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ASTANA – Kazakhstan will host Silk Way Star, the first Asian vocal competition in August, creating a new platform to promote Asian music, strengthen cultural ties and showcase emerging talent, reported the competition’s press service.

Filming begins Aug. 20, with the grand finale broadcast live Nov. 22 on Jibek Joly (Silk Way) and major TV channels across participating countries.

The competition will feature performers from 12 countries, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, China, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Malaysia, Mongolia, South Korea, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

“This is a new experience for us. Organizing and hosting such a large-scale project requires effort, fresh thinking and new approaches. Our team has shown creativity, persistence and, above all, great enthusiasm,” said Yerkezhan Kuntugan, managing director of Jibek Joly/Silk Way during the competition’s press conference.

Kuntugan noted that the project will provide a stage for talented artists as “ambassadors of culture, peace, music, their national traditions and the soul of their people.”

“Our millions-strong audience can expect discoveries and unforgettable moments of unity between people who live in different places in the world. We are on an important mission, building a golden bridge of friendship, uniting countries and peoples through the power of culture,” he said.

Silk Way Star is expected to become a major addition to the global music scene, highlighting the cultural heritage of nations along the Great Silk Road. Contestants will perform a wide range of musical styles and traditions reflecting their countries’ unique identities.

The jury will include renowned performers, songwriters, producers and media personalities.

Kazakh singer, composer and video director ALEM (Batyrkhan Malikov) will represent Kazakhstan. He has been a leading member of the Ninety One band since 2015, as well as a finalist on The Voice of Kazakhstan and semi-finalist on X Factor.

“For me, taking part in such a project for the first time on behalf of Kazakhstan is a great honor. To carry the Kazakh flag high is truly one of the moments I have long awaited. Of course, I feel nervous, but I will do my best to bring everything I have gathered and worked on over the years to that stage. To be honest, this is an enormous responsibility, but above all, it is a profound honor,” said ALEM during the press conference.

He added that after more than a decade away from competitions, he has learned not to undervalue himself, his art or fellow artists.

“Art cannot be measured against art. One form is never greater than another. It is deeply personal, something that touches every heart in its own way,” he said.         

The show is being organized under the Agreement on the Creation of the International Project Silk Way Star, signed between the TV and Radio Complex of the President of Kazakhstan and China Media Group.

Two things need to be borne in mind about The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a new true crime drama. The first is that Knox and Monica Lewinsky – both members of “The Sisterhood of Ill Repute”, as Knox has described them in the past – are executive producers of the show. The second is that the family of Meredith Kercher, the 21-year-old British exchange student with whose murder Knox and others were charged in 2007, were not involved in the series. Her sister Stephanie said last year to the Guardian: “Our family has been through so much and it is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose.”

To the first point: it is undoubtedly true that the subject of The Twisted Tale is Knox and her survival of an extraordinary and extraordinarily awful experience, and while not hagiographic, it is not a warts-and-all profile either. Then again, how much warts-and-all can there be for an ordinary 20-year-old excited to be studying abroad – in Perugia, Italy – for the first time? If you set aside the salacious narrative built up around her by a rabid press and fuelled by the preconceived prosecutorial notions around the crime, that is what she was.

To the second: the grief of the Kercher family, and their enduring loss, is a terrible thing. But the purpose of the series is clear – to show how this particular miscarriage of justice took place and, by implication, how different forces, prejudices and appetites can combine to bring them about in general. It is designed to give the lie to the appealing notion that justice is always blind and its administrators are always beacons of rectitude, shining light into the darkness of depraved people’s souls.

Over the course of eight dense and often extremely tense episodes, writer KJ Steinberg (best known for This Is Us) maps out Knox’s long journey from first arrest for her flatmate’s murder to eventual exoneration, via wrongful conviction, four years in prison and multiple trials. The outlines of the case are probably remembered by many of us of an age to have followed the headlines and articles that proliferated at the time, and the series does a good job of illustrating each pivotal point as it arises (the initial misstep in establishing the time of death, for example. Similarly, the misinterpretation of the English phrase “See you later” as meaning definite plans to meet had been established between Knox and her initially co-accused, Patrick Lumumba, reminiscent of the very British “I popped him on the bed” expression misconstrued by a US audience in the Louise Woodward trial), while a propulsive energy keeps the whole narrative going.

Strenuous efforts are made to humanise public prosecutor Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), who led the murder investigation as a man led astray by his passionate sense of duty and frustration over his experience of pursuing the infamous Monster of Florence serial killer. His subordinates are given shorter shrift, and remain ciphers who are portrayed as having taken against Knox on a whim then found more and more things to be disgusted by, such as her public displays of affection with her boyfriend and later co-accused Raffaele Sollecito, and the vibrator in her washbag.

Perhaps the most shocking part of the story is the fact that Knox’s ordeal continued even after the trial and conviction of Rudy Guede, the man whose fingerprints and DNA (unlike that of Knox, Lumumba and Sollecito) were all over the crime scene. Or perhaps the most shocking part is that his name hardly resonates in the public consciousness, while “Foxy Knoxy” still has such potency.

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox has its flaws. The mannered, Wes Anderson-lite openings to each episode sit uneasily with the harrowing hours to which they give way and the script – particularly in those openings – can be dreadful. “We were just getting to know our young selves in this charmed and ancient city,” says Knox in a voiceover early on. And later: “Does truth actually exist if no one believes it?” At one point, investigator Monica (Roberta Mattei) describes Knox providing “unsolicited information in crude American spasms”.

Fortunately, the main parts are held together by an unreservedly brilliant performance by Grace Van Patten as Knox, in English and Italian (halting at first, fluent by the end of Knox’s incarceration), the ebullient, naive, overconfident, shattered young woman caught in so many currents and cross-currents it seems a miracle that she ever made it back to shore.

A family say their lives have been ruined after a video of a black man and his brother playing in the park with his white granddaughters was shared by Tommy Robinson and weaponised by the far right.

Olajuwon Ayeni, a musician from Redcar, North Yorkshire, has been racially abused and falsely labelled a paedophile in the week since the family video was stolen from the TikTok account of his wife, Natalie, who he married five years ago, and shared by extremists online.

On Tuesday, the couple’s local MP, Anna Turley, was forced to write a letter providing a reference of good character for Ayeni when he was suspended by his management after the online disinformation.

“I’m devastated to receive the email from my management,” Ayeni said. “Music is my life. My social media will be damaged, my career will be tarnished … but I am determined to show the truth and hopefully clear it up.”

He and Natalie say they have been living in fear since being threatened in the street after Robinson shared the video with his 1.4 million followers. The far-right activist wrote on his X account: “Wtf is even going on here? Where are the parents?!”

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has not removed the video despite numerous replies debunking it and calling for him to delete it.

Ayeni and his wife have been scared to leave their house because of threats. “We haven’t gone outside at home, we just can’t,” Natalie said. “Just after it started to go viral, someone in the local pub recognised Olajuwon immediately; we couldn’t believe how quick it had spread. We were walking home from shops just streets from our house, and two lads passed us, spun round and said ‘I hope you’re not them off that video or we’re coming back to slash you up’. It’s just horrendous.

“Someone was shouting ‘paedophile’ outside the house the other night, so I rang the police again but they say there’s little they can do. It feels a matter of time before something bad happens. We tried to go out yesterday and had to come home.”

The impact on Ayeni has been particularly severe. “I feel I have to sleep with one eye open,” he said. “I feel unsafe, scared and sad, as mine and my brother’s lives have been threatened. Someone said they will seek revenge and I’ll never walk again, all for just being in the park with the kids I love on a family day out. It’s been twisted by haters and wicked people.”

Natalie said: “The distress this is causing is unreal, it’s ruined our lives and there we were, getting on with things, looking after the girls minding our own business and now we are scared to do anything. It’s made me quite poorly to be honest and the shares, views and vile comments just keep going. I’ve had to stop looking.

“We just want people to know the truth,” Natalie added. “We’re a normal family who went to the park with our grandchildren. The lies and racism have turned our lives upside down and continue to do so daily.”

Despite reporting threats to police, the family said they had received only limited support. Officers have told them that while personal threats are criminal, sharing the video does not constitute a crime.

Cleveland police said they were offering the family all available support and advice. The Redcar and Cleveland local policing superintendent, Emily Harrison, added: “Cleveland police would also urge social media users to refrain from further sharing either the video or any incorrect information about the people featured.”

When Alyson Stoner was nine, a wardrobe assistant on the set of a TV show noticed the child actor’s dark leg-hair and told Stoner it was “dirty and unladylike”, and that they couldn’t wear shorts in the show until it was removed. “I started to view my body in a detached way where it was just something to control, to fix, to manipulate for whatever standard was presented to me,” says Stoner. “In this case, the extreme beauty standards of the industry.”

It was a lot for a nine-year-old to take on, but by then Stoner had been working for several years – they were a Disney regular, and appeared in films such as Cheaper By the Dozen – and were used to doing whatever adults asked. As a teenager, this would lead to an excessive exercise regime and an eating disorder requiring inpatient treatment.

Later, Stoner, who uses they/them pronouns, would embrace evangelical Christianity as a way of making sense of their life, undergoing conversion practices to, in the words of a church friend, exorcise “the demon of homosexuality”. Eventually, Stoner, who is 32, would embrace themselves, come out as queer and become a mental-health practitioner and advocate. Their experiences as a child star meant, they say when we speak over Zoom, “I didn’t have a chance to establish any kind of trustworthy connection with my own mind and body.”

In their memoir, Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything, Stoner details all the ways being a child star makes for such a weird and damaging life. The raised hopes and rejections; the sense that you could be considered a failure before other children have even left primary school. And even if you’re among the minuscule number of hopefuls who make it on to a TV show or film, you enter an adult world that requires professionalism along with the ability to cry on cue and the responsibility to develop into an attractive teenager. You are rewarded for being malleable and easy to work with, whatever that entails, whether it’s putting up with the loopholes executives would find to enable you to work long hours on set, or shaping yourself into what the industry demands. For Stoner, that included being told to cover up in the sun so their skin wouldn’t get “any darker”.

As a child star, the livelihoods of adults – a parent or agent or any number of people you employ – depend on you. Then there are the stalkers and threats; Stoner was once the victim of an attempted kidnapping after their team almost sent them to meet someone they thought was a terminally ill fan. Their relationship with their mother was close but fraught; she was overinvested, Stoner writes, in her child’s success: “As long as I shined, she shined.”

Stoner calls the path of child stardom the “toddler to train-wreck pipeline”. With their book, they say: “My intention is less focused on trying to name, shame and blame individuals, and more to empower people with information. I’m choosing to believe that once we know more and know better, we will choose better, especially for children.”

They point out that as a child, making an informed decision to become a professional actor, with everything it entailed, was impossible. “I deeply question whether commercialising my love for performing was my decision.”

Stoner grew up in Toledo, Ohio, the youngest of three, and for as long as they can remember, they loved performing. They write that they arranged the cages of the pets in their preschool classroom in a semicircle so they could perform numbers from Grease to them. When they were “spotted” by the woman who also discovered the actor Katie Holmes, Stoner was marked as special.

“I think there were a lot of well-intentioned adults who just wanted to support what appeared to be a young person having a knack for something. If I could go back in time, I would strongly encourage non-commercialised, non-industrialised explorations of creativity. At the heart of it, artistry is a beautiful, deeply human expression.” A small, sardonic laugh. “A corporation owning your name and likeness, less natural.” It isn’t even as if Stoner has financial security from decades of work – thanks to mismanagement by adults around them, instead of the approximately million dollars they thought they had, they were left with nothing.

By six, and a talented dancer and actor, Stoner was entering child modelling and talent competitions, hoping to get the attention of casting directors and agents. Then Stoner and their mother moved to Los Angeles to pursue their career, a gruelling time of endless auditions and acting classes. In one acting lesson, Stoner was encouraged to dredge up real pain; in their case, Stoner imagined never seeing their father, who had become distant since the divorce from their mother, again. “I thought it was an act of honouring the character’s lived experience, to pull from real pain, to be able to access certain memories and emotions,” says Stoner.

“I noticed that my body started revolting against trying to access that degree of vulnerability,” they say of the effect, over many years, this caused. “Instead of being open, I now had this callousness, this shield, where I could no longer feel emotions, let alone portray them.” Later, when they were having therapy, they were diagnosed with alexithymia, a difficulty in identifying emotions. It was, says Stoner, “a response to accidentally traumatising myself on all of these auditions, and following the guidance of adults who had acting manuals that encouraged it”. This included auditions playing a terminally ill child, and witnessing a shootout being enacted for a job on an action film – and they were praised for being able to do it so well. “Of course, right? What a bizarre experience, to be rewarded for acting out pain and horror. It’s so confusing to a seven-year-old.”

Stoner was a success – appearing in three Missy Elliott videos, and landing roles in Disney Channel shows and the Cheaper By the Dozen, Camp Rock and Step Up film franchises. But there were, inevitably, numerous disappointments – auditions that went nowhere, and pilots that weren’t picked up. “When you are the product, it’s like, well, what’s wrong with me? It had a deep impact on my self-esteem. The rejection hurt terribly, but then when I became chosen, my self-esteem was still tied up with that. Either way, you’re not cultivating a core sense of worth. It’s tied to so many things beyond your control. The unique aspect of [the entertainment industry] is that this is a daily experience that a child is going through, while disrupting every other area of their health and development along the way.”

For a while, when Stoner was 12, the prospect of their own show was dangled, until a similar teen sitcom was picked up, which would become the huge hit Hannah Montana and make a star of its lead, Miley Cyrus. Other peers, such as Demi Lovato, who had the lead role in Camp Rock, would also eclipse their career. “My coping strategy was being a bit in denial that I was affected,” says Stoner. “I think I was terrified of what I would have perceived to be negative emotions, whether that’s self-doubt or envy, and doubled down on toxic positivity. The reality is, had I felt the hurt of not being chosen, I might have quit. I had to have some narrative that enabled me to persevere.” But these emotions, says Stoner, “were festering, and they eventually took quite a toll on my health”.

Since the age of eight, says Stoner, they were in “permanent performance mode” and they point out they didn’t have any real sense of normality. Going through puberty is bad enough for any teen; to do it around adults, on camera, was excruciating. Stoner adds: “For a young female body in particular, what I noticed was this sudden expectation that you will know how to sexualise your portrayals. That was just such a bizarre and horrific experience, to be in room after room with adult casting directors, knowing that I, at 13 or 14, am expected to seduce them.”

So many of Stoner’s “firsts” happened on camera or in rehearsals. Rehearsing a scene on the Disney show The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, Stoner had to kiss both brothers of the title; in Cheaper By the Dozen 2, Stoner went on their first “date”. They remember having to Google what feelings they should be portraying during all these experiences. “I was on the outside peering in and going: ‘OK, as the scientist here, what are the specimens doing? Oh, that’s a schoolroom. Interesting. Textbooks, pencils? Fascinating.’” They laugh. “There’s some humour there, but also grief.”

By their mid-teens, Stoner was obsessively tracking the amount of punishing exercise they were doing, and their calorie intake. They followed diets so extreme that their menstrual cycle stopped. At 17, after a decade of being compliant, they finally asked for help.

They were advised not to go into rehab, aware of the rapidly approaching “child star expiration date”. “I knew I needed to hit certain milestones by 18 to be able to transition successfully into adulthood in entertainment, and I was creeping up on that date.” But they were also very unwell.

In treatment, Stoner experienced a consistent routine for the first time, “and also adults who weren’t on my payroll. I think treatment started pulling at threads.” After nearly three months of rehab, Stoner went back to Hollywood, although they had begun to look for a life beyond it. By their mid-20s, Stoner had a YouTube channel, had started studying mental health and was making music. They came out as queer in a piece for Teen Vogue in 2018 which, they say, caused them to lose the job on a children’s show they were in.

Stoner would later start a podcast, Dear Hollywood, in which they explored the life of child stars. In one episode, they spoke powerfully about a rape they had experienced in their 20s. It wasn’t that anything like that had happened during Stoner’s years as a child actor, but they say that “something felt indescribably familiar about it”. It made them reassess the situations they had been put in as a child, and the sense that their body was not their own, whether it was crew members reaching under their clothes to attach a microphone, or executives commenting on the way their adolescent body was developing. Stoner was already in therapy at the time, so they point out they had support after the sexual assault. “I don’t know if I had ever connected to that feeling [of what ‘no’ felt like] growing up, even though there were many cases where I could have and should have said no to what was happening.”

Stoner is also at a point where they think they may as well use their platform in a beneficial way, and especially, they say “to speak up on behalf of other survivors. To also – what’s the word? – I don’t want to say objectify myself, but continue allowing this commodified version of myself to exist to hopefully accomplish social change. It’s a strange position. Almost all the time, I crave anonymity.”

They work as a mental health coordinator on sets and have developed a toolkit for young performers. In the same way that intimacy coordinators have become industry standard for sex and nudity on set, Stoner would like to see the mental health of actors, and particularly child actors, given as much care. They hope that there will be change, “not just for kids in Hollywood, but also kids online”. Stoner still works as an actor, including voice acting for the Disney show Phineas and Ferb. They did worry that their book, and being so critical of the industry, would affect their work. “I’ve been testing out different scenarios, depending on how this unfolds, so that I can at least have my basic needs met, in case this disrupts contracts.”

Having been rich, and then not, how have they come to view society’s idea – pushed by Hollywood itself – of success and the importance we place on fame and money? “I got to see the folly of the illusion much sooner,” says Stoner. “By the time I was 18 and others were just looking for their first jobs, I had already tasted the promised flavours of success and status, and I found them to be quite unsavoury.”

Having missed out on a normal childhood, Stoner has built a life. Therapy and finding a purpose, particularly in their mental health work, has helped them to work out who they are and what they want. Writing the book brought them closer to their father, and uncovered a different story from the one they had grown up with. They had been estranged for 15 years by that point, but in getting back in touch, they discovered their father had fought for years for custody and contact.

“I think those sections [of the book] feel the most emotionally potent and unresolved,” says Stoner. Their relationship with their mother is, says Stoner, “a very delicate matter” they don’t wish to go into. In writing, Stoner has been able to make more sense of their place beyond being the little girl in a Missy Elliott video, or a teen Disney star. “It’s brought a certain kind of freedom from my past.”