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| | | I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickhart review – Ukraine's struggle | | by Jennifer Croft Sep 28, 2022 | | The 2014 resistance movement is the battleground for this powerful debut that has much to say about the war of today The Russo-Ukrainian war did not start with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The conflict goes back to 2014 and the so-called Revolution of Dignity, when after months of protest against a corrupt Ukrainian government strengthening ties with Vladimir Putin, Kyiv erupted in violent clashes that culminated in the deaths of more than 100 protesters and the removal of the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovich. This victory was short-lived: Russia quickly moved to annex Crimea and send in support for pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donbas and Luhansk. American author Kalani Pickhart’s powerful debut novel, I Will Die in a Foreign Land, returns to the explosive energy that immediately preceded that outbreak of war, showing us characters who each, in their own way, contribute to the Revolution of Dignity. Pickhart homes in on her characters’ individual struggles and widens the shot in turn, to encompass the whole conflagration and the sequence of ruins it left behind it. It is an impressive feat of empathy, for although Pickhart did travel to Kyiv and consult with many Ukrainian authors and scholars, she is not Ukrainian (or Ukrainian-American) herself. Continue reading... | | | | | Invisible Demons review – pollution nightmare in Delhi means apocalypse now | | by Cath Clarke Sep 28, 2022 | | A despairing handwring of a film shows the effects of environmental crisis on India’s capital – with images as nightmarish as sci-fi Environmental doom is coming: as the planet heats up, it’s all going to get much worse. Nothing new there – but, terrifyingly, this depressing snapshot of severe pollution in Delhi gives us a vision of apocalypse now. It’s a follow-up by Rahul Jain to another haunting documentary, Machines, about a Gujarat textile factory. Here he has captured some nightmarish images that genuinely look as if they could have been staged for a sci-fi film: patients in a hospital gasping into oxygen masks like victims of a chemical attack; streets engulfed by brown smog; waves of toxic white foam bobbing along a river. This is a despairing handwring of a film. In a voiceover at the start Jain admits his own privilege, explaining that he “grew up in an air-conditioned world”. What the rest of the film demonstrates is the environmental injustice of India’s economic growth, how the poor are bearing the brunt. Clips from the TV news fill in the details: a 49C heatwave in Delhi (eight degrees higher than expected June temperatures). A news anchor explains that toxic air pollution is the third biggest killer in India, more deadly than smoking and terrorist attacks. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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