Bafta 2026 film awards longlists hope to avoid #BaftasSoWhite diversity criticism

With strong showings for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and target hit for 50% female directors, criticism that has dogged the prizes in recent years may have been headed off For now, the Bafta film awards appears to have headed off further criticism over its long-running diversity crisis after revealing its longlists on Friday. Despite Bafta overhauling its awards voting system in 2020 after claims of “systemic racism” , outrage re-emerged in 2023 after no people of colour won awards . The longlists, which are an intermediate stage on the way to the final nominations with each category determined by different mixes of membership voting and jury selection, suggest that some progress is being made. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/ws6nORV via IFTTT

Rojek review – unsettlingly intimate portraits of Islamic State militants

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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