Features

LOS ANGELES — Surrounded by fallen trees and languid cows, illegal cattle rancher Chacalin surveys a clearing deep inside one of Nicaragua’s largest remaining protected rainforests.

“When I came here, I knew it was a reserve. I just stole the land. I didn’t pay for it,” he says calmly, staring away from the camera.

“If they take me out of here they can take me off the land, but I don’t lose money. That’s how we operate.”

Beginning in 2016, and over several years, filmmakers Camilo de Castro and Brad Allgood visited the Indio-Maiz Biological Reserve for a documentary about the threats of deforestation and indigenous rights violations.

The roughly 2,600 square kilometre tropical rainforest bordering Costa Rica is a biodiversity haven, and the sacred home of the indigenous Rama people, but despite legal protections, it has seen a rapid influx of illegal settlers.

After violent protests erupted in the Central American nation in 2018 — in part triggered by fury over the government’s failure to tackle a massive fire in the reserve lit by an illegal settler — investigative journalist de Castro had to flee his home country.

In his absence, the situation in Indio-Maiz has only worsened, and President Daniel Ortega’s intensifying crackdown on dissent has made it too dangerous for the filmmakers to return.

This February, de Castro was one of 94 dissidents stripped of their citizenship — along with his mother Gioconda Belli, a prominent writer — and he now lives in exile in Costa Rica.

Relying on Nicaraguans within the country to send updates and images via the encrypted Signal app, the directors are now premiering “Patrol” at the Mountainfilm documentary festival in Colorado, hoping to draw attention to the situation from afar.

“This is probably the last independent documentary that’s gonna come out on Nicaragua in who knows how long,” said de Castro. 

“The government basically has put up a wall around the country so that people inside can’t hear anything coming from outside, and can’t share information about what’s really happening in the country.”

The documentary follows indigenous Rama and Afro-descendent Kriols as they patrol their lands via canoe and on foot through dense, treacherous jungle, avoiding blood-sucking ticks and predatory jaguars.

It chronicles their encounters with ever-swelling ranks of newly arrived illegal settlers. Many are in the pocket of wealthy cattle ranchers living outside the reserve, and are paid to clear the land before the cows arrive.

During the filming, an indigenous patrol encounters a large, sophisticated ranch that has sprung up in the rainforest, and leaders report it to police and Nicaraguan government officials.

But they are told they must pay up if they want police to investigate, while a meeting with a minister fails to materialise.

While rampant deforestation is not unique to Nicaragua, Allgood said the situation is different from places like the sprawling Amazon, because Indio-Maiz is a “small area” where “it would not be difficult to put up a barrier to prevent people from going in”.

The government is “turning a blind eye — it’s in plain sight, but nobody pays attention”.

Meanwhile, the land conflict has spilled into violence. Nicaragua has recently seen a string of murders of indigenous people by settlers, many of which go unpunished.

“There’s a lot of racism involved,” said de Castro. “I would say we’re filming the last stage of 500 years of colonisation in Nicaragua.”

Ninety per cent of deforestation in the region is driven by illegal cattle ranching, according to Christopher Jordan, Latin American director for conservation group Re:wild.

“Government corruption allows them to steal and deforest the land without consequences,” he says in the film.

Beef is one of impoverished Nicaragua’s largest exports. This tiny country, the size of Mississippi, is the United States’ sixth-biggest global supplier.

Since 2015, a US law requiring beef to carry a “country-of-origin” label has been dropped, meaning consumers rarely know if their burgers or steaks come from animals reared on Indigenous forest lands.

While many importing companies claim to check the origin of their beef back to its original farm, de Castro and Allgood say this is not possible in Nicaragua, where the traceability process is too opaque.

“We talk about oil, we talk about mining... but the food industry is still not something that’s getting enough attention,” said de Castro.

“What we want is for consumers to be more wary, to ask questions when they buy beef at the supermarket.”

As for the Nicaragua government?

“What we need is political will, to really make them make an example of some of these illegal cattle ranchers and throw them in jail,” he said.

“Once they throw a few of them in jail, people will think twice about going in. That’s what we want. We want the government to uphold the law.”

KATHMANDU — Seventy years ago, New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepali Tenzing Norgay Sherpa became the first humans to summit Everest on May 29, 1953. 

The British expedition made the two men household names around the world and changed mountaineering forever.

Hundreds now climb the 8,849-metre peak every year, fuelling concerns of overcrowding and pollution on the mountain. 

AFP looks at the evolution of the Everest phenomenon.

What is the mountain called?

Initially known only to British mapmakers as Peak XV, the mountain was identified as the world’s highest point in the 1850s and renamed in 1865 after Sir George Everest, a former Surveyor General of India. 

On the border of Nepal and China and climbable from both sides, it is called Chomolungma or Qomolangma in Sherpa and Tibetan — “goddess mother of the world” — and Sagarmatha in Nepali, meaning “peak of the sky”.

How has climbing Everest changed?

The 1953 expedition was the ninth attempt on the summit and it took 20 years for the first 600 people to climb it. Now that number can be expected in a single season, with climbers catered to by experienced guides and commercial expedition companies.

The months-long journey to the base camp was cut to eight days with the construction of a small mountain airstrip in 1964 in the town of Lukla, the gateway to the Everest region.

Gear is lighter, oxygen supplies are more readily available, and tracking devices make expeditions safer. Climbers today can summon a helicopter in case of emergency.

Every season, experienced Nepali guides set the route all the way to the summit for paying clients to follow.

But Billi Bierling of Himalayan Database, an archive of mountaineering expeditions, said some things remain similar: “They didn’t go to the mountains much different than we do now. The Sherpas carried everything. The expedition style itself hasn’t changed.”

What is base camp like?

The starting point for climbs proper, Everest Base Camp was once little more than a collection of tents at 5,364 metres, where climbers lived off canned foods. 

Now fresh salads, baked goods and trendy coffee are available, with crackly conversations over bulky satellite phones replaced by WiFi and Instagram posts.

How does the news of a summit travel?

Hillary and Tenzing summited Everest on May 29 but it only appeared in newspapers on June 2, the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation: the news had to be brought down the mountain on foot to a telegraph station in the town of Namche Bazaar, to be relayed to the British embassy in Kathmandu.

In 2011, British climber Kenton Cool tweeted from the summit with a 3G signal after his ninth successful ascent. More usually, walkie-talkie radios are standard expedition equipment and summiteers contact their base camp teams, who swiftly post on social media.

In 2020, China announced 5G connectivity at the Everest summit. 

What are the effects of climate change? 

Warming temperatures are slowly widening crevasses on the mountain and bringing running water to previously snowy slopes.

A 2018 study of Everest’s Khumbu glacier indicated it was vulnerable to even minor atmospheric warming, with the temperature of shallow ice already close to melting point.

“The future of the Khumbu icefall is bleak,” its principal investigator, glaciologist Duncan Quincey, told AFP. “The striking difference is the meltwater on the surface of the glaciers.”

Three Nepali guides were killed on the formation this year when a chunk of falling glacial ice swept them into a deep crevasse.

It has become a popular cause for climbers to highlight, and expedition companies are starting to implement eco-friendly practices at their camps, such as solar power.

What is the impact of social media?

Click, post, repeat — the climbing season plays out on social media as excited mountaineers document their journey to Everest on Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.

Hashtags keep their sponsors happy and the posts can catch the eyes of potential funders. 

That applies to both foreign climbers and their now tech-savvy Nepali guides.

“Everyone posts nowadays, it is part of how we share and build our profile,” said Lakpa Dendi Sherpa, who has summited Everest multiple times and has 62,000 Instagram followers.

Mountain of records?

Veteran Nepali guides Kami Rita Sherpa and Pasang Dawa Sherpa both scaled Everest twice this season, with the latter twice matching the former’s record number of summits before Kami Rita reclaimed pole position with 28.

There are multiple Everest record categories for first and fastest feats of endurance.

But some precedents are more quixotic: in 2018, a team of British climbers, an Australian and a Nepali dressed in tuxedos and gowns for the world’s highest dinner party at 7,056 metres on the mountain’s Chinese side.

GOHALOPATA, India — Decades after inspiring a best-selling novel that brought readers into slums near Kolkata, 86-year-old ascetic Gaston Dayanand is still working for India’s poorest.

His life helping people in the mega-slums of Pilkhana formed the plot of Dominique Lapierre’s 1985 book “The City of Joy”, which was later turned into a Patrick Swayze movie.

Born in 1937 to a Swiss working-class family in Geneva, Brother Gaston said he remembered deciding at six years of age to dedicate his life “to Christ and the poor”.

“I never wanted to be a priest,” the brother of the Prado congregation told AFP at the Inter-Religious Centre of Development (ICOD), an NGO he co-founded in Gohalopata, a village 75 kilometres southwest of Kolkata.

“The church would never have let me live in a slum with the poor, but my life was about sharing with the poorest.”

A trained nurse, Brother Gaston arrived in India in 1972 to work with a French priest in a small self-help centre in Pilkhana.

“It was the biggest slum in India at the time, they said in the world!”

Having arrived on a tuk-tuk, he surprised the local residents by entering on foot.

“I didn’t want to enter a place where there are so many poor people, on a rickshaw, like a rich person,” he said.

“I went to places where there were no doctors, no nongovernmental organisations, no Christians. That is to say, places that were completely abandoned.”

‘Chicago on the Ganges’

One day in 1981, Brother Gaston said he received a visit from Dominique Lapierre, who was “sent by Mother Teresa”.

The well-known French author, who wanted to write a novel “about the poor”, convinced the ascetic of his sincerity.

The two men became friends.

Lapierre, who died last December, described Brother Gaston as “one of the ‘Lights of the World’ whose epic of love and sharing I had the honour of recounting in my book ‘The City of Joy’.”

Translated throughout the world, Lapierre’s novel, published in 1985, sold several million copies.

“He financed all my organisations at a rate of $3 million a year, almost all his royalties, for almost 30 years,” Brother Gaston said.

But the film adaptation of the novel, in which Swayze plays a fictional doctor, displeased him: “I frankly hated this film. ‘The City of Joy’ has become ‘Chicago on the Ganges’.”

Surrounded by leprosy

At the time of Lapierre’s visit, Mother Teresa was receiving medicine from all over the world.

She donated large quantities to the self-help centre, which Brother Gaston was able to use.

He trained nurses and established a dispensary.

“I had the medicine, I didn’t need anything else,” he said.

“We quickly had more than 60,000 patients the first year, 100,000 the second. Three years later, we had a small hospital.”

As soon as he arrived in India, he decided to adopt the nationality.

“It took 20 years, of course,” he said.

Brother Gaston was born with the surname Grandjean.

In India, he chose the surname “Dayanand”, meaning “blessed (ananda) of mercy (daya)”.

He worked for a long time with Mother Teresa’s brothers caring for people suffering from leprosy in Pilkhana.

“I stayed for 18 years, surrounded by 500 lepers, in a very small room,” he said.

Abdul Wohab, a 74-year-old social worker, said: “Gaston is a saint.”

‘A board to sleep on’

Now white-haired and confined to a wheelchair, Brother Gaston is still trying to help those in need in the northeastern province of West Bengal.

Of the 12 NGOs he founded since moving to India, six are still active, including the ICOD, which has taken in 81 people of all faiths, including orphans and the elderly, as well as those suffering from disabilities and mental health problems.

Brother Gaston said he spends “three-quarters of [his] days meditating” on his bed, facing Christ.

“I had never had anything else but a board to sleep on. Now I live like a bourgeois in a big bed,” he said.

“But it’s not me who wanted it,” he added with a laugh.

“The worst part is that I accept it.”

The ICOD’s co-founder and director, Mamata Gosh, nicknamed “Gopa”, watches over the man who taught her to be a nurse 25 years ago.

“Before him, I didn’t know anything,” the 43-year-old told AFP.

“He is my spiritual father.”

Brother Gaston’s day begins at 5:00 am with three hours of prayer, in front of a reproduction of the Shroud of Turin overhanging an Aum, the symbol of Hinduism, in his tiny oratory adjoining his room.

Dressed all in white and barefoot, he sits in his electric wheelchair and visits each of the residents of the thatched hamlet, then returns to his room in the late morning.

On his bedside table sits a Bible, a crucifix, his glasses and an old laptop that he uses to keep in touch with his NGO’s donors.

“I will earn my bread until the last day of my life,” he said.

Combining lightweight agility and driver involvement with fast driven unpaved terrain, the off-road sports car harks back to a bygone age when manufacturers entered their most athletic and desirable models onto gruelling rally stages, such cars are, however, now a tiny niche indulged by few manufacturers. From rally stage greats including the Ranault Alpine A110 and “Safari” Porsche 911s to the specially developed Lancia Stratos, raised and beefed versions of low slung sports cars were the norm, and rear-drive dominated on the rally circuit, with the last such great holding out against the Audi Quattro four-wheel-drive rally revolution being the Lancia 037.

Ariel Nomad

An off-road sister to the superlative supercar-humbling ultra-lightweight Ariel Atom sports car, the Nomad launched in 2015 and shares the same basic exposed and rigid tubular steel space frame construction and mid-rear transverse engine layout. A more rugged interpretation, the Nomad features full rollover safety cage and chunky high sidewall 235/75R15 tires to soak up punishment and provide traction. It meanwhile sits significantly higher, with generous 330mm ground clearance and extreme 71° approach and 82°departure angles to traverse off-road obstacles.

Equipped with minimal bodywork and tough plastic mudguards, the Nomad’s light aluminium double wishbone suspension features adjustable outboard Bilstein dampers and twin Eibach springs each side. Its longer suspension travel meanwhile both allows for driving fast in off-road conditions, and enhances on-road comfort. Reminiscent of a dune buggy in appearance, the Nomad is slightly heavier and slower than the Atom, but is nevertheless a highly agile and nimble machine with quick 1.7-turn un-assisted steering and compact 3.2 metre long dimensions.

Savagely swift and perhaps as capable on-road as it is off-road, the Nomad is powered by an eagerly high-revving Honda-sourced naturally-aspirated 2.4-litre four-cylinder engine driving the rear wheels through a 6-speed manual gearbox, and delivering precise and progressive throttle control. Developing 235BHP at 7,200rpm and 221lb/ft at 4,300rpm, the featherweight 670kg Nomad pounces through 0-100km/h in just 3.4-seconds and onto a 201km/h maximum. The Nomad also features four-point harnesses and optional spot lamps and a zip-up roof and doors.

Specifications

Engine: 2.4-litre, mid-mounted transverse 4-cylinders

Gearbox: 6-speed manual, rear-wheel-drive

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 235 (238) [175] @7,200rpm

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 221 (300) @4,300rpm

0-100km/h: 3.4-seconds

Top speed: 201km/h

Length: 3,215mm

Width: 1,850mm

Height: 1,425mm

Wheelbase: 2,348mm

Ground clearance: 330mm

Weight: 670kg

Approach/departure angles: 71°/82°

Suspension: Double wishbones

Tyres: 235/75R15

Morgan Plus Four CX-T

Produced in just eight examples in 2021, the magnificently madcap Morgan Plus Four CX-T is a showcase for Morgan’s potential and a reflection of the British sports car maker’s past. Inspired by Morgan’s historic adventure and durability trial vehicles, the CX-T’s design is ruggedly purposeful, but decidedly retro. Developed in collaboration with Rally Raid UK, the CX-T is a rally-like overland off-road vehicle based on the standard new CX-generation Plus Four sports car’s thoroughly modern and stiff bonded aluminium frame.

Gaining SUV-like 230mm ground clearance, wider stance, chunky off-road tyres, underbody protection, a rigid exposed external roll cage for safety, and a redesigned rear-side port exhaust for an improved departure angle, the CX-T’s sturdier components, two externally-mounted spare tires and tool and storage containers lightly increase its weight over the 1,013kg standard Plus Four. It meanwhile incorporates modified Morgan Plus Six suspension wishbones with EXE-TC coil-overs and bump stops for deeper compression and improved traction, stability, compliance and durability.

Driving its rear wheels through either 6-speed manual or 8-speed automatic gearbox options, the CX-T meanwhile shares the Plus Four’s BMW-sourced 2-litre twin-scroll turbo four-cylinder engine. Producing 254BHP at 5,500rpm and 258lb/ft at 1,000-5,000rpm, it is expected to match or slightly lag behind the standard version’s 5.2-second 0-100km/h acceleration and 240km/h maximum. Low revving with a broad and versatile torque sweet spot, the CX-T meanwhile also uses a BMW-sourced lockable limited slip differential for enhanced off-road traction and agility.

Specifications

Engine: 2-liter, twin-scroll turbo, in-line 4-cylinders

Gearbox: 6-speed manual, rear-wheel-drive, lockable limited slip differential

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 254 (258) [190] @5,500rpm

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 258 (350) @1,000-5,000rpm

0-100km/h: 5.2-seconds (estimate)

Top speed: 240km/h (estimate)

Ground clearance: 230mm

Weight: under 1,100kg (estimate)

Suspension, F/R: Double wishbones/multi-link

Tyres: 215/70R16

Porsche 911 Dakar

Inspired by the 1984 Paris-Dakar rally winning Porsche 911 racer, the latest iteration of the Stuttgart manufacturer’s brand defining rear engine sports car is a higher riding off-road tuned beast based on the current 911 GTS, and is powered by the same twin-turbo flat-six 3-lire engine. Launched earlier this year and limited to just 2,500 examples, the slightly taller 911 Dakar is the German manufacturer’s less extreme answer to aftermarket “Safari” style Porsche conversions from tuners like Gembala.

Somewhere between what an Outback variant is to the Subaru Legacy and a Raptor is to a Ford F150 in how heavily modified it is, the 911 Dakar’s 161mm ride height and 14.2° approach, 16.2° break-over and 16.4° departure angles are certainly improvements, but do not make it an extreme off-roader. It is, however, more of a road legal rally-style sports car for dirt roads, snow, sand and dusty flats, and features 245/45R19 front and 295/40R20 rear off-road tyres, and optional height adjustable suspension.

Pressing down on the rear wheels to develop excellent off the line traction, the 911 Dakar’s engine produces 473BHP at 6,500rpm and 420lb/ft throughout 2,300-5,000rpm and powers all four wheels through a quick automated dual-clutch gearbox. Carrying its 1.6-tonne mass through 0-100km/h 3.4-seconds and onto 240km/h, the 911 Dakar meanwhile features adaptable off-road driving modes and an off-road optimised centre differential to ensure road holding and agility over loose surfaces. Four-wheel-steering meanwhile further improves agility and stability.

Specifications

Engine: 3-litre, twin-turbo, rear-mounted, horizontally-opposed 6-cylinders

Gearbox: 8-speed automated dual-clutch, four-wheel-drive

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 473 (480) [353] @6,500rpm

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 420 (570) @2,300-5,000rpm

0-100km/h: 3.4-seconds

Top speed: 240km/h

Length: 4,530mm

Width: 1,864mm

Height: 1,338mm

Wheelbase: 2,450mm

Ground clearance: 161mm

Approach/ramp/departure angles: 14.2°/16.2°/16.4°

Weight: 1,605kg

Suspension, F/R: MacPherson strut/multilink

Tyres, F/R: 245/45R19/295/40R20

By Nathalie Khalaf
Holistic Counsellor

One of the most beautiful experiences we can be blessed with in life is loving others and accepting their love in return. Relationships come in many forms: Those we have with our selves, with our parents, our siblings, our pets, with our extended family members, our romantic partners and society as a whole.

Our parents

The first relationship is the one we experience with our parents. As children we are sponges, absorbing the things we experience mentally, emotionally and physically. It is this early relationship with our parents that paves the way, setting “patterns” in terms of how we view our future relationships starting with our “selves”.

I intentionally separate “our” and “selves” as I feel it’s important to emphasise the “self’ here. If our parents showed us love and acceptance regardless of how we were as children, this will set the foundation for our self-love and acceptance in later life.

If we sensed negativity from our parents’ look, or detected altered tones in their speech (perhaps disapproval, anger or sadness), the same process occurs. This time, we are locked in a cycle of doubting, even disliking our selves as we mature. One of the most powerful quotes I’ve come across by Gibran Khalil Gibran, reads “God said ‘love your enemy, I obeyed him and loved myself’. For me, it shows the importance of not only physical health, but emotional health too. This helps develop healthy relationships as adults. It all starts and ends with us.”

A reflection of childhood

The way we are treated and brought up as children has everything to do with the way we treat our selves as adults and that becomes our “default programming”, or “internal dialogue”, so to speak.

If we weren’t hugged by our mothers then we will find it difficult to hug or hold our future partner or children. If we received conditional love from our parents, for being good girls or boys; if we did what pleased them by not making noise, not crying, not shouting, not voicing our opinion, not disagreeing with them, etc., then we will also express that same conditional love towards our selves.

There may come a day when we will struggle to accept what we are going through, or have difficulty accepting and loving “the new person we have become”. That sentence in itself carries a flawed concept; there is no right or wrong way to be and change is a constant in life.

Pulsating energy

We are made of pulsating energy. If, as children, we were loved unconditionally by being allowed to cry, scream, shout, voice our opinions, then that is also the love we will give to our selves and eventually others, be it friends or romantic partners. I am not saying parents have to let loose their children’s upbringing completely. Instead, parents can work on becoming more aware of themselves in order not to project what they want, or wish they could have been, vicariously onto their children.

Children are not born to be the clones of their parents, they are completely unique individuals. Parents can, and should, guide them along the way , but the red tape is trying to mould their child into improved versions of themselves.

Yes, this can be challenging, especially when we, as parents, are not conscious of our own ego, through which our behaviour plays out. But that’s for another article, so stay tuned!

When we love and accept our selves as we are, we approach others from a “full cup” instead of “one that needs to be filled”; we can begin to live life without the need for external validation. We have all heard the expression “that person completes me” but this is the wrong outlook, something we have been conditioned to believe, for no one is born “incomplete”.

Opposites attract?

Whether we believe in God or energy, God creates perfection, we are perfect. Therefore, we are all complete just the way we are. The expression “opposites attract” is more ideologically sound, simply because it means that on an energy level we have identified with certain aspects of our selves (aspects judged as good, in order to receive love and acceptance) and rejected other aspects (aspects judged as bad, which will block us from receiving love or acceptance).

The law of opposites will play its role in completing that energy circle. So, if you feel you are “such and such a person” (by placing your self in a box of certain attributes) you will automatically attract someone who has placed themselves in a box of the opposite attributes. Anything we feel we want to fix or change in others is a good indication for what needs healing within our selves.

When we grow up not fully loving, accepting or believing in our selves, we emit that responsibility onto others and that’s where things go wrong. As children we are expected to be a certain way in order to receive love. In fact, what happens is that the masks we wear become too heavy to bear after a while and who we truly are (all aspects of our selves) is what will show. Most of us become adults reflecting with conditional love towards our selves and therefore others because we have expectations of how “they should be”; men and women should be this and do that, for example, or, a partner should be… so. It is a vicious cycle. We do not really see the other person, but project an image of who we expect them to be, based on our past experiences instead.

When we choose to let go of expectations for our selves and replace this with pure acceptance of all that we are, it becomes easy to accept and love others, because we see them for who they are.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

CANNES, France — At an artificial intelligence talk on a Cannes beach, a presenter’s voice is cloned and used to say a random phrase in three languages, while another’s face is replaced live on screen as they speak.

Few of the film buffs attending the premiere industry festival are shocked.

Ever since the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT took the world by storm six months ago, spurring an AI race among tech giants, the technology has shaken up the film industry.

The use of AI to write scripts is one of the leading concerns among Hollywood movie and TV writers who are in their third week of a strike that has upended productions.

However the technology is revolutionising everything from voice acting, to analysing scripts and coming up with a budget, to creating mock-ups of scenes before you even pick up a camera.

“New things are created every single day,” says Quinn Halleck, a 25-year-old filmmaker who is about to release a three-part short movie called “./ Sigma_001” which is about a sentient AI being, and uses AI from conception to marketing and distribution.

“It’s not just one tool, it’s sort of sprinkled throughout the workflow process,” he tells AFP on the sidelines of a panel on AI.

This ranges from asking ChatGPT what a character could be like, what her backstory is, and “riffing” off that to create ideas.

Telling an anecdote about a showrunner who hires writers by giving them the same prompt as he gives ChatGPT and seeing if they perform better, he argues the “bar has been raised” to come up with great ideas.

But while some assistant roles may disappear, he believes a human director remains essential.

“You still have to come up with the ideas, you have to create the prompts and curate the answers.”

Deepfake technology

The world’s leading film festival, taking place on the French Riviera, got a hefty dose of AI with a lengthy scene de-aging Harrison Ford, 80, in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”.

While producers have ruled out using AI to keep the role going, actors like Tom Hanks believe it will allow him to keep acting long after his death.

Hanks is currently being de-aged in his upcoming movie “Here”, with help from deepfake, face-swapping technology from AI firm Metaphysic.

The company’s co-founder Tom Graham says technology has bridged the so-called “uncanny valley” — the visceral human rejection of less-than-realistic androids — and is now creating deepfakes where you “absolutely can’t tell the difference”.

The company is behind Deepfake Tom Cruise, a TikTok account that perfectly imitates the actor, and also created a hyper-real Elvis Presley who morphed into Simon Cowell and his co-judges on an episode of “America’s Got Talent”.

While filmmakers are brimming with excitement over the technology’s potential, questions of its abuse hang over the session.

“This set of technologies represents, you know, a set of tectonic social shifts like the industrial revolution, which will play out over the next 20-50 years and people should be worried about what happens,” Graham tells AFP.

“Unfortunately, I don’t believe that you can stop the advancement of the technology because a lot of it is open source. There’s not really anything to turn off.”

His advice: “You should try to own and control the rights to your biometric data, how you sound, how you look, and really kind of lock that down.”

Voice cloning

Magdalena Zielinska of ElevenLabs in Poland which claims to have created the “most expressive” AI voices available, says tools to check if a voice is synthetic will be essential.

Unlike the robotic AI voices of the past, models have learned to replicate the pace and intonation of human voices. 

She says the tool allows directors to see how a scene will sound, or advertisers to see what kind of voice resonates most with clients. It can also be used to fix problems in post-production.

Zielinska says the technology could allow an actor to license their voice and do more projects at the same time.

A voice actor who fled the war in Ukraine was struggling to find work in Poland, and is “now making money”, she says, after using the technology to clean up his English accent.

French director Mathias Chelebourg foresees that 90 per cent of overall production will eventually be done by AI on movie sets. 

“Hire right now an AI specialist in your team, whatever your job is, and hire it now, because in one year you will regret it,” he warns.

WASHINGTON — Tina Turner, the growling songstress whose explosive presence left an indelible mark on 20th-century rock, electrified fans with five decades of hit records — first with husband Ike Turner, then as a wildly successful solo act.

The Black eight-time Grammy winner, who has died at the age of 83, lit up the stage from the 1960s, and won a new generation of fans in a stunning comeback after escaping her violent marriage — making her popular music’s ultimate survivor.

Abandoned by her parents, she emerged from Tennessee’s cotton fields to become the impassioned “Queen of Rock and Roll” who, according to music lore, taught Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger how to dance.

After snowballing into a global phenomenon, the singer of “Nutbush City Limits” and “The Best” lived her final years in Switzerland with husband Erwin Bach, a former record label executive who was her romantic partner for three decades before they tied the knot in 2013.

Her early career, originally as a soul and R&B siren, was a roller coaster for Turner, who admitted attempting suicide at the height of Ike’s physical and emotional abuse.

Tina fled Ike in 1976, dashing across a highway to escape during a concert tour. Her divorce was finalised in 1978, and she was left with nothing but her stage name.

But the rock star dream still gnawed at her.

“How can I fill stadiums?” Turner wondered, in comments played during her 2021 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction.

“I wanted it. I wanted to do what Jagger and all the other guys at the time was doing.”

Those dreams were fulfilled, and then some, when she struck crossover gold with her 1984 album “Private Dancer”, whose Grammy-winning smash single “What’s Love Got to Do With It” propelled her to superstardom at age 44.

Four years later, she set the record for largest paying attendance of a performance by a solo artist when her Rio concert crowd topped 180,000.

As a Black woman who embraced rock over 1950s doo-wop and 1960s Motown, Turner was a double outsider. But she wrote — and then rewrote — the rule book for women in the genre.

“A Black woman owning the stage all by herself: that’s the dream right there,” singer and rapper Lizzo said of Turner.

Turner sold more than 100 million records worldwide, according to Billboard, and paved the way for bold performers like Janet Jackson, Madonna and Beyonce.

“I never in my life saw a woman so powerful, so fearless, so fabulous,” Beyonce told Turner from the Kennedy Centre stage in a 2005 Tina tribute. “And those legs!”

‘Pain in your heart’

Anna Mae Bullock was born on November 26, 1939, in Brownsville, Tennessee.

She and her sister grew up in a family of modest means, but conditions worsened when they were abandoned by their father, and then their mother.

When the grandmother who helped raise them died, Anna Mae moved in with relatives in St. Louis, Missouri at age 16.

There she met Ike Turner, a guitarist and bandleader eight years her senior who had already tasted fame, having written and recorded what was arguably the first rock and roll record, “Rocket 88”, in 1951. 

She convinced Ike to let her sing with him. 

When he scored a 1960 hit with her lead vocals on “A Fool in Love”, he gave her the stage name Tina Turner, and the pair performed as the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. By 1962, they were married.

From early on, Tina was the fiery, dominant presence, stealing the limelight with a blend of thick, textured vocals, haunting howls and mesmerising dance moves.

The Turner oeuvre reflected their personal tensions: it included “I Idolise You”, “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”, and their most famous number, a 1970 cover of “Proud Mary”, in which Tina purrs about starting the song “nice and easy”, but finishing it “nice and rough”.

Even as she exuded raw sexual power as a performer, her singing was tinged with a palpable vulnerability.

“You sing with those emotions because you’ve had pain in your heart,” Turner told Rolling Stone magazine in 1986.

After leaving Ike, she toiled in Las Vegas shows, released modestly selling solo records and toured heavily in Europe. 

But with the success of 1984’s “Private Dancer”, her metamorphosis from manipulated co-star to resurrected rock goddess was complete.

The next year, she was onstage at Live Aid in Philadelphia for a memorable encounter with Jagger, who ripped off Turner’s black leather miniskirt mid-performance, revealing her in fishnet stockings and a leotard.

Turner grinned and ran fingers through her lion’s mane of hair. 

“I know, it’s only rock and roll but I like it!” she belted out.

She starred opposite Mel Gibson in a Hollywood blockbuster, “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome;” co-wrote a best-selling autobiography, “I, Tina;” and was the subject of a feature film, “What’s Love Got To Do With It” starring Angela Bassett.

‘A way out’

In the revealing 2021 HBO documentary “Tina”, an uncomfortable reality emerges: her past trauma had become a focus for interviewers, with the star repeatedly asked to recount her life’s worst moments.

Turner, who had embraced Buddhism and saw it as “a way out” of her dangerous first marriage, pointed to the faith as a catalyst for rejuvenation and stability. 

She often swatted away probing questions, once saying reliving the past was like a “curse”.

But personal hardships were impossible to ignore, including the violence from Ike.

“He used my nose as a punching bag so many times that I could taste blood running down my throat when I sang,” she wrote in her 2018 memoir, “My Love Story”.

In life after Ike, her concerts became glitzy spectacles — and she kept the high-octane rock flowing for decades.

A Wembley Stadium concert in 2000 saw a 60-year-old Turner holding nothing back, grinding across the stage in stiletto heels and her trademark leather miniskirt.

In 2008, she embarked on her Tina! — 50th Anniversary Tour, which grossed some $130 million.

In 2013, three months after marrying Bach and taking Swiss nationality, Turner relinquished her US citizenship.

The grande dame enjoyed her later years with Bach in their Zurich home and a vacation mansion near the French Riviera.

Tragedy struck in 2018 when Turner’s eldest son Craig, from her pre-Ike union with saxophonist Raymond Hill, committed suicide at 59.

Ike Turner — who died in 2007 — and Tina had one child together, Ronnie, who died last year at 62 of complications from colon cancer.

WASHINGTON — If there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on, it’s that all human beings belong to the same species, Homo sapiens.

But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday has found a yawning gap between what people claim to believe and what they actually hold true.

A team from Harvard and Tufts gathered data from more than 60,000 subjects who took part in 13 experiments that tested their implicit biases.

An overwhelming majority — over 90 per cent — explicitly stated that white people and non-white people are equally human.

But on an implicit measure, white US participants, as well as white participants from other countries, consistently associated the attribute “human” (as opposed to “animal”) with their own group more than other racial groups. 

Conversely, Black, Asian and Hispanic participants showed no such bias, equally associating their own group and white people with “human”.

“The biggest takeaway for me is that we’re still grappling in a new form with sentiments that have been around for centuries,” first author Kirsten Morehouse, a PhD student at Harvard University, told AFP.

Throughout history, the de-humanisation of other races has been used as a pretext for unequal treatment, ranging from police brutality all the way to genocide. 

Implicit Association Test

The research relied on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a tool developed in the 1990s and now widely used in the field.

A computer-based measure, it tests the strength of associations between two concepts — for example Black and white people or gay and straight people — and two attributes like good or bad.

The idea is that easier pairings, as measured by faster key responses, are more strongly associated in the mind than difficult pairings, as measured by slower responses.

Researchers believe IAT tests reveal attitudes that people would be unwilling to state publicly, or might not even be aware of on a conscious level. 

Across all the experiments, 61 per cent of white participants associated white people more with “human” and Black people more with “animal”.

An even greater number — 69 per cent of white participants — associated white participants more with humans and Asians more with animals, and the same result occurred for white people taking a white-Hispanic test.

These effects held true across age, religion and education of participants, but did vary by political affiliation and gender. Self-identified conservatives and men expressed slightly stronger implicit “human = white” associations.

Non-white people did not show an implicit bias in favour of their own racial groups compared to white people.

But they did show a bias towards whites as more human when the test was between white people and another minority group, for example Asians asked to take a test that assessed their attitudes towards white people versus Black people.

Social hierarchy

Morehouse attributed these findings to the fact that white people are socially and economically dominant in the United States, where 85 per cent of the participants were from (8.5 per cent were from Western Europe).

She theorised that while you might expect all races to be more biased in favour of their own “in-group”, such sentiments might be cancelled out by their lower standing in American society, resulting in overall neutrality.

The fact that “third party” participants were biased in favour of white people when assessed against another race “demonstrates how powerful these social hierarchies are”, she said. 

Similar tests to those used in the experiment are available to take at https://implicit.harvard.edu/ 

Morehouse said that while the results could be uncomfortable for some, awareness was a first step that could help individuals break patterns of stereotyping.

BIRMINGHAM, United Kingdom — In a rehearsal studio in central England, dancers are getting to grips with new, heavy metal-inspired ballet steps. Moving gracefully in unison, they team pirouettes with air guitar, leaps with head banging.

Welcome to “Black Sabbath — The Ballet”, the brainchild of Cuban dance superstar Carlos Acosta, artistic director of the Birmingham Royal Ballet.

Determined to celebrate the cultural treasures of the UK’s second city since his arrival in 2020, Acosta took his idea to Black Sabbath co-founder and guitarist Tony Iommi, who gave it his blessing along with the group’s original vocalist Ozzy Osbourne.

“I was fascinated with the idea. I thought ‘How are they going to do that’,” Iommi, 75, told AFP in Birmingham.

“I just couldn’t imagine how they’d do ballet to Black Sabbath and then I thought well maybe they’re going to use the... softer tracks, but no they went for ‘Black Sabbath’, ‘War Pigs’, ‘Iron Man’,” he said.

“I think I was just really intrigued.”

The full-length, three-act ballet opens in Birmingham, the pioneering group’s home city, in September before going on tour. Rehearsals have just begun.

Bat incident

According to writer Richard Thomas, the ballet is the “rags-to-riches story” of four young men who went from the “factory floor to one of the most successful bands in rock history”, although he stressed it would not be a documentary set to music and dance.

The legendary group’s original line-up was Osbourne, Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward.

They were instrumental in creating heavy metal in the early 1970s with dark and high-volume guitars coupled with a keen interest in the occult.

“It’s very simple. It’s like Black Sabbath meets the Birmingham Royal Ballet,” Thomas said.

There would, however, be use of archive interviews and also some famous Black Sabbath stories such as how Iommi lost the tips of two fingers in an industrial accident on his last day working at a sheet metal factory.

Also making an appearance will be the tale of the “Stonehenge” set that had to be dumped after a measurements mix-up meant it was so big it wouldn’t fit into auditoriums.

And he said there might “possibly be a brief mention of the bat incident”, in which Osbourne thought a fan had thrown a rubber bat onstage only to discover — after he took a bite — that it was real.

For Acosta, 39, there had been an immediate rapport with Iommi after he first approached him with the project.

“I didn’t know the man [or] how we were going to hit it off, but obviously we both come from the same background in terms of working-class and poor families... and the chemistry was instant,” he said.

The former star dancer said he came to the music of Black Sabbath late due to growing up in Cuba.

‘Stratospheric’

“I grew up in the 1980s, I wanted to be Michael Jackson. I didn’t know anything about Black Sabbath,” he said, adding that he only discovered the group through a friend in the late 1990s.

“This was the music of those who are marginalised so I found it very interesting.”

Musically, composer Chris Austin said it had been difficult to know where to start as the Black Sabbath back catalogue was so huge.

But he said once they narrowed it down it had been easy to be inspired by the music’s “glorious irregularity” and “enormous shifts of tempo”, combined with Osbourne’s early “stratospheric” vocals.

The show will be a treat for fans after the group, including three of the original members, ended their last-ever tour with a final concert in Birmingham in 2017.

Iommi said he was as interested as everyone else to discover how the ballet would turn out, but that he had been confident in Acosta and his team from the start.

“I know from our fans that there is a lot of excitement to come to the show,” he said, adding that he expected people would be particularly keen to join in.

“I think it will be great.”