Wham! 10 Days in China review – pop meets politics in George and Andrew’s great leap east

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The duo’s groundbreaking 1985 tour reveals a strange collision of pop stardom and communism, a re-edit of Lindsay Anderson’s efforts that got him fired Here is a documentary that has a very important story to tell, maybe more important than it feels comfortable admitting. It’s about two separate subjects – or maybe three: Wham!, China and film-maker Lindsay Anderson. A superpower nervously edging towards western-style openness, a pop band nervously doing what needed to be done to make it big in the US, and a great film director, needing the money, taking on a project he didn’t really believe in. In 1985, Wham!’s beetle-browed manager Simon Napier-Bell had a cunning plan for how George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley could break the US: Wham! would be the first ever western pop band to perform in mainland China. They would play where the Beatles, the Stones and Elvis had never played, and the resulting global publicity would launch them into the US. (He was right – it did.) In our modern ag...
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All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt review – experimental film pulls on the senses

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Sundance film festival: Raven Jackson’s gorgeous, sparsely worded debut film evokes the non-linear memories of one Black woman in Mississippi

There will be a moment in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the gorgeous, unconventional debut from Raven Jackson, when the film’s spell works. It may be in the first 15 minutes, lulled by Mississippi’s lush soundscape and meditative shots of a southern summer, or an extended take in a hospital delivery room. It could wait until the final scene, an ode to memories already recorded and yet to come.

The pull of this sparsely worded, deeply sensitive film will probably depend on what triggers one’s personal sentimentality and, more pertinently, how much you know about it going in. The plot is so loosely outlined, and the camera so frequently turned to hands over faces, that it could be difficult, sans context, to pick up on its ambitious logic: a series of non-chronological memories in the life of one Black woman, connected by the senses of touch and sound and particularly attuned to the lingering feel of one’s skin on another.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt premiered at the Sundance film festival and will be released later this year

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