Vue lecture

State of Statelessness review – Dalai Lama presides over intimate dramas about Tibetans’ life of exile

13 janvier 2026 à 08:00

Tibetan directors, who all live outside Tibet, deliver a quartet of films that explore the pain of separation and migration

The wrench of exile is the theme of this quartet of short films from Tibetan directors, who themselves all live outside Tibet. Their intimate, emotional family dramas tell stories of separation and migration. In two of them, the 90-year-old Dalai Lama smiles out from photographs on shrines, a reminder of the precariousness of Tibet’s future. As a character in one of the films puts it bluntly: will there be anything to stop China erasing Tibetan identity when its rock-star spiritual leader is no longer around?

In the first film a Tibetan man lives in a kind of complicated happiness in Vietnam. He loves his wife, and they both adore their sunny-natured little daughter, but he has mournful eyes. Home is a town on the banks of the Mekong River, which has its source in Tibet. The river is a constant reminder of the region – and of Chinese might too, since Chinese hydropower dams are the cause of drought downstream in Vietnam.

Becoming Victoria Wood review – intimate and hilarious portrait of the trailblazing standup

The Guardian

Par :Cath Clarke

9 janvier 2026 à 01:01

Featuring Wood, her famous sidekicks Julie Walters and Celia Imrie and other female standups, this documentary is tender, moving and an absolute hoot

There is a moment at the start of this documentary about the comedian Victoria Wood when you realise what she was up against at the beginning of her career: a snippet from the archives of Melvyn Bragg hailing her as Britain’s first female standup comedian. That wasn’t entirely the case, but it seems unthinkable now that it took until the 1980s for women to break through in any numbers. In 1985, when season one of Wood’s sketch show As Seen on TV aired on BBC2, there were sniffs of doubt that a woman could front a comedy programme, let alone a northern woman. How wrong they were. Clips from the show, featuring Wood, Julie Walters and Celia Imrie, are a hoot: high on a tipsy energy, the performers are all on the edge of collapsing into giggles.

For those who grew up with Wood as a national treasure, Becoming Victoria Wood will be a revelation. Her standup routines in the 1980s blazed a trail, with jokes about tampons and cellulite. She had a lonely childhood, was ignored by her mother and was shy and self-conscious about her weight. (Later press coverage fixating on her size was vile.) She didn’t feel clever or good-looking enough but she had a fierce streak of ambition that seemed to come from nowhere.