In September 2014, after three months of captivity, Nadia Murad escaped ISIS control in Mosul, Iraq. Since then, she has dedicated her life to travelling the world and telling everyone who will listen about the plight suffered by her Yazidi people, then and now still.
Nadia Murad caught the world’s attention when she spoke at the United Nations Security Council. She spoke of living under ISIS, daily assaults, escaping, and the current plight of the Yazidi people, in refugee camps and still under ISIS control. It was a heart-breaking plea for support to the world’s silent nations. But in a rapidly changing news landscape, it’s easy to stay silent and wait for the next story come to come along.
On 22nd July 2011, on a tiny island off the Norwegian coast, 69 young people were killed, with another 109 injured in a terrorist attack. It was the darkest day in Norway since World War Two, and one that is still evident in its news, politics and society today. But somewhere down the line, the victims became background noise to the circus around the aftermath and perpetrator.
Thanks heavens not all police officers spend their time trying to find “hate crime” on Twitter, or not going to the assistance of colleagues in peril. Take Gabe Waters, for instance, the central character in BBC One’s new undercover-policier.
So far Jon Hamm has had trouble finding himself movie roles which fit him quite as impeccably as Mad Men’s Don Draper – though he could do worse than throw his hat in the ring for James Bond – but his role here as an American diplomat in Beirut plays obligingly to his strengths.
Aidan Turner may not reveal those famously bronzed pecs that have made TV's Poldark box office catnip in his West End debut. But what Michael Grandage's funny and fiery revival of The Lieutenant of Inishmore reveals in spades is the irresistible charisma and stage savvy of an actor fully at home in what can only be called Martin McDonagh-land.
The issue of immigrants being smuggled across the Mexican border into the USA is currently live and inflammatory, and this second instalment of the feds-versus-drugs cartels saga hurls us right into the centre of it.
The Cannes jury in 2017 gave best actress to Diane Kruger for her performance in In the Fade. She plays Katja, who turns avenging angel when her son and Turkish husband are murdered. It’s Kruger’s first acting role in her native German and she’s on screen for almost the entire film. Whether you are absorbed by the narrative of In the Fade (German title: Aus der Nichts) or find yourself distanced by the stylistic tics and plot holes, probably depends on how much Kruger/Katja convinces you. I kept being reminded of another intelligent, beautiful model turned actress, Jessica Lange, who took on a heavyweight role in Costa-Gavras' courtroom drama, The Music Box. If Kruger could have delivered a similarly nuanced performance, In the Fade might have overcome its somewhat clunky structure.
Director Fatih Akin, the son of Turkish immigrants, lives in Hamburg and has won high praise for previous films such as Head On (2004) and Soul Kitchen (2009) that captured multicultural life in Germany. Here he takes a darker turn, drawing on the recent rise of neo-Nazi terrorism to craft a thriller that turns into a courtroom drama and then an action-revenge movie. In the Fade won him a Golden Globe for best foreign film but has not done that well at the US box office before its release here, timed perhaps as an intelligent women’s film alternative to World Cup season.
We first meet Katja in home movie flashbacks. She’s a bohemian young student, buying drugs from Nuri (played by Numan Acar, best known from season 4 of Homeland). They fall in love and marry while he’s in prison. Cut to the present day and we meet a more respectable couple with a cute six-year-old son and a shared business. They’re running a travel and translation agency from a shop-front office in a Turkish neighbourhood in Hamburg. It’s not the most lucrative of enterprises and makes their very glossy home and top-end BMW a bit baffling. (Pictured below: Diane Kruger and Numan Acar)
Turns out their lifestyle’s funded by Nuri’s father’s property empire back in Turkey, but it’s this kind of distracting detail that makes it hard to be absorbed by the main narrative. Instead of working as a device to show how prejudiced the investigating police are – they assume from his lifestyle that Nuri is still a drug-dealer and that his murderers will be from the underworld – the emphasis on luxe production design make it seem as if the filmmakers couldn’t resist floating camerawork around stylish interiors and fast cars, rather than working within the cramped confinement of a real apartment and an everyday motor.
In the Fade was co-written by lawyer Hark Bohm and is partially based on a real-life terrorism case which is yet to be resolved. The courtroom scenes are screenwriting 101: the presentation of gruesome forensic detail, infuriating legal nitpicking and passionate emotional outbursts from Kruger. There’s a particularly ferocious performance by the cadaverous Johannes Krisch as the ruthless defence lawyer. It’s the final section of the film, when it turns into a vigilante revenge movie, which really puts too much burden on Kruger's acting skills and taxes the viewer’s ability to suspend disbelief. While it’s good to get an insight into Germany’s current racial tensions and the film is never boring, In the Fade just doesn’t quite deliver.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to In the Fade
I’ve never been in the Army, but I can’t imagine anybody involved with the making of Our Girl (BBC One) has either.
“I thought she maybe had superpowers to go that high.” Emilia Senior, 12, watched her sister Eve, 15, thrown into the air by the force of the explosion. When Eve came to earth her own perception had tilted on its axis: “I saw my legs on fire,” she remembered, “and then I was unconscious.” Short of targeting a kindergarten, a terrorist could not have chosen to decimate a more blameless demographic than teen fans of Ariana Grande.