The brief life and sudden death of Zyzz: why did the bodybuilding influencer die at just 22?

Long before looksmaxxers, Aziz ‘Zyzz’ Shavershian was famous online for posting workouts and rage-bait – until he died in Thailand in 2011. A new documentary reveals what really happened Decades before the extreme aesthetic trend of looksmaxxing, there was Zyzz. Aziz Shavershian was an Australian teenager who became a fitness influencer in the 2000s, filming his workouts and thoughts about the world on his Nokia and posting them to YouTube. Zyzz was big in all senses of the word: many of his videos would see him flexing into unabashedly vain bodybuilding poses, hair feathered like an anime character, as he mocked his audience’s envy with slang straight out of bodybuilding forums: “U mirin’, brah?” He was skilled in rage-bait long before anyone had heard of it, creating accounts to troll himself in case the haters ever forgot to hate. He started an anonymous Facebook page, titled “10,000 likes and I’ll bash Zyzz”, and, when the goal was reached, switched the page to one advertising his ...

Saint Omer director Alice Diop: ‘I make films from the margins because that’s my territory, my history’

Raised in a Paris banlieue, the documentary-maker is now in the spotlight thanks to her Venice prize-winning first feature, based on the true story of a woman accused of killing her baby

“I have a voice that doesn’t carry very well,” says French film-maker Alice Diop, when I tell her I can’t quite hear what she’s saying. We meet in a cafe near her home in the working-class district of Montreuil, on the eastern edge of Paris. It is busy with lunch parties, and the combination of Diop’s French – she speaks fast and quietly – with the occasional crashes of crockery isn’t ideal for discussing the complex, challenging new film she has made.

Still, if Diop’s speech doesn’t carry acoustically, it’s a different matter with her artistic voice. After a significant career as a documentary-maker, Diop’s feature film debut, Saint Omer, is resonating worldwide. It won two awards at the Venice film festival last year and was France’s entry for the best international feature at the Academy Awards, making Diop the first black woman ever to represent France in the Oscar race. Diop is suddenly in the spotlight in a way she never imagined.

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