Inside is back! – escaping Soho for the Frontline Club but still the same bohemian mix of music, comedy, spoken word, creativity & alcohol. Headlined by Indie Rock Band Hows Harry as well as fantastic inspirational singer songwriter Amy Odell, fantastic musician David Catlin-Birch with comedy from the incomparable Darcie Silver and Elle Bert. It’s going to be an amazing night!

Forget Christmas and New Year – this is the celebration you can’t miss.

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Bejan Matur is the most illustrious poet among a bold new women’s poetry emerging from the maelstrom in the Middle East.

Bejan’s poetry is certainly engaged in her people’s struggles, currently spilling across borders that ill-define ravaged eastern Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. She has been jailed by the Turkish regime, and – with other writers – faces continuous menace and harassment. She writes dissident journalism and a prose work based on interviews with Kurdish men and women became an instant bestseller in Turkey.

Her first book of translations into English, In The Temple of a Patient God, refers in stark terms to an Exodus by stateless people who “… walked with touches of the moon / veiling our pain / but still we were tired”. And more vividly: “My mother shows the dead / to my brother / and has become the journey. / They weep together”. 

And yet there is always this palpable mysticism in her writing, close to nature, imagining dragons and leopards, meditating on creation – a dialogue with God. Or what her translator calls “an endless spiritual quest to understand the nature of being”. And this is what propels a second translated volume, How Abraham Abandoned Me, which Matur wrote after being impelled to abandon a trip to Lebanon and listen to the poetry in her mind inspired by her native Diyarbakir. The result can only be likened to Coleridge’s Kubla Khan – visionary, as though dictated from some outer world, writing of: “A long sleep in the garden / and before roses / and birdsong / the serpent, / his body unfamiliar with earth / would slither along / and steal heaven away from us.” Or: “Where poets / and prayers / and words cannot reach / a lover’s breath / and his throbbing breast / will be the guide. / A lover’s swelling heart / watching the river at night / will summon the tiger”. 

For this very special BookNight, Bejan will talk about her work and people, but – here’s the difference – sections of Bejan’s poetry will be read first in translation, and then by her in Turkish or Kurdish, according to the original.

Recommended reading: In The Temple of a Patient God, and How Abraham Abandoned Me, both published by Arc. 

The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, followed by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM.

Three course menu costs £25 per person – drinks not included.

The event will be hosted by Senior Correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Aurélie Bourguet.

On Friday 19 June 2015, the Frontline Club held a screening of the genre-defying Those Who Feel the Fire Burning, an experimental film focusing on the experiences of those who risk their lives in order to reach the shores of Europe. The audience was joined by co-producer Katja Draaijer for a discussion following the screening.

Producer Katja Draaijer

On the film’s experimental narrative structure, Draaijer said: “It was always clear from the beginning that he [director Morgan Knibbe] wanted to tell the story from the perspective of a ghost. That’s why he used style elements from fiction films.”

“On the news we see all the numbers,” said Draaijer, “but he didn’t want to portray them [the refugees] as victims, but for we as an audience to experience what it is to be a refugee. That’s why he wanted to tell it from the perspective of a refugee himself.”

Asked by an audience member about the myriad languages spoken the film’s protagonists, Draaijer explained:
“Most of the time he [Knibbe] didn’t understand what was said. For the Arabic we had an Arabic translator… What he was really doing was intuitive, just really following them around. He didn’t care, really, about what they were saying. He just wanted to show the people what they do. How they cook, how they live. And that’s what he did. Sometimes he thought, ‘OK I have enough’ and turned the camera away. In the editing we found out that that really worked that way. It wasn’t so much about what they were telling us, [but] more about their experiences at the time.”

An audience member asked what personal impact the filmmaking process had on the director.

“When he started he was only 22,” replied Draaijer. “He wanted to help everyone by giving them money. So that was the first thing I said, ‘Don’t help these people by giving them money, you can help in another way.’

“I think after Lampedusa he was really emotional, for a long time… He wants the whole world to see it.”

For more information about the film and upcoming screenings, visit the Those Who Feel the Fire Burning Facebook page.

After an inspiring discussion with Robert McCrum on his list of the 100 greatest novels of all time composed for The Observer, we remain in the literary gear and welcome the acclaimed playwright, poet, and librettist Dan O’Brien.

During the evening, Dan will give a reading from his book of poems War Reporter, as well as talking about his critically acclaimed play The Body of an American, which was derived from the same material.

The collection of poems focuses on the photojournalist Paul Watson. Paul won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1993 photograph of a dead American being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Deriving from correspondence between poet and photojournalist, from transcripts, Watson’s own memoir, and their eventual meeting on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, these poems bear unsparing witness to the incalculable damage inflicted by contemporary warfare.

‘War Reporter is an edgy, heartbreaking amalgam of memoir, dramatic monologue and poetic intensity, in which war reporter Paul Watson’s complex personal struggles are seen against the backdrop of political violence.’
– Alan Shapiro

‘A masterpiece of truthfulness and feeling, and a completely sui generis addition not just to writing about war but to contemporary poetry’
– Patrick McGuinness, Guardian

War Reporter won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2013 and was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize 2013, while The Body of an American won the prestigious Horton Foote Prize in New York in September 2014.

The format for the night will be as tried and tested: drinks from 7:00 PM, dinner at 7:30 PM – getting to know one another over starters before I cue our guest. After Dan‘s readings the discussion begins over the main course. Same ethos as usual: this is not a “book club”, more a 19th century salon after which people leave merrier, better-fed and wiser than when they arrived, having hopefully made new acquaintances, friends, lovers, who knows.

We do intend to keep the dinner intimate and places are going fast, so please book now.

Very best wishes, see you there –

Ed Vulliamy & Pranvera Smith 
Frontline Club BookNights

Menu £25 per person excluding drink

On Wednesday 26 March 2014, Lacuna magazine hosted a night of discussion and performance at the Frontline Club chaired by Maureen Freely, English Pen president.

ice&fire perform an extract of a new play based on the Sri Lankan civil war

Lesley McIntyre spoke first about her time spent photographing the RAF Greenham protest against nuclear weapons in the early eighties:

“What I saw at Greenham . . . it was a moment that was unprecedented, and an extraordinary ability to sustain a non-violent demonstration. . . . I always tried . . . to care about composition. . . . It was always trying to get an aesthetic image, a symbolic image that could be a metaphor for it.”

Freely:

“What struck me this time [watching McIntyre’s film] the aesthetic comes first. . . . It’s the aesthetic that makes you understand that something extraordinary is going on. It implies that . . . art is not separate.”

The birth of McIntyre‘s daughter, Molly, led to her leaving the Greenham project but led to the start of a whole new chapter in her life: Molly’s life with disability and her fight to get her into mainstream school. McIntyre documented the entire time through her photographs which eventually formed the book The Time of Her Life.

On finding the aesthetics within her photographs, McIntyre said that it only revealed itself when she started to slowly print up the images years later:

“I was suddenly aware that what I had recorded was a life effectively, from birth until death. . . . The edit almost revealed itself. . . . It would have been very hard to write, to describe her physical presence. . . . Photographs reveal that. . . . I really wanted to address that particular aspect and how beautiful she was.”

Laila Sumpton discussing found poetry #lacunalive pic.twitter.com/Pp2GTopQfy

— Lacuna Magazine (@Lacunamagazine) March 26, 2014

Laila Sumpton is a poet, member of the Keats House Poetry Forum and also works with young campaigners at global children’s charity Plan UK, to help empower young people to speak about their own lives. After reading from In Protest: 150 Poems for Human Rights, Sumpton said that laughter is a key emotion to fighting with words:

“Laughter is an incredibly powerful tool . . . to confront human rights abuses, to stand up to terrible situations and spin them on their head – spin the power structures on their head as well. There are a lot of very harrowing poems in [the book] but there are also a lot of poems which stand up and say, ‘No, we’re going to show you how ridiculous you are by using humour.’”

"Laughter is a choice between survival and defeat" Laila Sumpton #lacunalive

— Lacuna Magazine (@Lacunamagazine) March 26, 2014

Lacuna editor Andrew Williams and lecturer in law and creative writing at Warwick University said that after 20 years of working in legal terminology as a lawyer he became incensed by the constrained language and form he was forced to use.  He decided to take it out in creative writing, particularly his book A Very British Killing, which describes in minute and intense detail the case of Barha Mousa, who was beaten to death in the middle of a British military base in Iraq.

“The book is based on vigorous approach towards evidence . . . trying to look at more detail than you would possibly see in a court case, the detail that lies behind just the facts, the pettiness of the behaviour, which wasn’t overly abusive, just childish in it’s nature. . . . The aesthetic element of that is to try and break through the press reporting of it or the legal description in court, all very dry, all very mundane. . . . The aesthetic here is to try and get to a deeper truth.”

Maureen Freely, Lesley McIntyre and Andrew Williams discuss art and politics at the Frontline Club

ice&fire artistic director Christine Bacon started out as an actor in Australia. In 2001, the then-Australian prime minister John Howard refused a boat of asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Iraq entry to the country forcing them to be detained on the small island nation of Nauru for four years. The Australian people subsequently voted Howard back into parliament.

“These events are shocking enough in themselves, the most shocking thing to me was that 85% of the Australian public agreed with the actions of the government. . . . That was my moment, of just saying, ‘What? Why do I think differently to everyone else?’”

Christine Bacon on being inspired by the conduct of Australian govt towards asylum seekers in 2001 #lacunalive

— Lacuna Magazine (@Lacunamagazine) March 26, 2014

Bacon attended a meeting addressing the situation and heard a woman speak who had survived for three days in the ocean after around 350 people drowned around her.

“It was so vivid . . . this encounter with this woman, and I thought if only other people can have this experience, if only other people can hear what she’s saying in such an authentic and immediate way, surely things could change.”

ice&fire performed a short extract from a new play that addresses the Sri Lankan civil war. Bacon said she was shocked to find out about what happened in Sri Lanka:

“It was shocking in terms of its subject matter, but again the shocking thing was, ‘Why don’t I know this? . . . Why is this not common knowledge? . . . Why is Sri Lanka not being held to account for this?’ That was really the impetuous for how do we find a way to make this as vivid as these stories were for people who really have no idea it really happened.”

Really moving performance by @iceandfire about Sri Lankan civil war. Worth visiting @frontlineclub website to watch live recording

— R Omonira-Oyekanmi (@Rebecca_Omonira) March 26, 2014

An audience member asked, how do you stop these outputs from being purely aesthetic or on the reverse being swayed by government or NGO outlooks?

Bacon:

“Everything that we’ve done has been rooted in very detailed research and speaking to those people and making sure what is presented has an authenticity about it. . . . How can we authentically communicate something so complex difficult, full of all sorts of facets to people that are the lay-audience and make them understand this is something you should care about? . . . Because listen to that person. . . . It’s about this person, where they are and what they’ve been through, that’s why we should care. And that’s part of the power of art and expressive mediums.”

Watch or listen to the full discussion below:

“The evening breeze
blows towards the bride
as she takes her leave
on her wedding day.”

(“New Bride, New Night” by Salma)

On Thursday 26 September, the Frontline Club and DocHouse screened the evocative documentary Salma. Hosted at Rich Mix, the film was the latest in the Between the Lines Follow-Up series.

Directed by Kim Longinotto, the film follows the poet and novelist Salma on her return to her home village where she was effectively imprisoned for 25 years. Editor Ollie Huddleston joined for the post-film Q&A.

Elizabeth Wood of DocHouse began with a discussion on the craft of editing:

“Fiction films are shot to a script, but really, with a film like this, and with all Kim’s films, a script is really written during the edit.”

“I think the best documentary films are like fiction films,” responded Huddleston:

“You’re building a story. . . . I look at this film now and I see it’s of course a film about Tamil Nadu and Muslim culture and Salma, but the important thing is always that it should connect to us. It’s a very universal story in some ways. The bonds, the knots, the ties, the families. Fear of breaking away and not being able to break away.”

Editor Ollie Huddleston. Photo: George Symonds

An audience member asked if the village had changed since the film was made.

“My experience of the village,” said Huddleston, “is what I see through that material. My understanding is that it hasn’t changed, no, not at all. And I think Malik – Salma’s husband – is quite unusual. As much as he was a very strong part of keeping her away and keeping her apart from society, he also helped her to break free, and that’s very unusual.”

“He must have grown too, in a way do you think?” followed Wood.

“Yeah, the weirdest thing was that Kim and Salma, when I finally met her, said he liked the film, that he was proud of the film. That is amazing for me,” said Huddleston. “Because he doesn’t come across brilliantly sometimes. Kim said he was a lovely guy and incredibly friendly and all the rest of it, but maybe he’s happy that the story is being told. He seems very proud of his wife so eventually maybe he’s coming around and maybe the village will change, one day.”

“But,” countered Wood, “do you think perhaps he’s the one who made his sons critical of her?”

“Yes, I do. Definitely he did. But he’s part of the village, isn’t he? I mean they all are. So the village tradition has meant that they’re all bound by the past and traditions that women are locked up and hidden away.”

Ollie Huddleston in conversation with Elizabeth Wood. Photo: George Symonds.

Huddleston then spoke of the difficulties faced during filming:

“Salma had to hide a lot. They thought she was making some kind of drama film and she was going to make money out of this film in some way. So I think there was a lot of antagonism in the village. But she’s an extraordinary, pragmatic, charismatic, thoughtful, incredibly eloquent person so I imagine she found a way to explain it to them, and to get the film made.”

Hands went up in the audience to ask about the inclusion of the Hindu wedding:

“We wanted to balance the film out. That it’s not just Muslim weddings. I mean, that girl is about 10 or 11. It happens quite a lot in the village so that was the reason. It’s quite shocking, and truthful.”

Is she, Salma, interested in the world of politics and making a difference that way?

“She started a women’s refuge in Chennai and yes, she’s very interested in changing the world, most definitely,” explained Huddleston. “Politics is one way of doing that but I think at the moment she’s writing. I couldn’t say whether she’d go back into politics again. Maybe.”

Huddleston then responded to how he approached representing the many complex characters:

“You try to make stories develop. . . . Throughout the film you’re probably thinking, ‘God, how could she [Salma’s mother] do that to her daughter?’ . . . In the end, she helps her publish her books, she smuggles them out – she’s more complicated than that. So to be really crude about it, there’s a kind of set up about who the mother is. You think she’s this person then, later on, you’ve changed your opinion of her. ‘Wow, she’s stood up, she went and got the books, she sent them to a publisher, she is on Salma’s side.’ There’re many references to the mother and the complexity of that relationship is huge and crucial to the film really. You’re trying to make it understandable and very real.”

'Each shot has to count and each moment has to count' – editor Ollie Huddleston #documentary #Salma

— BerthaDocHouse (@BerthaDocHouse) September 26, 2013

To conclude, Huddleston commented on the circularity that the film depicts:

“It’s that idea that we’re constantly going in a circle. When she lies on the floor and says, ‘What can I do, I can’t leave the ones that love me, I’d be completely alone,’ isn’t that true of all families? It’s a circular thing. That seemed to be the most truthful point. She’s still yearning for her mother’s approval or love or closeness. Nothing has changed, in certain ways, even though she’s done extraordinary things.

“It’s because it’s a film about circles. Circles within families, within tradition, within religion, and trying to break free from those. That felt like the most honest end, the most truthful end. Nothing is simple.”

A collection of Salma’s poems and Longinotto’s reflections on creating the documentary is published by OR Books.

Upcoming films in the Between the Lines Follow-Up series can be found here.