up the mood of a pandemic-hit planet as she received an honorary Palme d’Or for her stellar career from Spanish director Pedro Almodovar.

“Lots of us have spent the year shut up in our little bubbles... confronted by suffering and anxiety and mortal fear.”

“Yet here we are after a year like never before back together in our beautiful clothes. Have you missed the glamour? I have too,” she joked.

She later declared the festival opened with Almodovar, US director Spike Lee and Bong, who won the last Palme d’Or in 2019. 

Lee, who is the first black person to head the Cannes jury, had earlier set an unapologetically political tone.

“This world is run by gangsters,” Lee said in response to an emotional appeal from a Georgian journalist about a recent crackdown on a Pride celebration in her country, which she blamed on Russian influence. 

Lee also stuck the knife into Donald Trump, who he calls “Agent Orange”, and sported a cap reading “1619” — the year the first slaves arrived in the Americas. 

“Agent Orange, this guy in Brazil [President Jair Bolsonaro],and Putin are gangsters. They have no morals, no scruples. That’s the world we live in,” Lee said.

As he led his jury up the red carpet, Lee wore an electric pink double-breasted suit, matching spectacles and colourful sneakers.

Rock opera

“Annette” tells the story of a celebrity couple and their mysterious child, the titular Annette. 

The stars sing their way through a story that began as an idea by Ron and Russell Mael, the eccentric Los Angeles pop duo known as the Sparks. 

They brought “Annette” to Carax after meeting him at Cannes in 2013, and the result is a rock opera with musical styles ranging from danceable electro to classically inspired lyrical passages.

The stars do most of their own singing which, Cotillard told AFP, required “a major preparation effort in a very limited time”. 

Her co-star Driver famously hates watching himself on screen and said the musical would be no exception. 

“My plan is to go in and when the lights go down, I run,” Driver told AFP ahead of the screening.

He said he would try to find an empty office and sit out the screening while “playing with staplers” and making phone calls.

Describing his usual technique, he said “Then I go back, and when the lights come up, I stand up, I pretend that I was there the whole time.”

This year, 24 films compete for the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.

The directors vying for glory include perennial Cannes favourites such as Italy’s Nanni Moretti with his new film “Tre Piani”, France’s Jacques Audiard (“Les Olympiades”) and Thailand’s master of the slow burn, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with his English-language debut (“Memoria”). 

Other contenders include Sean Penn, whose Africa-based humanitarian love story “The Last Face” bombed at Cannes in 2016; Iran’s two-time Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi; and Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, who is barred from leaving his country due to an embezzlement conviction widely seen as punishment for criticism of President Vladimir Putin.

The jury this year is mostly female, including US star Maggie Gyllenhaal, Canadian-French singer Mylene Farmer and French-Senegalese director Mati Diop. 

But with just four female directors in the competition, the festival’s tendency to pick the usual (male) suspects of the arthouse elite is once again under scrutiny.

Only one woman has won the Palme d’Or in 73 editions of the festival — Jane Campion for “The Piano” in 1993.

CANNES, France — Here are the 24 films competing for the Palme d’Or as the Cannes Film Festival returns from July 6 to 17, with a jury led by US director Spike Lee.

‘Annette’ by Leos Carax, France

Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard star as a glamorous celebrity couple whose lives are upended by the arrival of their first child. 

The first film in a decade from auteur Carax is also the first in English from the eccentric French mind behind arthouse favourites “Holy Motors” and “The Lovers on the Bridge”. 

‘The French Dispatch’ by Wes Anderson, US

Film fans can never get enough of Wes Anderson, and his latest quirky bauble can be counted on for more obsessively curated sets and shots, 20th-century nostalgia, family disharmony and Bill Murray. 

Plus yet more megastars in Anderson’s menagerie in the form of Timothee Chalamet and Benicio Del Toro, and a set-up — foreign correspondents in France — that is likely to play well with critics at Cannes. 

‘Benedetta’ by Paul Verhoeven, The Netherlands

From “Robocop” to “Basic Instinct” to “Starship Troopers”, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has always walked a fine line between gaudy schlock and cinematic genius. His latest tale recounts a lesbian affair in a 17th-century convent, starring Virginie Efira and Charlotte Rampling.

‘Flag Day’ by Sean Penn, US

Star actor Penn again steps behind the camera for a film about a conman whose daughter struggles to come to terms with his choice of profession. Penn stars alongside his own daughter Dylan, as well as Josh Brolin. 

‘A Hero’ by Asghar Farhadi, Iran

Iran’s lauded director Asghar Farhadi has worked in multiple languages but returns to his homeland for his latest, details of which are scant. He has won awards all over, including Oscars for “A Separation” and “The Salesman”, which also won best screenplay at Cannes.

‘Tout s’est Bien Passe’ (Everything Went Fine) by Francois Ozon, France

Featuring French stars Sophie Marceau and Charlotte Rampling, France’s prolific and eclectic director Francois Ozon tells the story of a woman asked by her father to help him die.

‘Tre Piani’ (Three Floors) by Nanni Moretti, Italy

Exactly 20 years after winning the Palme d’Or with “The Son’s Room” and nine years after heading the main jury at Cannes, Moretti is back with his first-ever adaptation of a novel, which looks at three families who live on three different floors, in three chapters.

‘Titane’ by Julia Ducournau, France

Starring French veteran actor Vincent Lindon, “Titane” is the second feature after “Grave” by horror film specialist Ducournau, which she reportedly wrote in six weeks between two COVID-19 lockdowns.

‘Red Rocket’ by Sean Baker, US

The comedy-drama by indie filmmaker Baker features Simon Rex as an over-the-hill porn star who returns to his hometown in Texas, where he is not very welcome, and hopes to build on the success of “The Florida Project”.

‘Petrov’s Flu’ by Kirill Serebrennikov, Russia

An alcohol-fuelled stroll by a cartoonist and his friend in post-Soviet Russia brings back childhood memories that get mixed up with the present. Serebrennikov is unable to attend Cannes due to a criminal conviction, widely seen as punishment for his political views.

‘France’ by Bruno Dumont, France

The gritty director adapts a novel by Charles Peguy, killed in World War I, updating it to chart the fall from grace of a star TV reporter in contemporary France.

‘Nitram’ by Justin Kurzel, Australia

Following a smash hit adaptation of “Macbeth” starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard and a less successful adaptation of video game “Assassin’s Creed”, the Australian director looks at events leading up to the Port Arthur mass shooting in Tasmania that led to gun control reforms.

‘Memoria’ by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand

Tilda Swinton stars in the slow-burn director’s first film in English. It comes 11 years after he won the Palme d’Or for the dreamlike “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”. Shot in Colombia, “Memoria” follows a Scottish horticulturist as she tries to understand strange sounds in the night.

‘Lingui’ by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Chad

Set in the outskirts of N’Djamena, “Lingui” tells the story of an adolescent whose unwanted pregnancy puts her in conflict with her country’s traditions and the law. Haroun lives in France, but most of his films have been produced in his birth country of Chad, which he left during unrest in the 1980s.

‘Paris 13th District’ by Jacques Audiard, France

Audiard won the Palme in 2015 for “Dheepan”, but is best-known abroad for “The Prophet” and “Rust and Bone”. His latest is based on three graphic novels by US author Adrian Tomine and set in a mixed neighbourhood of Paris. It features four young people who are sometimes friends, sometimes lovers, and sometimes both.

‘The Restless’ by Joachim Lafosse, Belgium

Starring Leila Bekhti and Damien Bonnard, the film tells the story of a couple under stress due to Bonnard’s character suffering from bipolar disorder, and who do their best to protect their child.

‘The Divide’ by Catherine Corsini, France

Two decades after her film “Replay” entered the Cannes competition, Corsini returns with a drama about a couple stuck in a hospital that comes under siege during a violent Paris demonstration inspired by the Yellow Vests movement.

‘The Worst Person in the World’ by Joachim Trier, Norway

A film about love and its complications, Trier’s latest concludes an accidental trilogy of Oslo-based films exploring exclusion and isolation. It tells the story of Julie, turning 30 and looking for answers in a new relationship, only to be let down by reality. 

‘Hytti No 6’ (Compartment No 6) by Juho Kuosmanen, Finland

Two strangers — a Finnish woman and a gloomy Russian — share a train compartment winding its way up to the Arctic circle in a road movie set against the backdrop of the 1980s Soviet Union. Kuosmanen hopes to follow the success of his charming, low-key boxing flick, “The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki”. 

‘Casablanca Beats’ by Nabil Ayouch, France-Morocco

Ayouch rocks the suburbs of Casablanca with a film about young people seeking an outlet through hip-hop in an underprivileged neighbourhood made infamous in 2003 after a group of radicalised local youth carried out suicide bombings in the city.

‘Ha’Berech’ (Ahed’s Knee) by Nadav Lapid, Israel

After winning prizes in Locarno, Cannes and Berlin for his first three films, Lapid explores two battles waged by an Israeli director, one against the death of freedom and one against the death of a mother, both of which are doomed to failure.

‘Drive My Car’ by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan

An aging, widowed actor looking for a chauffeur ends up hiring a 20-year-old woman. Things go wrong between them at first, but then a special relationship emerges. 

‘Bergman Island’ by Mia Hansen-Love, France

An American film-making couple spends a summer on Faro, the windswept Baltic island that inspired Ingmar Bergman. Reality and fiction start to blur as the weeks pass.

‘A Felesegem Tortenete’ (The Story of My Wife) by Ildiko Enyedi, Hungary

Featuring France’s Lea Seydoux, who features in three of the films in competition this year, Enyedi’s film kicks off with a bet by a sea captain that he’ll marry the first woman who walks in. It follows Enyedi’s Golden Bear win at Berlin in 2017 for “On Body and Soul”.