Queer as Punk review – joyous portrait of Malaysian LGBTQ+ rebels making noise

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Yihwen Chen’s warm and galvanising documentary follows queer punk band Shh…Diam! as they battle discrimination with humour and raw energy For queer Malaysian punk band Shh … Diam!, every live gig is a small miracle. Their name translates as “Shut up!”, a powerful and defiant cry in a country rife with homophobia. Favouring distorted riffs, heavy drums and swaggering lyrics, the band’s powerful sound seeks to drown out the noise of prejudice and discrimination. Their courage, as well as their simple joie de vivre, thrum through Yihwen Chen’s documentary portrait. Shot over six years, the film charts the monumental changes undergone by the band members and their home nation. Always ready with a joke, lead singer and guitarist Faris is a proud trans man. Rejected by his own family, the charismatic performer finds a safe haven with his bandmates Yon and Yoyo, and their audience. Their songs turn up the volume on issues faced by the queer community, and also bristle with an anarchic sense o...
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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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