Slave

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeEmancipation producer Joey McFarland has been condemned by critics for bringing “slave memorabilia” to the film’s premiere. During the movie’s recent red carpet on Wednesday (30 November), McFarland carried with him the “original photograph from 1863” of former slave Peter, on which director Antoine Fuqua’s newest Will Smith-led thriller is based.Taking the plastic-encased image,…

There are a lot of guns in America — this nation has collectively more civilian-owned guns than we have citizens. Unlike the rest of the developed world, firearms ownership in America is broadly held, with an estimated 40% of American households owning at least one gun; and unlike the rest of the world, gun-owning Americans tend to think of their weapons not as something dangerous, but as something that keeps them and their families safe.Two-thirds of American gun owners say that they own their gun at least in part for…

BANGKOK —  The hustle started like it often does, with a post on Facebook promising job seekers generously paid customer service positions in Cambodia, no experience necessary.Soraton Charehkphunpol, a Thai cook scraping by in a restaurant in Bangkok, couldn’t resist the offer to earn more than double his $470 monthly salary.Late one evening last year, after another grueling shift, Soraton answered the ad. Within hours, a man arrived at his door to take him to the Cambodian border city of Poipet.It wasn’t long before…

Margaret Brown doesn’t see herself as the director behind Descendant. “It’s not my story to tell,” she says about her Netflix documentary following activists in Africatown – a Black community in Mobile, Alabama – who rally to reclaim and preserve their history.Many of Africatown’s citizens are descended from the Clotilda, the last recorded vessel to bring enslaved people into the United States in 1860. At the time, importing such human cargo was illegal. In her film, Brown, a Mobile-native who currently resides in Austin,…

Sheila Atim is happy to play the fool. More than happy, in fact – it may just be her dream role. As a litmus test, I had asked the two-time Olivier Award-winning actor which of Shakespeare’s myriad roles she would most want to tackle – sort of a culture snob’s equivalent of an astrology chart or Myers-Briggs alignment. I expect one of the biggies – perhaps Prospero, Hamlet or Lady Macbeth. But no, it’s the wise, eccentric figures advising from the margins of plays such as King Lear or Twelfth Night. “They see everything,…

A high school football team in Northern California was forced to forfeit the remainder of its season after a video showed several players staging a reenactment of a “slave auction,” according to district officials.In a statement, Doreen Osumi, the superintendent of Yuba City Unified School District, called the incident at River Valley High School in Yuba City “extremely distressing,” and confirmed that participating students are not playing the rest of the season. The student-athletes were in violation of the code of…

To Lebanese guitarist Lilas Mayassi, heavy metal music speaks a language. “It’s the language of power,” she said, “the language of rebellion.”For Mayassi and her band, Slave to Sirens, those two languages have given her group a voice in a country where power has been widely abused and rebellion has become increasingly dangerous. The dramatic challenges Mayassi and her group have faced over the last few years – exacerbated by their role as the first, and only, all-female heavy metal band in Lebanon – are chronicled in a…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Historian Prof. Tamar Herzig, Vice Dean for Research at Entin Faculty of Humanities, exposed previously unknown evidence of an organized gang rape of a group of enslaved Jewish girls and women from North Africa in the Italian city of Livorno at the beginning of the 17th century. The rape was organized by Dr. Bernardetto Buonromei, a high-ranking state official at Livorno's slave prison, who was also…

Amazon is working on an internal messaging app that will ban words that reflect the company's working conditions or organising labour unions. The app, sort of a social media platform specifically for Amazon employees, will have a content filter that will ban words such as “union”, “prison”, “slave labour”, “diversity” as well as “restrooms” presumably to prohibit employees from discussing that they relieved themselves in bottles to meet punishing deadlines, according to a new report based on the company's internal…