Category: 5. Entertainment

Whether it’s lava carving through frozen terrain or sharks gliding through shimmering shoals in turquoise seas, seeing nature from above reveals a stunning new perspective on our planet’s landscapes and wildlife.

Enter the inaugural International Aerial Photographer of the Year competition. Professional and amateur photographers worldwide were invited to enter the contest, and the standard of entries was incredibly high (pun intended).

The first winner was announced as professional drone pilot and artist Joanna Steidle – her stunning drone views of marine life from above wowed the judges with their drama and beauty. You can see this stunning image below, alongside our favourite images from the competition.

The plane! The plane! – David Mierowsky

Flamingos and Pelicans – David Swindler

Smoking skull – Daniel Viñé Garcia

Elephants of the Flo – Murray Evans

Austfonna Ice Cap – Thomas Vijayan

Laguna Hedionda – Ignacio Palacios

Salt Works IV The Eye – Daniela Tommasi

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Tajogaite Volcano – Javier Garcia

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Twisted Owl – Colin Leonhardt

Tidal Flora – Peter Harrison

Reclaim – Ael Kermare

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Celestine Pool – Daniel Reiter

Eternal Harmony – Rositsa Dimitrova

Martian Sunrise – Taylor Duncan

International Aerial Photograph of the Year – Ignacio Palacios

International Aerial Photographer of the Year Winner – Joanna Steidle

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Former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr said that he personally intervened in the script of the forthcoming four-film Beatles biopic directed by Sam Mendes to clarify the depiction of himself and his then wife Maureen.

In an interview with the New York Times, Starr said that he had met Mendes in London in April and spent two days discussing the script for the section of the project focusing on him.

Having gone through the script in detail, Starr said that Mendes “had a writer [involved] – very good writer, great reputation, and he wrote it great, but it had nothing to do with Maureen and I,” Starr said. “That’s not how we were. I’d say, ‘We would never do that.’”

Starr met Maureen Cox in 1962 when the Beatles were performing at the Cavern club in Liverpool and they were married in 1965; they divorced in 1975 and she subsequently married Isaac Tigrett, co-founder of the Hard Rock Cafe. She died in 1994 from leukaemia. Her and Starr’s son Zak Starkey also became a drummer, with Starr recently defending him after he was fired by the Who.

According to New York Times writer Lindsay Zoladz, Starr is now “much more satisfied with how he’s depicted in the script” and that he sends director Mendes “peace and love”.

Starr will be played in the films by Irish actor Barry Keoghan, star of The Banshees of Inisherin and Saltburn, whose casting was accidentally revealed by Starr in November in an interview with Entertainment Tonight. Keoghan’s role in the project was officially announced in April, alongside castmates Joseph Quinn (George Harrison), Harris Dickinson (John Lennon) and Paul Mescal (Paul McCartney).

Keoghan recently talked about meeting Starr to prepare for the role, saying he was too nervous to look at him. In an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Keoghan said he was “in awe” and “just froze”. “When I was talking to him, I couldn’t look at him. I was nervous … he was like, ‘You can look at me’.”

He added: “My job is to observe and take in kind of mannerisms and study, but I want to humanise him and bring feelings to him, not just sort of imitate him.”

Mendes is acting as producer on all four films along with regular collaborators Pippa Harris and Julie Pastor. In May reports emerged that he had hired award-winning writers Jez Butterworth, Peter Straughan and Jack Thorne to work on the films.

Mendes’ Beatles films are scheduled to be released in 2028.

The King kept out the cold with a dram of whisky when he visited a Scottish town famous for its distilleries.

With wind and rain making the summer visit to Campbeltown feel like autumn, Charles readily sipped an award-winning 25-year-old single malt by the Glen Scotia distillery.

The King and Queen are in Scotland for Holyrood week, an annual tradition that sees that monarch spend a week in Scotland each July.

More than a thousand people lined the streets in Argyll and Bute to see the King tour the town.

The King met charity and community organisations in the town hall where the distillery had a stand, and finally visited the harbour area.

Charles is known to like whisky produced using peat, which has a very distinctive flavour, and he asked Iain McAlister, master distiller and manager of Glen Scotia’s distillery in Campbeltown: “Is it a peaty one?” He was told it was not.

He watched as a double measure from the whisky, costing more than £500 a bottle, was poured, and after taking a sip said: “I’m always so amused by these people who describe these whiskys in the most amazing ways.”

On the distillery’s website the whisky is described as having “hints of vanilla oak interwoven with the subtle notes of sea spray and spicy aromatic fruits”.

Mr McAlister presented a bottle of the whisky to mark the visit and said afterwards: “It doesn’t get much better than this, having the King try our whisky.”

Outside well-wishers had waited in the rain to see the monarch who spent time shaking hands with people. When one local shouted out “you’re looking well”, Charles, who is receiving ongoing cancer care, replied “thank you”.

He stopped to visit a number of retailers including a fishmongers, butchers, fruit and veg store and Fetcha Chocolates run by chocolatier Fiona McArthur, who said last year she supplied vegan sweet treats for the famous Oscars goody bags.

She added: “The King was asking how we made the chocolates and he was very excited about the Oscars when I told him, and we gifted him a box of chocolates.”

Earlier Charles watched 67-year-old Willie Skilling, livestock agent and sheep shearer, cutting off the fleece from a Scotch Mule sheep.

He wrestled with the animal and used a harness called a bungee that supported his back, telling the King “this is what you call help the aged” and Charles replied: “I must remember that”.

The King ended his visit by meeting a series of organisations from HM Coastguard to the RNLI and Sea Cadets by the harbour along with local nursery school children.

The Queen was not in attendance.

A British actor best known for his role in the Star Wars franchise has died. He was 87.

Kenneth Colley, who starred as imperial officer Admiral Piett in “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” died “peacefully at his home in Ashford, Kent, on June 30 after contracting COVID and developing pneumonia,” according to his agent, Julian Owen, in a statement to the BBC.

Owens 60-year career spanned stage, film and television, including roles as Jesus in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” and the Duke of Vienna in Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” for the BBC.

Colley was admitted to the hospital with an injured arm after a fall, but he quickly contracted COVID, which developed into pneumonia. He died with friends at his bedside.

Colley also starred in Clint Eastwood’s “Firefox” and the World War II series “War and Remembrance.”

Star Wars fans will remember his initial performance in “The Empire Strikes Back.” Darth Vader uses the Force to choke the general next to him while saying, “You have failed me for the last time.”

Looking frightened but resolute, Piett accepts his new position as admiral.

Colley reprised his role as Piett for the 2012 animated Lego production, “Lego Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Out.”

Colley enjoyed traveling to Star Wars conventions and fan events all over the world and held several hobbies.

“Ken also loved his garden, art collecting and had a passion for fast cars,” Owen said.

Students at a performing arts school were preparing their final act after being told it would be shutting down after 25 years.

Tiffany Theatre School in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, was forced into closure after bosses could not secure the funding it needed.

The school’s three-year higher education course was oversubscribed for September, but its 15 students have since been told the curtains were closing on Friday.

“People are suddenly now having to grieve friendships because they’re going to have to find other places to train,” said principal Phil Gostelow.

The school’s future was thrown into uncertainty after the government said it would no longer finance its students’ loans.

Staff and families rallied to raise £30,000 in four weeks to keep the doors open, but Mr Gostelow said the “amazing” effort was in vain as £200,000 was needed.

“It’s not a big enough figure for us to responsibly open and give any form of security to our students,” he added.

“We were left with no option other than to draw a line under it and close the college, which is heartbreaking for all concerned.”

Past students have gone on to perform in London’s West End, choreograph for pop star Kylie Minogue, as well as featuring in films, TV and music videos.

The school was meant to be welcoming a full intake of 20 new students in September.

However, they would not be able to pay for their education without student finance.

The sudden closure would follow two final performances at the Lakeside Theatre in Colchester on Friday.

“These were meant to be the end of year shows, our graduating cohort’s farewell,” Mr Gostelow said.

“Now it’s turned into the last thing we’ll ever produce as a college.

“We’re trying to keep our brains on making the best show we can, but there’s a big cloud hanging over everything.”

He stressed to families it would be a goodbye “not with mourning, but with pride”.

The Department for Education has been approached for comment.

As long as you can hear a beat or someone singing, you can dabke.

“The official definition, if there is one for dabke, is when a group of people dance together, usually in a synchronised way,” Tareq Halawa says.

Unofficially, the musician continues, the dabke is when a group of people jump in no particular order, prompted by the sound of music. Sometimes the only beat is the sound of feet hitting the floor, without a drum.

“All the beat and rhythm that you need actually comes from the stomping,” he says. “It’s an expression of our culture. It can be an expression of our joy, frustration – a show of power.”

A celebration of the Levantine folk dance forms part of Dabke and Tatreez, an Artists for Peace event showing at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday.

There, Halawa will play the riq – one of the world’s oldest instruments.

It is “like a tambourine but it’s especially for Arabic music,” Palestinian musician Seraj Jelda says.

Jelda, who played with the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Gaza before fleeing Israel’s bombardment for Australia a year ago, will play the riq and oud on Sunday.

He’s one of an ensemble of 10 artists performing at the event, which brings together musicians and dancers with Palestinian, Lebanese, Turkish, Indonesian and Cypriot heritage.

“It means a lot because we are delivering our culture, our songs,” Jelda says.

‘A window of understanding’

From the routine of harvest, joys of weddings and honouring of family matriarchs to being forced to leave a homeland, the event’s repertoire is “a journey through people’s lives”, Halawa says.

Most pieces come from before the 1948 Nakba – “how our grandfathers, and our ancient people, [were] singing their songs,” Jelda says.

“Once they want to collect vegetables and fruits and olives … they start singing these songs. Once they want to get married, they sing these songs for the groom and for the bride.

“Some songs will talk about the Nakba and how songs are transferred from cultural and happy songs to songs that talk about Palestine and how it was occupied and our land was stolen.”

Halawa says Sunday’s show is “a window of understanding” into the Levant culture.

“What this means to me … is that I am seen and heard and accepted here in Australia, with the background and the culture that I bring with me,” the Palestinian, Syrian and Turkish musician says. He has lived in Australia for 12 years.

“The language of storytelling and music is so universal that it’s compelling, and having that as our medium of conversing with Australia is important.”

As Israel continues its bombardment of Gaza – which has destroyed cultural heritage sites across the strip – Halawa says the performance becomes “more than just sharing of culture and understanding and music”.

“It’s a plea for connection,” he says. “It also means that it’s part of our contribution as performers to lifting the injustice.”

It has made Halawa reflect on “what these songs actually mean”.

A song telling the story of a person leaving home, for example, wields the meaning “that it’s not about the taste of the food as much as the togetherness, the caring and connection with the land and with one another, endurance as a collective thing”.

“Now that I need to convey its content and its spirit, it led me to really rethink these stories and what they mean and what the original authors were thinking and experiencing that potentially led to them writing these stories.”

The Opera House event is a work of cultural preservation, Ayşe Göknur Shanal says.

Music is “one of the most important mediums in expressing culture and identity and heritage and tradition”.

“There are songs for celebration, for grief, lamenting,” the Turkish-Cypriot Australian curator and opera singer says. “You dance in anger, and you dance in love and passion and celebration.”

Shanal felt a sense of urgency to perform.

“I feel like the complacency of the arts industry and sector has propelled the urgency in me,” she says.

“The silence has propelled the urgency in me. We are proponents of arts and culture and heritage and history … and to see Palestinian music being absent from the musical vernacular and landscape frustrated me.

“So many mosques and churches [are] being bombed in Gaza and elsewhere – that’s destroying heritage and history and culture. We are trying to protect and preserve, as opposed to what’s happening, which is destroy, erase.”

Jelda says: “Sometimes it is sad for us to play music and do happy things [when] our families and friends [are] in Gaza facing a difficult time.

“But it is [also] like a happy moment, because we are delivering something for them, making people know what’s happening in Palestine and Gaza.”

Later this month, the cult film service Arrow will do something that would once have plunged the UK into screaming fits of utter chaos. That’s right, it’s going to stream Zombie Flesh Eaters.

The film comes with a tremendously confusing backstory. In Italy, George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was recut by Dario Argento and retitled Zombi. Zombi, no relation to Bambi, was such a success that a sequel was commissioned, using the script of an unmade movie entitled Nightmare Island. This film became Zombi 2. In the UK, Zombi 2 was renamed Zombie Flesh Eaters. And then it was banned.

This was largely down to the campaign waged against so-called “video nasties” in the early 1980s. Driven by newspaper front pages screaming things like “BAN VIDEO SADISM NOW”, police officers began conducting raids on video shops, confiscating anything they saw as breaching the Obscene Publications Act.

The confiscations felt arbitrary (in Slough, officers seized Dolly Parton’s The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, under the impression it was pornography), but eventually 39 films were successfully prosecuted under the act. Zombie Flesh Eaters was one of them. And now its unimaginable horrors are available to stream, uncut and in pin-sharp 4K.

In truth, it’s been around for a while. Around the turn of the century, the BBFC loosened its regulations, and the banned films began to trickle out. Not all of them – 1969’s Nazi sex film Love Camp 7 is still routinely refused a certificate, as is the thematically similar Gestapo’s Last Orgy – but Zombie Flesh Eaters has been available to legally watch uncut for two decades now.

Which means that I probably should have watched it by now. After all, if you grew up in the 80s and 90s like I did, nothing gave a movie more cachet than being banned. All these films had a too-hot-for-TV thrill to them; if you weren’t allowed to watch them, they had to be good. And yet I never got around to watching Zombie Flesh Eaters.

Turns out I didn’t need to bother. Not because the Thatcher government was right and the film has turned me into a depraved subversive, but because it lumbers on for ever, grinding through endless overlong, overacted dialogue scenes that go nowhere and do nothing. Admittedly there are hints of gleeful gore here and there. In one scene a woman’s eyeball is impaled, and there’s a tremendous underwater sequence with a zombie, a topless woman and what appears to be an actual live shark. Maybe there was some religious outrage that has lost its impact over the years (OK, a zombie does get its head caved in with a crucifix), but otherwise it contains nothing that wouldn’t be found in a workaday Game of Thrones episode.

Would it get banned today? Unlikely. In an age where Damien Leone can release three Terrifier movies (where, variously, a man is chainsawed to death through his scrotum and a woman has a rat-filled pipe hammered down her throat), it’s practically daytime television. I grew up scared and fascinated by the prospect of Zombie Flesh Eaters corrupting my mind. Now that I have actually seen it, I’m afraid to report that Zombie Flesh Eaters is no Zombie Flesh Eaters.

Were all the banned films like that? Has society moved on so much that everything we once feared would undo society has become unimaginably hokey? I decided to watch some of the other 39 films to find out. I started with the most notorious, John Alan Schwartz’s Faces of Death.

No film was arguably bolstered more by a banning than Faces of Death. A mockumentary that combines unaired news footage with material shot for the film, Faces of Death presented itself as a compilation of every kind of death: accidents, executions, suicide, cannibalism. Back when nobody could see it, it sounded like a kind of aggressively violent precursor to You’ve Been Framed. But that isn’t what it is at all. It is, in fact, a harrowing look at human suffering. There’s Holocaust footage. There are starving children. There’s violence against animals (staged) and footage of body parts scattered across the ground following a plane crash (real). It is, to put it lightly, an incredible bummer to watch.

Despite its reputation, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust was slightly easier to watch. You can understand the nerves around releasing it – it features graphic sexual violence, and more than one scene of animals being killed – but at least it had the benefit of having an identifiable point of view. The film is a satire about cultural appropriation and media sensationalism, in which an American documentary crew travel to the Amazon rainforest and get in over their heads. Which in terms of intent puts it above a lot of the other banned films, but the execution muddles the message. After all, if you have to kill an animal to make a point about media sensationalism, you’ve already lost the argument.

And then there’s Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave, a film that lacks either the intellectual rigour of Cannibal Holocaust or the fun of Zombie Flesh Eaters. It is one of the least enjoyable films I have ever watched.

I Spit on Your Grave is a film in which a woman exacts revenge against a group of men who gang rape her. It was banned in the UK, as well as in Canada, Iceland, Ireland, Norway and West Germany. This is likely due to the point of the film being the rape itself. So much time is dedicated to the rape sequence that the revenge part feels tacked on, as if it wants to trick you into thinking that it’s a feminist film. It’s worth pointing out that I Spit on Your Grave still hasn’t been released here uncut – some heavily eroticised rape scenes still contravene BBFC guidance – but the edited version available on Amazon Prime was still so unpleasant that it represents the only time I have ever welcomed the intrusion of interstitial ads.

And yet by modern standards, even these video nasties pale next to what is now circulating online. For the purposes of this feature, my editor ushered me towards a 2006 film called Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, part of Lucifer Valentine’s Vomit Gore trilogy, along with ReGOREgitated Sacrifice and Slow Torture Puke Chamber. A surreal satanist film about a woman with an eating disorder, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls contains scenes of torture and several scenes in which people vomit various fluids, some of which are gobbled straight back up. It was awful. If this was 1983, it would have been banned in a heartbeat.

Because time has rendered Zombie Flesh Eaters so quaint, my assumption was that all the other banned films would be equally silly and kitschy. After all, we’re talking about a government so jumpy that it also banned the third word in the title of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But that isn’t the case, since a lot of these films are still genuinely repellent. What has changed, though, is our attitude to them. Clearly, banning them only served to boost their reputation, whereas if they had been allowed to remain in public, I’m convinced that they would have all died in obscurity decades ago. In other words, less “BAN VIDEO SADISM NOW” and more “LET’S WATCH SOMETHING THAT’S ACTUALLY GOOD”.

Zombie Flesh Eaters is available to stream on Arrow and on Limited Edition 4K UHD from 28 July