Life Style

In 1989, Zhou Xiaoping was a 29-year-old Chinese artist travelling around Australia pursuing his passion for Aboriginal culture.He had explored the desert town of Alice Springs and the tropical Arnhem Land region before he arrived in the coastal resort of Broome. Here, immersed in an environment that felt completely foreign to him, Zhou was shocked to discover a connection to his home country.“I met the Aboriginal songwriter Jimmy Chi,” Zhou says. “Jimmy asked me to say something to him in Chinese. He wanted to hear the sound of spoken Chinese. He then told me that his father was James Joseph Minero Chi, the son of a Chinese gold miner who had come to Australia around 1870.”The conversation sparked Zhou’s decades-long fascination with Aboriginal-Chinese history, culture and communities, wh...

4.5/5 starsThe Cannes Film Festival may be hosting yet another virtual-reality programme this year, but the most immersive event on the Croisette in the French seaside city so far has been the premiere of an old-school, two-dimensional, three-hour movie filmed in the classic 4:3 aspect ratio.Revolving around its titular Portuguese explorer’s expeditions to Southeast Asia in the early 16th century, Magellan is relentlessly engrossing – an epic in which viewers witness the distress, death and destruction brought about by one man’s delusions of colonial conquest.By presenting Ferdinand Magellan as a dogmatic, slave-owning colonialist who brooks no dissent from his quixotic mission, Filipino auteur Lav Diaz and his Mexican lead actor Gael García Bernal have delivered a subversive portrait of a...

4/5 starsWes Anderson’s latest feature, a spy movie rendered in the way only he can, feels like the antithesis to the latest Mission: Impossible film.Playing in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where his last two features premiered, The Phoenician Scheme is an old-fashioned espionage caper styled in the exquisite, delicately hewn manner for which Anderson is famed.Here he gets to work with Benicio del Toro, who featured briefly in Anderson’s 2021 film The French Dispatch but here gets to take the lead. Perfectly cast, the actor plays Zsa-zsa Korda, a shady tycoon thought to be one of the richest men in Europe.As the explosive aerial opening shows, there are people out to sabotage him, including a government-led task force (chaired by Rupert Friend).With all this weighing on...

[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.]From long-awaited dreams to unforgettable destinations – luxury cruise line Oceania Cruises® turns the voyage into the destination You step onto the deck. A gentle breeze catches the hem of your linen shirt as you gaze out across the horizon. The sun is beginning to dip, gilding the sea in molten gold. Behind you, a steward offers a chilled glass of Sauvignon Blanc.  Ahead of you lies Asia. Or perhaps Africa. Or a hidden coral atoll in the South Pacific you hadn’t heard of until now. Wherever you're headed, you already know this isn’t just a holiday. This is something else entirely.  It’s the journey you’ve dreamt of and now that day has come. It’s time to reward yourself with an eye-opening voyage that’s rich in cu...

One need not travel thousands of miles to enjoy the very best of Asian cuisine, as Wynn invites guests to explore all the tantalizing flavors of Asia right here in Macao. Discover Michelin-starred Chaoshan fish congee, the best laksa from Singapore’s celebrity-favorite noodle shop, perfectly prepared unagi from a revered century-old Japanese restaurant, and the most sought-after beef noodles from the almost impossible-to-book restaurant in Taiwan. At Gourmet Pavilion, each new discovery is bursting with surprises that are hard to find anywhere else in the world and is exclusive to Wynn. Created by the world-renowned David Collins Studio, the design of Gourmet Pavilion is a combination of the elegance of European architecture with the world's finest craftsmanship, setting the stage for an e...

Lead cast: Hsieh Ying-xuan, Chin HanNetflix advances its robust slate of female-fronted Taiwanese drama series with Forget You Not, written and directed by Rene Liu Ruo-ying and starring Hsieh Ying-xuan as a middle-aged woman who uses stand-up comedy to process the everyday challenges in her life.Chief among these obstacles is her all-consuming relationship with her elderly father, played by Chin Han, while Wallace Huo Chien-hwa, Wang Po-chieh and Julia Wu Zhuoyuan round out the cast of this broad yet wholly relatable melodrama.Ever since her mother walked out on them when she was just eight years old, Le-le (Hsieh) and her father, Kuang-chi (Chin), have only had each other to depend on.When we first meet this headstrong 45-year-old divorcee, she is on stage at a comedy club, microphone in...

The Bolshoi Ballet’s appearance in Shenzhen was part of the company’s third tour to China in as many years – Beijing in 2023, Shanghai in 2024 and this year Beijing and Shenzhen.After a hiatus during the Covid-19 pandemic, this was a golden opportunity to see the new generation of dancers who have been making waves in Moscow since 2020.A glittering line-up that included no fewer than 10 principal dancers plus numerous soloists produced outstanding dancing, confirming that the Bolshoi remains one of the world’s greatest ballet companies.If there were a few moments when dancers looked under-rehearsed or tired, that is not surprising; the tour seems to have been decided upon at very short notice and the dancers had moved to Shenzhen immediately after five performances in five days in Beijing,...

4/5 starsThere was a time when Jennifer Lawrence was known as one of the most fearless actresses of her generation. More recently she has taken a step back, shifting down gears with films like Causeway and No Hard Feelings.But her reputation will surely be bolstered on the back of Die My Love, in which she gives a searing turn as a married mother who comes apart at the seams after giving birth.Playing in Cannes Film Festival’s main competition, this adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel is the brainchild of Lynne Ramsay. The Scottish filmmaker has managed five films in 26 years, a number that deserves to be more given what a unique talent she is.So it goes here: from the off, Ramsay plunges us into the mind of Grace, Lawrence’s increasingly fractured young parent.This is Ramsay’s first film...

Mark Knopfler and John Illsley have differing memories of the creation of Dire Straits’ most successful album.“It was like any other album,” says the former frontman and songwriter Knopfler, 75, almost stoically.In contrast, bassist Illsley, also 75, and still close friends with his former bandmate, said he immediately recognised that the band’s fifth studio album could be something special.“I knew instinctively we had some great material here,” he says. “We were going to have a really good album.”Illsley was proved right. Brothers In Arms, featuring classics like “Money For Nothing” and “Walk Of Life”, became a global success, selling more than 30 million copies and becoming one of the bestselling albums in music history. A new edition is now being released to mark its 40th anniversary....

An eastern German city is offering two weeks of free lodgings in a bid to attract new residents as it continues to grapple with depopulation some 35 years after reunification.Successful applicants will be eligible to spend two weeks in a furnished flat in Eisenhüttenstadt, some 100km (62 miles) southeast of Berlin, from September 6-20, the city administration said.Like many other regions in the former communist East Germany, Eisenhüttenstadt has seen a sharp population decline in the decades after German reunification, with younger people in particular moving away to look for work elsewhere.City official Julia Basan noted that the current population has declined to some 24,000 in recent years, from around 50,000 in 1990.Eisenhüttenstadt was initially designed for a population of 30,000. Ph...