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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Tomorrow’s Freedom review – does this man know the way to peace in Israel and Palestine?

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Sombre documentary focuses on the former Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, and how he is becoming a Mandela-like figure since his imprisonment in 2002

Here is a film that offers something not generally on offer in the media: an envisioning of the future and a road map, or part of a road map, out of the present situation in Israel and Palestine. It’s about Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, an initial supporter of the 1993 and 1995 Oslo peace accords who became progressively disillusioned with the slow choreography of international consensus, and was ultimately imprisoned in 2002 for authorising deadly attacks on Israel. Barghouti’s position is not that he is innocent, but that an Israeli court has no right to try him.

During the long years since, he has gone on hunger strike, been beaten and abused in captivity; his grownup children have themselves been targeted and arrested and his wife Fadwa has been repeatedly refused permission to visit him. But the film shows that something else has been happening as well: the Mandela-isation of Barghouti, a process which the Israeli forces themselves may well come to see as convenient, when in some future time they need an internationally accepted figure with whom to negotiate.

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