I am not Italian, and I have never visited Bombay (or now Mumbai). However, whenever I am feeling low or in need of a bit of comfort, I reach for my Arrivederci Bombay Jumper featuring stripes, and a massive Elephant head. For some people clothes are functional or just there for protection from the elements. For me clothes hold memories and stories and can significantly change your mood! 

I bought this colourful jumper for €1 in a vintage shop in Brussels where I lived for a summer a few years ago. Maybe part of its appeal was that I had no expectations from it – for €1 you are not going to expect a lot. I am also a big fan of elephants and the quiet wisdom they possess. In any case, I always love buying secondhand clothes and imagining the life they lived before they reached me. I remember the shop was closing so I quickly made up my mind and bought it. 

For someone who has found it difficult to find new trainers despite my trainers of five years having holes in the toes, this was a very snappy decision! Since then, it has been with me on my first camping trip, kept me warm and cosy through much period pain, accompanied me to art class when I felt nervous trying something new back in the post-lockdown world and been there for many wanders to St Leonards gardens and along the seafront. 

I’d say it was value for money as it is currently costing me about 1p per wear – hopefully it will be in my life for many moons to come!

• Kathryn was inspired to write this piece after watching ‘Worn Stories’ on Netflix. Do you have a piece of clothing whose story you would like to share? Contact HIP by emailing community@hastingsindependentpress.co.uk

BFI Player and funding for the Screen Sector

On 24th March BFI announced a new partnership with The Film and TV Charity to create a new COVID-19 Film and TV Emergency Relief Fund. Established with a £1m donation from Netflix, the new fund will provide emergency short-term relief to active workers and freelancers in the UK who have been directly affected by the Coronavirus pandemic. The Film and TV Charity is currently working on the precise eligibility criteria and level of individual funding, but the fund will be open to those working in production, distribution and exhibition.

The excellent BFI player is currently offering a two-week free trial, and the BFI website provides a number of archive clips and features to watch for free anyway. 

National Theatre YouTube Streaming

Starting on 2nd April with a showing of One Man, Two Guvnors, the National Theatre will be streaming full performances on its YouTube channel every week, with each performance remaining free to watch for 7 days after the first streaming. Following One Man, Two Guvnors will be Jane Eyre on 9th April, Treasure Island on 16th April and Twelfth Night on 23rd April. 

It has also announced: “In light of the Coronavirus pandemic, the National Theatre Collection, including 24 full filmed plays, will now be available to pupils and teachers at state schools and state-funded further education colleges via remote access in partnership with “Bloomsbury Publishing. During this temporary period schools will be able to share log-in details with pupils to access resources at home.

Bloomsbury Publishing has also extended the free trial period for academic institutions including universities, libraries and independent schools until the end of May 2020 to continue to support the educational community across the globe.” 

Get your login details today! 

The blackShed Gallery Announces 

“While the gallery is closed, we want to stay open in other ways for you, our loyal supporters. The blackShed has been a voice for art and artists for over 10 years, which we’re extremely proud of! Over the coming weeks we plan to revisit and share some of our favourite exhibitions with you. Entitled Virtual Spaces we’ll be featuring highlights, videos and interviews from some of the artists who have worked with us during this time.

“On Monday, we will launch our first online exhibition A Return To Order by an artist you all know and love, Robert Sample. Robert has exhibited with us on three different occasions and we look forward to revisiting these events with you all, next week!

“We want to encourage your comments and thoughts along the way, as we work on creative inspiration and new ways of working and connecting with our followers.

“We’ll continue to be in touch with regular updates and developments via email, but as always the content will be featured on our social media channels, so if you’re not following us already, please do!

“We look forward to welcoming you back to the gallery as soon as possible. In the meantime, we hope the blackShed can continue to offer our supporters something different! Please continue to interact, share and support what we do, your support means more now than ever!” 

• Read more here or visit www.theblackshedgallery.org.uk

An Exhibition of Works made by Isolation?

Local artist Ben Fenton writes: 

“This is to any and all artists local to Hastings and St Leonards. I’m imagining that like me, you’re holed up, probably at home, and away from your usual studio or work materials. I also imagine that, like me, that’s not stopping you from creating work in any way that you can. 

“Well, I’ve had a thought. I would dearly love to collect as many as you together, find a venue and then, when this surreal and terrible period of time is over, exhibit all our lockdown work together. 

“It might help some of us recoup a little of our lost earnings, but primarily it will stand as an example of the triumph of imagination and creativity in adversity. 

“This is just an idea right now, so I would love to hear from you if you’d be interested in taking part. When I have an idea of numbers, I can try and make some solid plans. There’s an awful lot of truly fantastic artists round here, and I think it would be wonderful to unite in this way and have something to focus on.” 

• You can find Ben Fenton on Facebook and Instagram, or email us at 
arts@hastingsindependentpress.co.uk and we can pass on the message.

The television serial format, telenovela, is the Latino equivalent of soap-opera; with more passion, more drama, doppelgangers, long-lost twin siblings, lovers, rivals, mortal enemies, shootings, comas, amnesia, mysteries… and of course, cliff-hangers. All of these characterised by low budget productions and cult hero actors. 

The satirical romantic comedy drama is a loose adaptation of the Venezuelan telenovela Juana la Virgen created by Perla Farías. The series stars Gina Rodriguez as Jane Villanueva, a devout 23-year-old Latina virgin, who becomes pregnant after an accidental artificial insemination by her gynaecologist. 

Jane grows up watching telenovelas with her mother and her abuela*, unaware of her intimate relation to diva telenovela star Rogelio de la Vega! As a child Jane is terrified into chastity by her grandmother, who makes her crush a flower in her hand, which she keeps framed on her bedroom wall. Overlapping and outrageous twists and turns disrupt Jane’s carefully planned timeline on her way to become a published novelist. Hotelier, playboy and Jane’s boss, Rafael Solano has his world is turned upside-down when his wife Petra books an appointment to be artificially inseminated, and his sister, her gynaecologist, is having a bad day. 

Jane the Virgin is comfortably within its genre but has been given a generous budget, a fantastic acting cast, perfect screen-play and the best written script of any Netflix series. Although a parody, it never drifts too far or close to the 4th wall and has elements of magical realism woven through the thick plots twists. To be taken completely at face value. 

The fifth and final series is currently being released and the spiralling web of drama that issues forth from the opening episode is yet to be resolved. Expect narration, on-screen text, #hashtags, fabulous cameos, larger than life characters with larger still wardrobes. 

*Her maternal grandmother

I’m told that the best way to appreciate a foreign country is to live like the inhabitants. So, on a recent trip to the US, I turned native and spent hours on my supersize bed, engulfed in a resplendence of cushions as I watched Netflix.

Cai Guo-Qiang – Elegy (Explosion Event), The Ninth Wave at Huangpu

Quickly bored by the Borgias ( and somewhat sickened by a desiccated Jeremy Irons’ gif-like seductions of young Lotte Verbeek) and fearing my Republican spirit might be compromised by too much exposure to The Crown, I reverted to type and tapped ‘Art Films’ into Google.

I found Sky Ladder and an extraordinary artist, new to me, but who may be familiar to you: Cai Guo-Quiang, who paints with gunpowder and creates installations with fireworks.

His work was the most ecstatic surprise. How very appropriate that it took someone from China, which invented gunpowder centuries ago, to use it as an art form, and the sight of these exquisitely orchestrated displays is well beyond an earthly treat. Always exciting, firework displays designed by Cai become entrancing on a much deeper level. Imagine the time, the expense, the expertise that goes into creating an artwork that lasts just minutes, that were it not for film would literally flee before our eyes. They are extra-terrestrial fire-ballets with a shorter life span than a mayfly.

The film gives spare and respectful biographical details: his childhood under the regime of Mao, some family stresses, a poignantly conflicted relationship with his father, but is not intrusive or mawkish and focuses too on the strength of his connection with his grandmother for whom he performs his lifelong ambition of creating a burning ladder connecting heaven and earth. 

The film is framed by this ambition, which he achieves on his fourth attempt, and shows us his many different kinds of installation as well as his drawing method which involves trailing gunpowder onto a canvas, covering it with boards and setting light to the touch paper. The results are profoundly beautiful.

Most moving is the scene of his final realisation of the burning ladder: a structure suspended in the sky by an air-balloon and reaching 500 metres into the heavens. After months of preparation, he lights the end of one of the struts and we watch the fire travel swiftly up the sides and along each rung, until the whole blazes with a pure white flame. In minutes the charred struts extinguish the light and the moment is over, but the experience stays in the imagination, I think, forever. I’ll let you know. 

His grandmother meanwhile at the age of 104, a diminutive, speechless and crinkled old lady, watches the event on an iPad.

Cai Guo-Qiang’s work is a fine interweaving of ancient and contemporary sensibilities, and an exquisite brush of beauty with violence, those two ancient and compelling forces which so often  give works of art their power and he does it through his play with time: working a lasting change on the imagination with his most evanescent and transitory creations.

The last decade has been filled with brilliant minds exploring the limits of technology with a simple purpose: making our lives easier. Rather than going out shopping, anything and everything can be bought online – the world has been transported to us. With the introduction of online streaming platforms, free or otherwise, the way we consume television and films is changing. The “bingeing” of TV box sets is encouraged – in fact, sometimes television programmes are released to the public in their entirety, rather than one episode at a time. The necessity for patience has been removed.

In recent years, the giants behind juggernaut network Netflix have tapped into a little known secret: there is money in obtaining the rights to international media. Overseas projects used to be difficult to access in the West. The International section in HMV is small, consisting primarily of blockbuster films, but on the Internet it is vast. Searching hard enough can uncover anything, and thus that is where the fan community of Asian dramas and movies have flocked.

The fandom for Asian cinema has rapidly expanded over the last two decades. Viki, established 2007, and Dramafever, 2009, marked some of the first websites dedicated to uploading Asian shows in high-definition with accurate subtitles. More have been created since: Viu, for example, was launched in 2015 and has widened its reach to cover many southern Asian countries. Although reliable, they are relatively unknown outside of the community and receive little traffic from experimental watchers. Netflix can reach audiences these websites cannot.

PICTURE: Film Society Lincoln Centre

The Netflix strategy and the Hallyu Wave
It isn’t the first streaming website to share foreign films, but Netflix, by acquiring the rights for them and claiming foreign projects as ‘Netflix Originals’, becomes solely responsible for the distribution and success of those productions. This suggests that Netflix had faith that the critically acclaimed ‘Prison Playbook’ or the sleeper hit ‘Hello, My Twenties’ would be well-received. Korean drama is famous for high-quality production values, beautiful stars and relatively unrealistic plot lines that often straddle the line between fantasy and absurdity. Western dramas tend to be completely different in style; situational comedies and gritty crime shows are usually the most popular, grounded and realistic. This gradual climb in popularity in Korean drama, a phenomenon known as the Hallyu Wave, is understandable: it provides a refreshing alternative to the sitcoms and dramas that air here on a daily basis.

Admittedly, Netflix are far from accurately displaying the range of what Asian content could offer for those sick of Western mainstream. Their films are often very different in tone from dramas and by opting for darker (‘Vanishing Time: A Boy Who Returned’) or more adventurous (‘Eun-Gyo’) story lines they appeal to a more mature and narrow demographic. Furthermore, the translators at Netflix choose to gloss over the terms of endearment, foods and ceremonies unique to Asian cultures, which leads to confusion for those reliant on subtitles. Yet, the once closely-knit fan base is exploding exponentially due to Netflix’s influence. It has offices in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India and Singapore. As of April, Netflix boasts approximately 125 million subscribers and has been available worldwide since 2016. People now have more opportunity than ever to try out international content and expand their horizons – just one more step for the progress of globalisation.

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