An interview with writer and local resident Darcus Howe on the events that took place in London in 2011. "Have some respect for an old West Indian 'negro' " "I don't call it rioting, I call it an insurrection...of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it's happening in Liverpool, it's happening in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment."

Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works that lie somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction.Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies. Slow Action is filmed at different sites across the globe: Lanzarote - a beautiful strange island known for its beach resorts yet one of the driest places on the planet, full of dead volcanoes and strange architecture; Gunkanjima - an island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, a deserted city built on a rock, once home to thousands of families mining its rich coal reserves; Tuvalu - one of the smallest countries in the world, with tiny strips of land barely above sea level in the middle of the Pacific; and Somerset - an as yet to be discovered island and its various clades. This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds. The film’s soundtrack - narratives by writer Mark von Schlegell - detail each of the four islands’ evolutions according to their geographical, geological, climatic and botanical conditions. Slow Action, inspired by novels such as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Bacon’s The New Atlantis, Herbert Read’s The Green Child and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, embodies the spirit of exploration, experiment and active research that has come to characterise Rivers’ practice.

In The Diary of an Unknown Soldier Watkins initiated a style of filmmaking which he has consistently developed and experimented with in all of his professional films… Watkins refused to be constrained by cinematic conventions. In this film, he freed the camera from the limitations of a fixed vantage point and forced it to take part in the action so that he could create strikingly realistic, almost newsreel-like, effects and directly involve the viewing audience in the events it was witnessing. The Diary of an Unknown Soldier, however, is not limited strictly to techniques of realism. It contains a curious, almost uneasy, mixture of expressionist and documentary styles, and one suspects that the financial and physical limitations that Watkins faced because of equipment and location problems played a major part in the evolution of this syncretistic approach.

The Mahabharata is one of the world’s greatest books. It is also the longest poem written. It was written in Sanskrit, and is about fifteen times the length of the Bible. “Maha” in Sanskrit means “great” or “complete”, “Bharata” is primarily the name of a legendary character, and then that of a family or clan. So the title can be understood as “The Great history of the Bharatas”. However in an extended meaning “Bharata” can mean “Hindu”, and, even more generally “Man”. So the Mahabharata could be translated as “The Great history of Mankind”. According to most scholars, the events recounted in The Mahabharata probably have a historical source. Others maintain that the correct interpretation of the poem lies entirely in the direction of myth. Yet others point out the importance of the teaching books in the epic - political, social, moral and religious - and see The Mahabharata as a long treatise of government initiation. “As far as we were concerned, this immense poem, which flows with the majesty of a great river, carries an inexhaustible richness which defies all structural, thematic, historic or psychological analysis. Doors are constantly opening which lead to other doors. It is impossible to hold the Mahabharata in the palm of your hand. Layers of subtext, sometimes contradictory, follow upon one another and are interwoven without losing the central theme. The theme is a threat: we live in a time of destruction - everything points in the same direction. Can this destruction be avoided?” Jean-Claude Carrière. In our interview with Carrière, he pointed out what he thinks is the core of the Mahabarata: it is a poem on oblivion. Mankind seems to constantly forget the source of their truly nature. Indian tradition says: “Everything in the Mahabharata is elsewhere. What it is not there is nowhere”.

The Mahabharata is one of the world’s greatest books. It is also the longest poem ever written. It was written in Sanskrit, and is about fifteen times the length of the Bible. “Maha” in Sanskrit means “great” or “complete”, “Bharata” is primarily the name of a legendary character, then that of a family or clan. So the title can be understood as “The Great history of the Bharatas”. However in a extended meaning “Bharata” can mean “Hindu”, and, even more generally “Man”. So the Mahabharata could be translated as “The Great history of Mankind”. According to most scholars, the events recounted in The Mahabharata probably have a historical source. Others maintain that the correct interpretation of the poem lies entirely in the direction of myth. Yet others point out the importance of the teaching books in the epic - political, social, moral and religious - and see The Mahabharata as a long treatise of government initiation “As far as we were concerned, this immense poem, which flows with the majesty of a great river, carries an inexhaustible richness which defies all structural, thematic, historic and psychological analysis. Doors are constantly opening which lead to other doors. It is impossible to hold the Mahabharata in the palm of your hand. Layers of subtext, sometimes contradictory, follow upon one another and are interwoven without losing the central theme. The theme is a threat: we live in a time of destruction - everything points in the same direction. Can this destruction be avoided?” Jean-Claude Carrière In our interview with Carrière, he talked about what he sees as the core of the Mahabharata: it is a poem on oblivion. Mankind seems to constantly forget the source of its true nature. Indian tradition says: “Everything in the Mahabharata is elsewhere. What it is not there is nowhere”. Part one, "The Game of Dice", shows us a growing confrontation between two sides battling for power. One side is clearly closer to the idea of dharma than the other, which barely bothers to respect it. To avoid direct hostilities, they decide to play a game of dice; but the game is rigged. Playing with power is a rigged game.

After the reflections from the Bhagavad Gita, the war begins: a tragedy that pits brother against brother and sucks up whole families, people of great courage. It is a war of devastating consequences, which does not just threaten the survival of one of the two sides, but the continuity of life on earth. “Even the blades of grass tremble in fear.” A battle in which the clashing sides do not hesitate to use the ultimate weapons. Vishnu himself exclaims: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This is a war that is also played out inside every human being.

Having been tricked by Power and humiliated by the arrogance of those who now wield it, the Pandavas are forced into exile even though they still harbor a desire for justice. They face twelve years of banishment in the wilderness, and a further year during which they must live in disguise and avoid being discovered. The Mahabharata, portrays this exile as a period of extreme hardship in which death is always present – but so is the growing awareness of its opposite. To abandon the palace and swap the city for nature also leads them to renew direct contact with life, embark on a search for knowledge, start a process of cleansing and strengthen the bond of brotherhood. Nevertheless, this strengthening seems to lead back towards war. Part two ends with the famous reflections of the Baghavad Gita in which Krishna responds to the doubts of Arjuna.

“By late 1964 Harold Wilson’s newly elected Labour Government had already broken its election manifesto to unilaterally disarm Britain, and was in fact developing a full-scale nuclear weapons programme, in spite of wide-spread public protest. There was a marked reluctance by British TV at the time to discuss the arms race, and there was especially silence on the effects of nuclear weapons - about which the large majority of the public had absolutely no information. I therefore proposed to the BBC that - using one small corner of Kent in southeastern England to represent a microcosm - I make a film showing the possible effects, during an outbreak of war between NATO and the USSR, of a nuclear strike on Britain.” The BBC panicked when they first saw the film, and sought government consultation re showing it. They subsequently denied this, but the sad fact remains that the BBC violated their own Charter of Independence, and on September 24, 1965, secretly showed The War Game to senior members of the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Post Office (in charge of telecommunications), a representative of the Military Chiefs of Staff, and Sir Burke Trend, Secretary to Harold Wilson’s Cabinet. Approximately six weeks later, the BBC announced that they were not going to broadcast the film on TV - and denied that their decision had anything to do with the secret screening to the government". Peter Watkins

He asked me: “Ms Ziadah, don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children? (...). Pause. I look inside me for strength to be patient but patience is not at the tip of my tongue as the bombs drop over Gaza. Patience has just escaped me. Pause. Smile. We teach life, sir! (...) These are not two equal sides: occupier and occupied. And a hundred dead, two hundred dead, and a thousand dead. (...) Is anybody out there? Will anyone listen? I wish I could wail over their bodies. I wish I could just run barefoot in every refugee camp and hold every child, cover their ears so they wouldn't have to hear the sound of bombing for the rest of their life the way I do. (...) Today my body was a TV’d massacre. We teach life, sir. We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.”