My Cultural Life

For one heart surgeon, seeing the Renaissance artist’s anatomical drawings gave him a natural understanding of the body that was often overlooked in modern medical science If you’d asked my teenage self, growing up in a small village in Shropshire, what I wanted to do with my life, I would have talked about art and music long before I spoke of scalpel blades and operating theatres. As an 18-year-old, I intended to go to art school, until my mother sat me down and told me rather bluntly that b...

A personal essay recounts how the coming-of-age film 'Thirteen' influenced a shy teenager's hedonistic youth, which eventually ended in a psychotic episode.

Dragged along by my dad to see Pentangle, I heard something ancient that kickstarted my obsession with this country’s folklore – an enchanted, subversive and strange version of a Britain where I…

A reviewer shares how the musical 'Operation Mincemeat', specifically a song about a woman's letter to her husband during WWII, unlocked their ability to cry and made them a happier person.

My sexuality had to be hidden from my friends, my parents, not to mention the authorities. Then I found freedom at house parties and one song that sums up me finally being able to be myself I was raised in Tehran, under the Ayatollah’s sharia law and daily watch of Basij – the “morality police”. My parents fell in love with the Islamic Revolution when I was a baby and welcomed life under its strict religious rules. The Ayatollah’s face stared down from the walls at home, a daily reminder of w...

For director Kornél Mundruczó his latest feature At the Sea, which stars Amy Adams and premieres In Competition in Berlin tonight, is an incredibly personal film.  The Hungarian director, who says he is “still in my cultural exile”, reveals that the idea for this “hidden drama” was born after he left his home country. He had […]