Call of My Life review – bright and breezy Nigerian call-centre romcom is just right for summer

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Uzoamaka Power’s broken-hearted, lovable worker falls for a charming customer in this delightful, deftly written tale Here is a delightful Nigerian romcom, in which Soluchi, or “Sol” (played by Uzoamaka Power) is a modern-minded career woman living in Lagos where she works at a call centre for a mobile phone network. She’s great at her job, a natural empath who listens to her customers’ problems and solves them with patience and good cheer – not that her jerk of a boss, who is obsessed with raising the unit’s throughput, spots the value of her diligence. In her spare time, Sol pours love into shipping mini-magnate Kalu (Zubby Michael), another chauvinist who doesn’t recognise her worth or even pay her much notice. In fact, after standing her up on an anniversary date and generally taking her devotion, kindness, fit figure and zingy fashion sense for granted, Kalu suddenly dumps her because she’s too “childish”, too available, and too easy when he thinks he should have a partner who’s m...
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Rojek review – unsettlingly intimate portraits of Islamic State militants

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Documentary collects sequence of interviews with prisoners, not all repentant, alongside footage of war-blasted Syrian Kurdistan

Here is an astringent, devastating and truly extraordinary film that is hard work to watch, but entirely worth it. Rojek probes the roots and fallen leaves of the Syrian civil war, a conflict the western media has practically forgotten as news of Ukraine and Gaza-Israel-Yemen dominates international reporting. Director Zayne Akyol, heard off-camera throughout, interviews members of Islamic State, now being held in high security prisons by the Syrian Democratic Forces, about their lives, with some recalling more innocent days when they hunted goldfinches to sell in markets or liked Canadian pop music. Many recount how they were recruited into IS by cells in local mosques in assorted countries – Germany, say, or Saudi Arabia – and came to have positions both high-ranking and menial in the organisation in the part of Syria with a dense Kurdish population.

In the film’s present, some are still unrepentant, believers that they fought honourably in a holy war; others see things differently and are riven with regrets. Some are women who recall their time of service to IS as the happiest days of their lives. In stately procession, each person speaks straight to the camera in almost disconcerting closeup, and however repugnant some of the things they say might be, it’s impossible to not recognise and see most of them as broken human beings.

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