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Snow in Paradise: How a boy from Hoxton swapped crime for Islam

Snow in Paradise director Andrew Hulme

Embroiled in a life of petty crime on the streets of the East End during the 80s, screenwriter Martin Askew watched the lives of many close friends and associates fall apart around him. On the same path to destruction, the young Cockney found his way out through a combination of the arts and Islam, and he’s put both into his most recent work.

Snow in Paradise follows the exploits of an ambitious young criminal, Dave (Frederick Schmidt), as he seeks to impress his hoodlum uncle, played by Askew himself. When Dave’s actions lead to the devastating death of his best mate, Tariq (Aymen Hamdouchi), he finds care and support amongst the Muslim community at his local mosque, but not before a rough internal struggle takes him right down to rock bottom.

“It’s obviously a very redemptive-type story of someone who’s been brought up in the East End in a very dysfunctional and quite violent environment, and he manages to pull away from that lifestyle and surrender himself to peace,” Askew explains over the phone, in a slow East End drawl.

“I wanted to be involved in something that can turn people away from violence and that sort of life.”

The film’s fiery script was co-written and brought to life by debutant director Andrew Hulme, who’s known for his sharp editing work on Control, Red Riding 1974 and The Imposter. In no danger of glamourising the darker side of East London, it’s an in-your-face anti-gangster flick delivered with real artsy flair.

“I wanted to make a film that was both a thriller and a character piece,” Hulme says, “something that rode the line between commercial and art-house. One of the things that interested me about it was the fact that it is quite political – here is a guy who embraces a castigated religion.”

Part fictional, part autobiographical, part steeped in history and extremely current, there’s a good bit to chew on. Excluded from the rapidly changing – gentrifying – landscape in which he lives, Dave’s choice is to struggle and suffer, skint and crime-free, or to struggle and suffer as a criminal with enough cash in his pocket to take the edge off things. On top of all this, his part-time girlfriend’s a sex worker and he’s got a serious drug habit.

Dave (Frederick Schmidt) and Amjad (Ashley Chin) wash their hands in a mosque

When, in desperate search of the missing Tariq, he stumbles into a mosque, something clicks and things gradually become a little less complicated – he falls into a kind of spiritual therapy.

“I certainly feel that Islam is a religion that is mis-portrayed by the media – that is misunderstood by the public because of that,” Hulme says. “Contrary to what we are told, the vast majority of Muslims are actually peace-loving. Like one of our characters says in the film, Islam means peace. It literally does. That’s not to deny that aspects of it are twisted to suit other people’s ends. But we know that story, that’s what we’re told all the time.”

Snow in Paradise successfully presents a new narrative. Steering the London gangster genre down an unfamiliar and refreshing road, the conversion storyline came directly from Askew’s own life.

“It’s just brushstrokes really of my experiences,” Askew says. “When I was growing up in the 70s and the 80s in East London, it was quite a criminal culture. And when you’re born into that sort of culture you just think it’s normal, and growing up I just thought this is how everyone lives.

“As I got older, when a friend of mine died and then I lost another four of my friends in a horrific car crash on the way to a friend’s funeral – who got murdered – I started questioning and I started searching for stuff in religions.”

He explains that despite exploring a wide range of religions and philosophies, he struggled to distance himself from his wayward lifestyle and continued to slip back into old habits. But when he was almost killed in a serious attack outside a nightclub, someone suggested that he read the Quran.

“It was just pragmatic and it helped me open up my eyes to another world I’d not experienced growing up in my community. My role models were all very colourful people, but the hard-living lifestyle was almost monolithic. My people were very socially oppressed to some extent and it’s a big mountain to climb for change,” he says.

Dave (Frederick Schmidt)

“I was fortunate to have some sort of epiphany after about six months of clean time and it helped me in my art, it helped in my writing, it gave me structure.”

As well as its progressively original storyline, the piece is driven by a searing lead performance from Frederick Schmidt, a previously unknown actor who was discovered puffing a cigarette on a Hoxton street corner by a casting scout.

“He didn’t believe we were real,” says Hulme. “But he came in anyway and before he knew it we were offering him another audition. We put him through a few more tests, different auditions, different scenes. He was very raw and had never acted before, but we all saw the potential in him. So we decided to push on.”

It was a good decision. There are traces in Schmidt’s performance of the intensity of a young Tom Hardy. He has the capacity to carry a scene on his broad shoulders in much the same vein as Jack O’Connell in David Mackenzie’s ferocious prison drama Starred Up. Expect to see plenty more of him.

Also surprising is Askew’s excellent turn as the ruthless Uncle Jimmy. Dark, brooding and unsettlingly composed, he makes for a convincing villain. His, too, was an unexpected appointment.

“Because I’d acted before, Frederick and I were actually rehearsing intensely together – doing boxing training and acting training. And after weeks of this, I think they started to realise that they had someone who had potential,” he explains.

“I had to read for it and then I got recalled, and then again, and eventually I got the role, which was a bit of a shock because I really didn’t expect to be acting in this film. Because of where I grew up, I had a lot of backstory to draw on, you know. I tried not to play him like a screen gangster but more in the vein of a real gangster.”

Dave (Frederick Schmidt) facing a difficult decision

With the film complete and set for release this month, Askew looks back on it as a cathartic experience. For a long time he’s been directly involved with the gangster genre, telling bits and pieces of his own story – he worked as associate producer on Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla – and now he’s ready to move on to fresh challenges.

As well as continuing his already established writing career, he’s turning his attention to charitable work, with plans to encourage troubled youngsters to get interested in the creative industries and to tell their own stories.

“Hopefully this film can help me do stuff with young guys who are involved in gangs or maybe living in a very macho world where being involved in the arts is something that’s contrary to their codes. I feel I’ve been there and I’ve seen it and I’ve got the battle scars and the trauma.

“I know how it can only take one push to help you go down another road, and that road could open doors to a very nice life.”

Snow in Paradise is out in cinemas and on demand from 13 February
facebook.com/SnowInParadise

February 11, 2015
World’s first ‘mindfulness opera’ to go ahead

Mezzo-Soprano Lore Lixenberg. Photograph: Mahogany Opera Group

A Stoke Newington singer will star in the world’s first ‘mindfulness opera’ this September at the Barbican, which is to feature yoga, communal eating and even washing up.

Mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg and seven musicians are to perform Lost in Thought, a four-hour opera for voices, instruments and audience based on the structure of an extended meditation.

Audience members are to work alongside the performers to create an “inner journey of mindfulness” through periods of meditation, rest, communal eating and yoga.

One of the most crucial parts is the washing up section, which develops into a communal performance by using a rhythm that occurs throughout the rest of the piece.

Composer Rolf Hind thought of the concept and composed the music for Lost in Thought, which is based on Buddhism.

Hind’s idea is to provide an antidote to the ‘critical mind’ that audiences bring to concerts and challenge traditional boundaries between audience and performers.

Artistic Director of Mahogany Opera Group and director of Lost in Thought, Frederic Wake-Walker, added that opera not only grapples with the desire to sing, dance, ritualise and tell stories, but can also “express most relevantly our multi-media, multi-cultural existence today”.

February 11, 2015
East London Painting Prize opens for entries

Last year’s winner: Nathan Eastwood collects his prize. Photograph: Bow Arts

Applications for the East London Painting Prize are now open, giving East London artists the chance to win £10,000 and a solo exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow.

Artists have until 8 March to submit their applications, with the prize open to both established and emerging artists of any age living or working in the boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Havering, Waltham Forest, Barking and Dagenham and Redbridge.

Now in its second year, the East London Painting Prize aims to explore and celebrate the diversity in painting practices and different approaches to the medium.

Last year’s winner was 41-year-old Nathan Eastwood, who said winning the prize had been a “huge boost”, allowing him to spend more time painting and producing new works.

His winning painting, Nico’s Café, was an Edward Hopper-inspired image of an elderly man eating alone in his local greasy spoon café, in grey and white tones.
Rosamond Murdoch, Gallery Director at the Nunnery, which is part of Bow Arts, said: “It’s never been harder to be an artist in London.

This prize offers the chance for us to gather a world class panel of judges to select the best in contemporary painting today and challenge the art audiences of London.”

The winner of the East London Painting Prize will be announced at a group exhibition featuring work from shortlisted artists to be held in East London this spring.

www.bowarts.org/elpp

February 10, 2015
Sex Shop exhibition to open this month

Unusual paint job: ‘Knockers’ by Tom Gallant

An eyebrow-raising exhibition of sex toys and paraphernalia made by artists and designers opens this month at Transition Gallery.

For Sex Shop, 50 artists, designers and creative types were invited to submit a prototype of a sex toy or fetish object.

The responses were as provocative as they were wide-ranging, from a video piece about the eroticisation of stilettos to a 3D representation of the internal workings of the clitoris.

The first incarnation of the exhibition was in Folkestone, where it played on the idea of the British seaside as a place for dirty weekends and secret liaisons.

In Hackney, Sex Shop will be curated in two halves though the personnel will be the same.

As well as artists, those taking part include a philosopher, a puppet maker, a graphic designer, a fashion designer and a jewellery designer.

“It’s quite a mixed bag,” says Darren Nairn, co-curator of Sex Shop. “Some people have done sculptural objects but there’s other things going on too.

Marlos tenBhomer, a footwear designer, made a video focusing on footwear and looking at film noir where women come a cropper, so women falling down stairs, or on perches and falling off.”

Other artworks include a contract, a piece formed from colour samples taken from adverts in pornographic magazines, and some scrap metal bought in China and shipped using the exact route used by sex traffickers.

Nairn’s own contribution to the exhibition is a butt plug. “The exhibition takes on any gender to some extent,” he says. “We’ve got mixtures of men and women, gay and straight going on, so there are all these different voices coming through.”

Sex Shop is at Transition Gallery,Unit 25a, Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, E8 4QN from 28 February – 29 March
www.transitiongallery.co.uk

February 10, 2015
Hackney artists to stand in the General Election

Regal: Russell Shaw Higgs

Is art above politics? Not if the growing number of artists standing in the General Election is anything to go by.

First it was Bob and Roberta Smith, the pseudonym of Leytonstone artist Patrick Brill, who is running for Michael Gove’s seat in Surrey Heath.

Now two more artists, Russell Shaw Higgs and Gordon Shrigley, have announced they will be running in Hackney South and Shoreditch against the sitting Labour MP Meg Hillier.

“I’ve been brewing this idea for the past four or five months,” says conceptual artist Higgs, 54, who is standing as an independent. “Within that time we’ve had tragedy in Paris, and what came to me was the concept of sending in the clowns and artists, the creative and the bright.”

Higgs, who describes himself as an optimist and will not rule out winning on 7 May, has lived on the Pembury Estate for 20 years, and volunteers for Core Arts, Hackney City Farm, as well as being a freelance contributor to the Hackney Citizen.

Asked what he would do differently if elected, he replies: “Most fundamentally I think the economic system needs changing. I’ve been advocating a basic income for many years which has gone very mainstream now. Everybody’s life should be given value by giving them a minimum level of security.”

A committed gay rights activist and veteran anti-Poll Tax campaigner, Higgs has chosen a bright pink fluorescent briefcase and a bowler hat as the twin emblems of his election campaign, which, he says, will not be traditional.

“I want to be as creative as possible. Every seven or eight days I will make a series of three videos, so there’ll be 10 blocks of three within the 100 days leading up to the final week.

“I don’t think it has to be a hard sell. It shouldn’t be dib-dib dob-dob, I’m top school prefect and look at me rising in my career. It’s going to be a challenge and I’m looking forward to it.”

Another artist vying for Meg Hillier’s seat is Gordon Shrigley, whose party, called Campaign, is based in the IMT gallery on Cambridge Heath Road.

Gordon Shrigley (middle) with his parents.

Shrigley, 51, has lived in Hackney for 30 years, and decided to stand due to what he sees as a fundamental lack of choice within the political mainstream.

“If you look at the narratives within mainstream politics, most haven’t really changed, apart from the post-war Western position and more managerial politics, which is not a politics of ideas – it’s more a politics of steady as we go,” says the artist.

Shrigley’s Campaign party is deliberately not offering ideas or alternatives. Instead of political views, its elliptical slogans aim to make voters think. These include: “I have nothing to offer but offer itself,” and “I have seen the future, and it doesn’t exist.”

“We’re not proposing any particular issues over and above the space of possibility, which is basically that we explore the imagination,” he says.

Shrigley realises he is a wild card, not least because he is running in a Labour safe seat, but adds: “There are a lot of artists and people involved in the culture industries [in Hackney] so in some ways this will be quite a good electorate to pitch that idea to.”

February 9, 2015
Kay Adshead: ‘I never thought I would be seeing women shot in the street for wanting an education’

Playwright Kay Adshead. Photograph: Mama Quilla Theatre Company

“Women are not free anywhere in this world until all women in the world are free.” This is the mission statement of Mama Quilla Theatre Company that presents its new show, The Singing Stones at the Arcola this month.

Inspired by the now deleted blog posts of women protesting in Tahrir Square, and on the frontlines of Tunisia and Kurdistan, this triad of new plays is written and directed by political playwright Kay Adshead.

“Although they were briefly celebrated, these women’s voices have been ignored, denied and forgotten since the revolution” Adshead says.

On a micro level the production is an effort to sustain the voices of women who, despite popular uprising, still suffer persecution and oppression around the world.

A third of the protesters in Tahrir square in 2011 were women, many of whom were subjected to so-called ‘virginity tests’ in the street. Some were raped and killed and almost all were censored.

The challenge for Adshead as the writer behind the piece was how to interpret such harrowing material for a theatre audience.

“How do I make art out of this?” she asks. “How do I even make sense of it? When I had my daughter I never thought I would be seeing women shot in the street for wanting an education.”

Despite the hard-hitting content the writer-director and her multiethnic, all female cast are at pains to insist that this is not agitprop – it is not a sermon, nor an agitation.

“You won’t feel bombarded by horror or propaganda, it’s about the individual stories of these women” says Tina Gray, a member of the ensemble.

Adshead made her name as an actor in television sitcoms such as One Foot in the Grave and alongside Victoria Wood in Dinnerladies. And her latest show undoubtedly benefits from that experience, infused with humour and her own natural vitality.

The plays have come about partly as a result of collaborations with a host of global artists. World music star Najma Akhta has composed the music and will be performing live in performances until 7 February.

Interspersed with the live performance will be films made by the Syrian theatre group Masasit Mati, whose satirical portrayals of Assad and his government intend to dispel the fear so present in Syria today.

Their medium is finger puppets, which unlike the pamphlets or spray cans of traditional dissenters can be smuggled through military checkpoints with ease.

As those who gathered in Tahrir Square were engaging in politics, so Adshead sees the act of witnessing theatre as a political act. The theatre, she says, is both a collective and an individual experience where people meet face-to-face and ask the question: “How do we live in this world together?”

Mama Quilla has a distinguished history of asking difficult and challenging questions and The Singing Stones looks set to be an urgent response to a continuing global lack of equality

The Singing Stones is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 28 February

www.arcolatheatre.com

February 9, 2015
The Singing Stones – stage review: ‘reflecting a familiar feeling of impotence’

Looking back at the Arab Spring: the cast of The Singing Stones

The Singing Stones is a jigsaw puzzle of perspectives on what the play’s creators see as potentially “the greatest missed opportunity of the 21st century”. In 2010, the Arab Spring swept through North Africa and the Middle East where despite countries such as Egypt booming financially the voice of the people was entirely absent.

Freedom of expression is a vivid theme in Kay Adshead’s latest piece of political theatre. Graphic images of lips being fused shut by fire and singing voices silenced by brutality recur. The play opens with an argument that making art, or reflecting creatively on war contributes nothing of any value, and it closes with the response – but what else can we do?

The reaction of the woman sat next to me at the theatre seemed to epitomise how many of us have responded to the barbarous acts carried out by the various regimes before, during and indeed after the revolution.

When the actors spoke of so-called ‘virginity tests’ performed on the roadside she tutted. It wasn’t long before, head in hands, she let out an exasperated and audible sigh at the story of a young woman’s body being mutilated. She gasped in disgust when more bodies were burned, and by the curtain she was crying silently, desperately to herself.

This journey from quiet disapproval, through vocal objection to helplessness seems to reflect a common feeling about the atrocities occurring in Iraq and Syria today. The Singing Stones’ press night even coincided with a debate in the House of Commons as to whether the British government is doing enough to help.

Although Adshead’s play occasionally feels like grandstanding, and some of its points are trite, it does reflect a familiar feeling of impotence. The piece falls down in places thanks to a lack of structure, but its message is a good one. It is an invitation to listen, to witness, and to speak up.

The Singing Stones is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL.
www.arcolatheatre.com

February 9, 2015
Made in heaven – with love from Yum Yum

Enjoy a cocktail at Yum Yum. Photograph: Yum Yum Thai Restaurant

“Love is in the air, every sight and every sound” (Love Is In The Air, John Paul Young, 1978).

Well, we love you and you love us in return – that’s why we are celebrating our twenty-second year as your partner.

We are one of London’s most popular Thai restaurants.

Entering the gates and walking through the leafy Thai garden, it’s not hard to identify the secret of Yum Yum’s success.

Housed in a Grade II listed building, grand steps lead up to an imposing Georgian entrance that opens into an exotically themed-Thai restaurant.

With over 180 freshly prepared dishes, and 65 cocktails served daily, there’s something for everyone at Yum Yum!

So for the Love Month, we’ve created four special cocktails just for you to celebrate your evenings – we promise they won’t be passion killers!

We’ll let you into the secret of the cocktail names but can’t tell you what’s in them as that will give the game away!

Lipstick
Red Rose
Secret Passion
Yum Yum Kiss

…with love from Yum Yum.

rawn tempura at Yum Yum. Photograph: Yum Yum Thai Restaurant

For more information please contact us at:

Yum Yum Thai Restaurant
187 Stoke Newington High Street
London
N16 0LH

Reservations: 020 7254 6751
Deliveries: 020 7241 5678

Info: yumyum.co.uk

Email: info@yumyum.co.uk

February 2, 2015
Bob and Roberta Smith: ‘Wealthy kids don’t tend to make terribly interesting art’

Making a stand for art: Bob and Roberta Smith (Patrick Brill). Photograph courtesy of Bob and Roberta Smith

Art in school and higher education is being endangered by government policies, according to Bob and Roberta Smith (B&R).

The East End contemporary artist (confusingly, he is actually just one person, whose real name is Patrick Brill) is so concerned about the future of the subject he loves that he is standing in the 2015 general election in Surrey Heath – the seat of former education secretary Michael Gove.

Although standing as an independent, B&R launched an informal political group, the Art Party, back in 2013, to apply pressure on the government to protect workshops in schools.

The party took inspiration from American wartime leader Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s post-war Works Progress Administration, which employed millions of people to carry out public works including art projects.

B&R, who has a studio off Cambridge Heath Road and whose work was shortlisted for the Trafalgar Square forth plinth, says the initiative paved the way to economic recovery from the depression and the USA’s subsequent successes in the 1950s.

One of the Art Party’s key beliefs is that art in schools should be practical rather than simply about appreciation and enjoyment.

Workshops are more expensive to maintain than classrooms, says B&R, and accountants and politicians “see them as resources that can be cut”.

Another subject B&R is concerned about, and once wrote to Michael Gove to address, is access to opportunities in art.

“Schools, when they achieve Academy status or if they’re Free Schools, don’t have to follow the national curriculum,” says B&R. “So that means that they don’t have to teach art, and that means then that if you have a Free School set up by whoever it is, a businessman or ex-serviceman or someone with a particular passion for a particular thing, they don’t necessarily have to teach art.

“This means that pupils at primary level might not be taught art, and that’s really bad.”

Free Schools are a flagship part of the government’s approach to education, and their supporters say they give educators more freedom.

Pupils in inner cities will be most affected by the changes, as these are the areas were Free Schools are being set up – and B&R thinks this means art could become more homogenous as poorer pupils could have less access to the opportunities to create it.

B&R says: “If you go to Westminster, if you go to The Tate or St James’s, as I do occasionally, you can walk past Westminster School [the elite private school]. It has fabulous art rooms, so it’s not that the rich or wealthy don’t want art.

“But the thing is, we want culture made by everybody, and every child should have a right to make it. It makes culture more vibrant if you have lots of different voices participating in it, and actually wealthy kids don’t tend to make terribly interesting art. We don’t really want a monoculture of just one sort of people making art.”

B&R says the government’s approach is “daft” even when looked at on their own terms.

“Conservative people are always very keen on business and enterprise and that sort of thing,” he explains. “And actually it will cripple British design if you don’t have people like Jonathan Ive, who was the son of a CDT (Craft Design and Technology) teacher.

“He grew up in Chingford and he went to a regular comprehensive school and went on to design the Apple Mac.

“It’s about plurality and getting as many people involved in culture and design as possible. That’s basically my problem with what the government has done.”

B&R, who teaches at London Metropolitan University, is passionate about higher education too, viewing it as key to individual development, and he is worried about increasing fees and “privatisation”.

“I think education is pretty much diagnostic,” he says. “When you start off doing it, you need to do as broad a curriculum as you can, and as you go through it you get passionate about certain things. The mathematicians get passionate about maths, the footballers get passionate about football and the artists get passionate about the arts. As you get further along with it you find yourself as a human being.

“Protecting support structures for artists is actually quite important. It’s important for the artists, and also it’s important for society more generally. I think one of the things that’s going to happen, one of the things people are worried about anyway, is what will happen to postgraduates and degrees.

“It’s not just the Conservatives that have been responsible for what has happened in higher education, the Labour Party instituted the Browne Review on Higher Education [which led to the cap on the amount universities could charge in fees to be removed].”

The 2013 student visa saga at London Met, which put foreign students at risk of being deported, brought the problem of funding for universities into even sharper focus.

“The government’s whole model has been increasing fees for home students and then getting as many overseas students in as possible,” says B&R. “That model for London Met is just being ripped away.”

As for whether aspiring artists should gain higher education qualifications before launching their careers, B&R clearly believes the answer is yes.

“The foundation course is kind of the great invention,” he says. “The thing about any kind of higher education, whatever subject it may be, is it’s as much about the subject as it is about those crucial years between 18 and 21 or 22 when you really do grow up. And young people need to do that in that environment which they can expand themselves and push and find the edges of.

“It’s not just about learning the subject, it’s about developing as a human being.

“As an artist you think maybe you should just go ahead and sell paintings or get something going on that front straight away, but the problem is once you do that people then tend to want the same thing that they bought last time, and it does actually tend to stunt the development a little bit and a make you a bit stale.”

http://bobandrobertasmith.co.uk/

January 29, 2015
Kaffa Coffee brings a taste of Ethiopia to Dalston

Street life: Kaffa Coffee on Gillett Square. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

The original coffee drinkers hailed from the Ethiopian province of Kaffa.

According to legend, it was there in the ninth century that a goatherd experienced something of a Eureka moment when his goats started behaving excitedly after munching on some bright red berries.

On his wife’s suggestion he took the berries to a monastery, where they were renounced as the devil’s work and thrown into the fire. The rich aroma of the beans filled the monastery, and led the monks to investigate further.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to travel quite so far to sample authentic Ethiopian coffee. Kaffa Coffee is located in Dalston. It uses beans grown on a plantation in the Kaffa province and roasted on site in Gillett Square.

Full of beans: Kaffa Coffee roasts its own beans on site. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

The plantation and business are owned by Markos Yared, who founded Kaffa Coffee in 2004. The original Kaffa Coffee was a stall in Camden. Four years later, Yared moved into new premises.

His signature coffee isn’t cappuccino, latte nor macchiato but a black, strong, rich coffee served in a small espresso cup with an Ethiopian flag.

Strength in depth: Kaffa’s signature blend. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

Kaffa is very much a family-owned business, and Yared’s wife Haile serves homemade injera and wat, typical Ethiopian cuisine, every Thursday and Friday.

A few outdoor tables are available to sit and chat and staying outside this laid back and unpretentious coffee place makes you feel local to the square.

With the shop open till late, Yared also enjoys sharing his taste for Ethiopian jazz, reggae and blues, turning Kaffa and Gillett Square into a very lively and vibrant place to be.

Kaffa Coffee serves probably one of the best Ethiopian coffees in town. Its coffee is strong, and so is its fan base.

Kaffa Coffee is at 1 Gillett Square N16 8AZ

January 28, 2015