Proud of my roots: Yalitza Aparicio
The Oscar-nominated Mexican actor Yalitza Aparicio, who stars in the critically acclaimed film Roma, said recently that she was proud of her indigenous roots, after a soap opera star used a racial slur to describe her. “I am proud to be an Oaxacan indigenous woman and it saddens me that there are people who do not know the correct meaning of words,” Aparicio, who became the first indigenous woman to be nominated for a best actress Oscar, said in a statement.
Last Friday, a video surfaced on Twitter in which the Mexican actor Sergio Goyri, 60, can be heard criticising the film community for nominating “A f*****g Indian who says, ‘Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am’.”
Goyri quickly apologised. “It was never my intent to offend anyone. I apologise to Yalitza, who deserves [the Oscar nomination] and much more,” he said in a video posted on Instagram. “For me, it is an honour to see a Mexican be nominated for an Oscar.”
Aparicio, 25, starred as a domestic worker in director Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, which chronicles the life of an upper-middle-class family in the Mexico City neighborhood where Cuaron was raised.
The film, which was released by Netflix, has been nominated for 10 Oscars at the Academy Awards, to be held in Los Angeles on February 24.
CBBC sitcom accused of racism
An upcoming BBC children’s sitcom that focuses on a British Chinese family has been marred by accusations of racism. A group representing British East Asians in the film and TV industry said it was indefensible that the show should have been developed and written with little input from writers and creatives from the community.
The CBBC series Living With the Lams is about a family that runs a restaurant in Manchester and is still in development. Members of British East Asians Working in Theatre and Screen (Beats) have seen scripts that they say perpetuate racial stereotypes and contain a “litany of orientalist cliches”.
More than 100 Beats members have signed an open letter to the BBC and the production company Twenty Twenty to complain that the enlisting of a Chinese writer as a cultural consultant had been insufficient. “We do not accept the use of cultural consultants as replacements for British East Asian writers in a show where the raison d’etre pivots on the lives of a British Chinese family,” the letter says.
It says widespread concerns about the script were ignored or dismissed, and that established British East Asian writers were told they were too inexperienced to be involved in the show. Signatories to the letter include the actors David Yip and Jessica Henwick and the American playwright David Henry Hwang.
Is this the real gateway to hell?
If there is a gateway to hell, a portal from the underworld used by demons and witches to wreak their evil havoc on humanity, then it could be in a small east Midlands cave handy for both the M1 and A60. Heritage experts have revealed what is thought to be the biggest concentration of apotropaic marks, or symbols to ward off evil or misfortune, ever found in the UK.
The markings, at Creswell
Crags, a limestone gorge on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border, include hundreds of letters, symbols and patterns carved, at a time when belief in witchcraft was widespread. The scale and variety of the marks made on the limestone walls and ceiling of a cave which has at its centre a deep, dark, hole, is unprecedented.
Believed to protect against witches and curses, the marks were discovered by chance at the site, which is also home to the only ice age art ever discovered in the UK. Paul Baker, the director of Creswell Heritage Trust, said the marks had been in plain sight. They had known they were there. “But we told people it was Victorian graffiti,” he said. “We had no idea. Can you imagine how stupid we felt?”
