The activist who first said “Me Too”
Ruben Östlund is fascinated by human behaviour. “Basically, all my films are about people trying to avoid losing face,” he told Xan Brooks in The Observer. His last film, Force Majeure (2014), was about a father who abandons his family at the first whiff of danger, then lies about it. The Square, his new film, contains a scene in which one character, an artist, claims in an interview that he is interested in “human responses to art” – but is then completely thrown when a man with Tourette’s starts shouting at him from the floor. This episode was lifted from Östlund’s own experience: he was watching a play in his native Sweden “when this guy starts clapping and then shushing himself. Clapping and shushing... So we’re all sitting there and our attention is split. What’s more interesting? The play on the stage or the man in the seat? And every time the actors did a loud scene, the man would get more excited. So now the actors are terrified! ‘Oh my God, I’m coming to the scene where I have to raise my voice and that’s only going to set him off.’” Östlund bursts out laughing. “It was probably the best play I’ve ever seen.”
Morpurgo and his children
Michael Morpurgo has a deep love of rural life. For 40 years, he and his wife have lived in a village near Dartmoor. They didn’t come to Devon only for themselves, though, but to fulfil a dream: they wanted to give city children a chance to experience nature on a working farm. The aim is to wake them from “the stupor of alienation”, Morpurgo told John Gapper in the FT. “They’re disconnected from the world around them and sometimes from each other... They have never seen buzzards in the air, wheeling above each other. They’ve never seen a heron lifting off the river. They’ve never seen a salmon jump.” Thousands of children have passed through their doors; one of them was April Bloomfield, then living on a council estate in Birmingham, now a Michelin-starred chef in New York. She recently invited the Morpurgos to dinner: “She said, ‘You’re sitting here because I learnt about milking cows on your farm.’”
Maisie Sly’s message
Gilson Sly is justifiably proud of his daughter, says Anna Hart in The Daily Telegraph. Aged six, Maisie has just played the lead role in an Oscar-winning short film. The Silent Child is about a profoundly deaf child born to hearing parents, who lives in silence until she is taught to sign. Maisie, from Swindon, is herself deaf, and so are her parents. And for them, what matters is not the Oscar; it’s the film’s message: sign language is not just for deaf people. “When I read the script for the first time, I got goosebumps,” says Gilson. “Deafness is not a learning disability. With the right support, a deaf child can achieve the same as a hearing child. Deafness is a communication issue.” It was in October last year, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, that #Metoo became a global phenomenon, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph. But the movement did not begin as a hashtag on Twitter. It was started by the civil rights activist Tarana Burke in 2006, and was inspired by an event in Alabama years before that. In 1997, Burke was working at a youth camp when she was approached by a young girl called Heaven, who told her that her mother’s boyfriend “was doing things to her”. Having been assaulted herself as a child, Burke listened, but couldn’t find the words to help: “Why couldn’t I bring myself to say: ‘me too’?” In 2006, she launched a non-profit organisation to help victims of sexual violence, Just Be Inc, and gave it the banner “Me Too”. When the latter went viral, she was panicked that her life’s work would be “co-opted”, not least by famous white women. Now, she thinks that while #Metoo is not beyond criticism, it has broadly been a force for good as women are sharing their stories. As for her, after spending years struggling to promote her cause, she is invited to speak at events all over the world. But she still thinks of the child who started her on this path, and she’d like to find her. “I want to let her know that my inability to connect with her that day propelled an entire movement,” she says. “And I want to apologise, because everything I have done, all this work, is really an apology to her.”