JAMES WALSH recommends an exceptional documentary about the experience of Western doctors in Gaza
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Settling the World by M John Harrison
Engrossing insights into culture, philosophy and the contradictions of existence from the master of 'contemporary weird'
POET'S EYE: M John Harrison
KEVIN DONNELLY suggests that the task of transforming cultural spaces is far from over and that photography still has a key role to play
RITA DI SANTO talks to Scottish-Irish filmmaker MARK COUSINS about his new panorama of world cinema The Story of Documentary Film
ALAN MORRISON welcomes a new collection from the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time
CAL McBRIDE relishes the lyrical truth of an unstable identity in an over-tidy and conventional social realist treatment
New releases from Shearwater, Florry, and Navy Blue
CHRIS SEARLE welcomes a startling vision of contemporary Newport from a veteran photographer of the British working class
M JOHN HARRISON says that ideas limit storytelling and he is equally unenthusiastic about plot and closure, because replicating the traditional structure and interpretation of stories is to accept the world as it is.
He sees image as a better starting point than philosophy and this is reflected in the 17 tales in Settling
the World. Drawn from half a century of Harrison’s writing, they are crammed with strange and unforgettable images, as in The Causeway, where an interstellar traveller discovers an immense granite structure projecting thousands of miles into the ocean and encounters a lemming-like human procession.
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ANDY HEDGECOCK is astonished by a portrait of contemporary Greece, complete with political protest, organised crime and people trafficking, told from the point of view of — wait for it — runaway poultry
SYLVIA HIKINS relishes Jeanette Winterson’s brilliant hijack of 1001 Nights to push aside the boundaries set by others
RITA DI SANTO gives us a first look at some extraordinary new films that examine outsiders, migrants, belonging and social abuse
MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Friendship, Four Letters of Love, Tin Soldier and The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire