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Winter Olympics disrupted by protests and 'sabotage'
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Italian authorities believe anti-Olympics protesters severed cables to disrupt trains
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Right in one spot and turn real time reporting into big time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Paul Moss and in the early hours of Sunday 8th February, these are our main stories. The Italian authorities denounced what they call serious sabotage on the rail network, linking the incidents to the start of the Winter Olympics. The US has apparently insisted that a peace deal on Ukraine be reached by the end of June and the Washington Post's chief executive executive is stepping down days after the newspaper announced mass layoffs. Also in this podcast, the French government is sending 29 year olds a letter urging them to have children and a medical milestone.
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She offered to donate her face. This gave us a unique opportunity which is having enough time in order to prepare the surgery.
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A woman offers to donate her face for a transplant before she undergoes euthanasia. On Friday, the Winter Olympics was all about sport and celebration. The opening ceremony in Milan saw music for Mariah Carey, this being Italy from Puccini and Verdi as well. And yet politics did intrude. The audience loudly booed the US Vice President JD Vance and the Israeli Olympics team. And A2 has seen all the talk of sport and universal brotherhood once again rudely interrupted. There were reports of sabotage on the Italian rail network linked to the Games. And then there was this. Demonstrators out on the streets of Milan blew whistles and chanted slogans against the Olympics presence and what began peacefully then deteriorated into violent clashes with riot police. So what exactly is it that these protesters object to about the Winter Olympics? I asked our global affairs reporter Ambarasan Ethirajan.
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Scores of people gathered in Milan on Saturday afternoon. Basically they were all part of this big group called Unsustainable Olympics Committee. This was activist organization. They had mobilized students, housing activists, many sports groups, all from the northern part of Italy. And they were against what they called the environmental impact of these Olympic venues. When you build such a huge venue, it is causing damage to the surroundings. When they reached the Olympic village, violent activities were happening. They were throwing fireworks and then police used water cannon as well as tear gas to disperse the group. And then only one group was firing these fireworks as well as attacking police vans. The other group, they were protesting peacefully and they wanted highlight how unsustainable these games could be.
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Saturday also saw a suggestion that the railways in Italy have been sabotaged in several places. Do we know if there's any connection with the protests you're talking about?
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The authorities are talking about three incidents. One was about a box containing a switch was set on fire. This is near the city of Pesaro. And the second one was where they saw severed cables near the city of Bologna and a very rudimentary explosive device in another location. So that actually caused more than two and a half hours of delay in these high speed trains and they suspended for a while. But later on Saturday afternoon they started resuming the service. But the ministers are taking this very seriously. What they are saying is that this echoes what happened in France during the Paris Olympics in 2024 when the high speed network was targeted by a group of people. But the officials were blaming various group including anarchists and extreme left. And they said probably the similar kind of thing was happening. But the ministers in Italy saying that it will not deter them and the Olympics will continue. This also comes two days after the Italian authorities were talking about cyber attacks which they blame on Russia. Targeting Foreign Ministry websites, some of the Olympic Games website as well.
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Ambarasan Ethirajan. There can't be many people who've served as a country's culture Minister but also been sent to North Korea to talk about its nuclear missile program and advised the United nations on how to prosecute Somali pirates. But then Jack Lang was a giant of the French political and cultural scene over several decades. Which makes it all the more pointed that he's now been brought down by his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. He joins the ever growing list of people whose reputations have been tarnished or ruined by their relationship with a late sex offender. A Paris correspondent, Hugh Schofield, has the details.
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Anyone who knows anything about modern French politics and history will know about Jacques Lang. He's an incredibly permanent figure in the French political landscape. He's now 86. You know, he's been around since the 80s as Mitterrand's. Francois Mitterrand's Socialist Culture Minister back then, so a very, very well known figure now, head of this Arab World Institute. And when the files were revealed, you know, a week or so ago, it was quickly seen that Jack Lang's name keeps coming up. It comes up nearly 700 times in the new files and his daughters too, Carol, who was a figure in the film world. Now, there's no suggestion for a second that either of them had anything to do or knowledge of his sexual activities. But there is a suspicion that they were a very friendly with him. It's quite clear that that was the case because Epstein would constantly be in touch with Laing when he came to Paris. He had a home here. And then there's more, because it's clear also that between Caroline Laing and Epstein there was some kind of financial arrangement to set up an offshore company in the American Virgin Islands, which was funded by Epstein in theory to buy French artworks. Plus there's indication that at some point Jacques Lang intervened with Epstein to try to arrange the sale of a Riad, a fancy house in Morocco, and that he got $60,000 from Epstein to help fund a film about his political career. None of which amounts to criminality. But it's all highly embarrassing. And the pressure has been building on Jacques Lang to step down from this sort of diplomatic post, which he's got kind of permanently at the head of the Arab World Institute. And on top of that, you know, there is now a preliminary criminal inquiry. I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean that it will end up as a full criminal kind of prosecution, but the prosecutor's office is looking into suspicions that maybe there's something criminal that went on financially between the Langes and Epstein, I imagine, regarding this offshore account in the Virgin Islands. So all in all, highly embarrassing. And at a time when France wants to, to boost its standing around the world and wants to be squeaky clean, it was clear that the pressure on him to go was very, very strong.
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Hugh Schofield and staying in France, 29 year olds there will soon be getting a letter in the post reminding them that their biological clock is ticking. The French government, like others around the world, is urging people to have more children. As official data shows France recorded more deaths than births last year for the first time since the Second World War. But the new scheme hoping to buck that trend is not going down well. As our reporter Stephanie Prentice told anchor.
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Desai, well, the scheme to tackle fertility issues in France has been in the works for a while at the Ministry of Health. But it's just been revealed. Well, aspects. At least one of 16 new measures is this letter that will arrive when people turn 29, reminding them of their biological clock and basically give them a nudge to say, get on with it if you want to have children. Its goal, it says to tackle what it calls the if only I had known mentality, which some young people in France have been reacting to. So they're saying this doesn't make any sense. They're saying sending a letter to remind them isn't necessary. French influencers have also been commenting, mostly humorously, saying lack of awareness isn't the issue. They haven't got any money, they haven't got job security. With one viral comment saying people don't want to be pressured, saying Macron et la combie undfant, pointing out that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, doesn't have biological children.
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Now, what's the reaction been as well, the broader reaction?
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Well, this is part of a broader plan to support people in France. It estimates one in eight couples have fertility issues. The letter includes a reminder that egg freezing can be done for free there between certain ages. It says it wants to make France a world leader in fertility research. So that's been welcomed. Before we came on air, I spoke to a professor at the University de Paris. She's called Stephanie Tatin. She specializes in public health policy. She thinks it's very complicated. She says the plan ignores fundamental issues in French society. She described a kind of tangle of societal, economic and behavioral reasons. And she said that young women are basically opting out of having children. Her prediction is that the birth rate will continue to decline.
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Stephanie Prentice. Spain has been a global leader in organ transplants for more than three decades, with Valdebaron Hospital in Barcelona leading the way. And this week, the staff there have marked another world. First in the way a face transplant was conducted. The recipient was identified only by her first name, Kame. She'd suffered facial tissue necrosis, which affected her ability to speak, eat and to see. The donor was a woman who'd been terminally ill and who opted for assisted dying, and that made the operation easier to perform, as Dr. Juan Perry Barret explained to my colleague Julian Wariker.
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She commented that she wanted to donate all her organs and tissues, and then the transplant coordinators had an interview with her. She also offered to donate her face if there was anyone that really needed that in order to get a face transplantation. And I think it's a maximum expression of love and generosity and she was smiling during all that process. So I think the intensity of all feelings and emotions and everything during that time was very, very high.
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We then obviously start to talk about the recipient. What was the actual medical procedure that you then had to carry out and the enormity of it and the scale of it, what went on.
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This also gave us a unique opportunity that no one else had carried out before in the world, which is having enough time in order to prepare the surgery, making plans with my medical engineers in terms of how cut the bone to be a perfect match. Also we had time to go to the anatomy department to make all the rehearsals of every tricky steps of the surgery and also prepare all the teams that had to be involved in that because with euthanasia it's probably the most complex type of multi organ donation that exists.
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Tell us about the recipient now. How is she doing?
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She's doing quite well. She has to cope now with some difficulties like any other transplant patient, but now she's in the rehabilitation phase now. She has recovered sensation in all her transplant area. So all the transplanted tissues that went to her face now have full sensation and now she's regaining movement in all the facial muscles.
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Where does this take the potential for these kinds of procedures in the future? I have a figure in front of me here. 54 facial transplants have been performed worldwide, six in Spain, three by your team. Where does this go? How much more widely could this apply in the near future, do you think?
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My impression is that we are going to advance a lot in terms of regenerative medicine and biology. Also in terms of bioengineering. In years to come, probably this will be just history.
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Dr. Juan Peribarret from Barcelona's Val d' Hebron Hospital. Still to come in this podcast, could Elon Musk really put AI data centers in space?
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It is not impossible to put a single data center into space, but it's never going to be a better idea than building it here on Earth.
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And the enduring appeal of Iran's new wave cinema. Hey, this is U.S. olympic gold medalist Tara Davis Woodhull. And I'm U.S. paralympic gold medalist Hunter Woodhull.
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New spring collection at 20% off $75 or more with code iHeart20 support is available 24. 7 with Verbo Care. We're here day or night, ready whenever you need help because a great trip starts with the right support. When it comes to the war in Ukraine, there have been plenty of grim predictions that the conflict will go on and on, the two sides irreconcilable. Russia's demands unacceptable. And yet it seems Donald Trump wants the whole thing over and done with by June. According to President Zelensky, the US Administration has set June as a deadline because it wants the situation sorted out well ahead of America's midterm elections in November. Mr. Zelenskyy made clear the challenge of reaching a peace deal, not least that this new deadline was imposed just as Russia launched one of its most ferocious drone and missile attacks yet on Ukraine's energy infrastructure. This is a level of attack that no terrorist in the world has ever allowed themselves to carry out, and Russia must feel the response of the entire world. Russia must demonstrate that they don't just care about striking and the war itself, but also truly about the negotiations that are currently ongoing and that they must deliver results. But until that happens, it is, of course, the ordinary citizens of Ukraine who'll bear the brunt of Russia's attempt to destroy its power supply. People like Katerina Malofieva, a journalist living in Kyiv.
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At home, the heating is completely cold, the radiator is cold. You could see the steam coming out of your mouth because it's so cold. And yeah, so basically the situation is difficult for the all members of this.
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Part of the city. And of course, there is no hot.
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Water, because it depends on the electricity. The electricity we have like three, four hours a day.
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That's not enough.
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So everyone just hope for the springtime, because at least in springtime, you know, the power outages in general, it's not.
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As frightening as actually staying without heat.
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It's really. It's really hard.
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Talks to end the war in Ukraine were held in Abu Dhabi this past week, but with little sign of progress there due to reconvene in Miami. And President Zelensky has now confirmed that he will be sending a delegation. But what the President has repeatedly made clear is that the country needs more military equipment to fend off a Russian invasion, which for now remains ongoing. And that was made all too clear by the latest attack on energy infrastructure. As Sarah Rainsford explained from Kyiv, it's.
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Another large scale attack and a large number of those missiles and drones making it through Ukraine's air defenses, which I think is significant because it points to what Ukraine keeps saying, which is that their air defenses lack enough missiles to defend the big cities and the power plants in particular that are being repeatedly and relentlessly targeted. Yesterday we went to visit the remains essentially of a thermal power plant here in Kyiv that had been hit with five ballistic missiles in recent days in just one night. And the damage there is extraordinary. I mean, just a massive mess of rubble and metal. And the power plant itself was only producing heating and hot water at the time to nearby apartment block. So, you know, the laws of war are pretty clear about striking civilian infrastructure, but Russia is doing that repeatedly. But at the same time, you know, despite these Russian attacks on the energy infrastructure, the difficult conditions in the midst of a very bitterly cold winter here, I haven't seen any sign that the mood for compromise is increasing. In fact, I think the mood is actually hardening. And the anger at Russia has increased in recent times, is my assessment. But in terms of the concrete stuff, well, it's interesting that President Zelensky says that. That Russia has stopped kind of its pseudo historical lectures, and instead it is focused on the actual discussions and that they are discussing, for example, how any ceasefire, if it were ever agreed upon, would be monitored. You know, who would be responsible for that kind of real concrete stuff. But as for where that ceasefire line would ever be drawn, there is still total disagreement on that point. And of course, that is the big issue, you know, the issue of territory. Interestingly, I think Mr. Zelensky said there was a discussion or kind of a suggestion that at some point, the hardest decisions, the hardest stuff particularly, of course, that issue of territory would eventually have to be decided by the presidents of Ukraine and Russia, as well as Donald Trump.
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Sarah Rainsford as we record this podcast, Voting is taking place in Thailand in an election called early after a series of coalition governments collapsed. The ruling Conservative Party faces tough opposition from the People's Party. The latter is ahead in the polls and has the support of young urban voters who are calling for political reforms. But as Jonathan Head reports, winning the most votes doesn't necessarily mean you get to rule the country. As in the last election three years ago, this one pits a youthful party advocating far reaching reforms against conservative forces and the populist movement headed by former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Three years ago, the young reformers won, only to be barred from forming a government by the military appointed Senate and then dissolved by the notoriously interventionist Constitutional Court. That led to a series of unstable coalitions in which two prime ministers were dismissed by the same court. Thailand's once dynamic economy has ground to a halt and opinion polls suggest the latest incarnation of the reformers, the People's Party, will win again, although the current conservative Prime Minister, Anitin Chawirakun, is mounting a strong challenge by appealing to nationalist sentiment in the wake of the two short border wars with Cambodia last year. But everyone here knows winning in Thai elections is never enough. Powerful, unelected bodies like the courts will ultimately decide who actually runs this country. Jonathan Head There were a few people scratching their heads when Elon Musk announced he was merging two of his companies. Xai is the artificial intelligence wing of his corporate empire, while SpaceX of course, focuses on space rockets. So what's the connection? Well, it seems Mr. Musk wants to take the data centers used for AI and send them into orbit, where he believes they can be powered by the unfiltered energy of the sun. Science fiction? Not at all, the tech billionaire insisted. It's a development that's just round the corner.
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It's a no brainer for building AI.
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Solar powered AI data centers in space. The lowest cost place to put AI will be space, and that'll be true within two years, maybe three.
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Three at the latest.
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It should be said that Elon Musk's plans for space have often been dismissed, only for some of them, at least to materialize just the way he promised. And yet this latest plan has met with particular skepticism. Among the doubters is Adam Michael Becker, an American astrophysicist who spoke to my colleague James Kumarasamy there are a lot.
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Of reasons why data centers in space make absolutely no sense. And at the top of that list is a very basic fact about space, which is that, you know, the best insulator is a vacuum. So putting a data center in space is like putting a giant blanket around it, and data centers need to be kept nice and cool.
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Elon Musk's answer to that, certainly when he was speaking at the World Economic Forum, is that you have a radiator pointed away from the sun.
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It would be massive. And that's going to be extraordinarily difficult to deploy in space for just one data center, much less, you know, a lot of them. There are also many other problems. For example, the radiation levels are much higher in space, and radiation wreaks havoc on digital data. If you ever want to upgrade the hardware in the data center, congratulations, you have to do a spacewalk.
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But I suppose one could ask, are they insurmountable problems given, you know, at some point in our history, the, the idea of even going into space was thought to be fanciful. Are these insurmountable necessarily?
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It is not impossible to put a single data center into space, but it's never gonna be a better idea than building it here on Earth.
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Well, you've addressed the economic and the practical, but there is another aspect to this, is there not? And one that you're interested in, which is the philosophical one, the why not just Elon Musk, but, but others are saying, look, we have to look to the stars for our future.
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You know, Musk talks a lot about putting a million people on Mars by 2050 in order to create a backup for humanity that will survive in the event of a massive disaster here on Earth, like an asteroid strike. This is possibly the stupidest idea that I've ever heard. I think that for someone like Musk, or, you know, someone like Jeff Bezos, who's espoused similar ideas, there's two things that work there, I think two main things. First, that they are afraid of death and want to transcend all limits and see going to space as part of that project. And second, they watched too much science fiction and misunderstood it.
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Is your concern then that some of this is displacement activity for actually addressing the problems on Earth?
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Yeah, absolutely. The way that Musk talks about Earth is like, it's doomed, you know, yeah, we've got problems here on Earth, but none of them are nearly as difficult to solve as the problem of getting a large number of people to be able to live on the surface of Mars and then take a look at somebody like Jeff Bezos. He thinks that, you know, the biggest problem that we're facing is that we're going to use up all the resources on Earth and so we have to go to space to have access to more energy. We could also just find better ways of using the energy and resources here on Earth.
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Adam Michael Becker Jeff Bezos is another tech billionaire who's been in the news, though it's matters terrestrial that concern the owner of Amazon. Mr. Bezos stands accused of deliberately killing off the Washington Post, the newspaper he bought in 2013. The post announced this week it was cutting a third of its workforce and Saturday saw the chief executive, Will Lewis, resign. Rory Gallimore has this report. The Washington Post's official slogan is Democracy dies in darkness. Many of its staff say these sweeping cuts made a mockery of that motto. Much of their anger has been directed at the paper's billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, and the man he appointed as its publisher two years ago, Will Lewis. The British journalist has proved a divisive figure at the Post. Under his leadership, it has failed to reverse heavy financial losses and tens of thousands of readers cancelled their subscriptions. When Mr. Bezos stopped the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris during the last presidential election, Mr. Lewis reportedly angered staff even further by not showing up to the video call announcing the job losses. The task of explaining the cuts was left to the Post's executive editor, who said the decision was painful but insisted it would bring stability and help reinvent a struggling business model. Mr. Lewis has now told colleagues it's the right time to go. He said difficult decisions had been made to ensure the Post could keep delivering high quality news. He's been replaced by the chief financial officer, Rory Gallimore. They may have been shot down on the streets of Iranian towns and cities, but protests against the country's rulers continue abroad. Saturday saw demonstrations in Berlin and in the United States. A nationwide gathering of Iranian Americans was held in Washington D.C. from where BBC Persia's Kaisaya Junaidi sent this report. A group of Iranians gathered here at the national mall in Washington D.C. on Saturday to show support for the protesters.
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Inside the country as they were chanting.
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Slogans against the leadership of the Islamic Republic Ali Khamenes. The Iranian was organized by pro monarchist groups and mainly these people here were also chanting showing their support for the former Crown Prince Rezaf Ahlayiya. You could see them holding flags of the pre revolutionary Iran as well as.
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The American flag and the Israeli flag.
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The protesters were also chanting in English calling on President Trump to take action against the Iranian regime. I have to mention that several of these protesters who I've talked to were saying that they were not very happy that the US administration is engaged in diplomatic talk with the Iranian government at this moment. Despite the obvious focus on protest and politics, critics of Iran's government have often expressed their views through the arts and particularly cinema. Indeed, a feature film about dissidents there It Was Just An Accident has received two nominations for this year's Oscars. But the history of Iranian cinema long precedes the country being an Islamic republic. And a festival has just opened here in London, which is screening some of those earlier films. The curator ers and Hochschpakt told us they feel particularly resonant at these uncertain times.
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In the late 50s and early 60s, there was this international movement in cinema of renewing the language of film. We are familiar with the examples from around the world, France, Japan, Czechoslovakia. And I think the least known of these cinematic new waves was the Iranian New wave of the early 60s. Up to the time of the revolution, the films were extremely bold. They were pushing the language of the film to the extent that even films after the revolution couldn't match the same level of innovation and intensity as the films made in a period. Stories about class, repression, sexuality, freedom of expression. And I think the most distinctive aspect of the Iranian new wave is the use of language and poetry. 1400 years of poetry and also the use of allegory. Today. I think some filmmakers totally reject that because they want something head on, because the cinema has now become perhaps more militant than what it was back in the 60s and 70s. Still, the beauty of allegory, the timelessness that allegory gives you because it's wrapped in many different layers of image and language. These are the origins of a cinema of dissent, of a cinema of rebellion.
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Iranian born filmmaker Ehsan Hochbakt. And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us@globalpodcastbc.co.uk you can also find us on XBCWorldService. Use the hashtag globalnewspod. And don't forget our sister podcast, the Global Story, which goes in depth and beyond the headlines on one big story, available wherever you get your podcasts. This edition of the Global News Podcast was mixed by Sholotta Had Roy Tojimska and the producer was Muzaffa Shakir. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Paul Moss. Until next time. Goodbye. If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.