This Cultural Life Folgen

Florence Pugh was Oscar and BAFTA nominated for her role as Amy March in the adaptation of Little Women. She has won huge acclaim for films including Midsommer, Lady Macbeth, and the Marvel adventure Black Widow. She also played the lead in the television adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl. More recently she’s been on the big screen in Don’t Worry Darling, and 18th century Irish drama The Wonder. Florence tells John Wilson how her performing ambitions during a primary school nativity show in which she played Mary with a northern accent, borrowed from her Grimsby-born grandparents. She chooses, as one of her most significant creative inspirations, a woman called Linda Mace who made costumes for all the school productions, and whose store room full of period clothes fuelled Florence’s imaginations. She recalls her breakthrough role in The Falling, about a fainting phenomenon at an English girls’ school in the late 1960s, and how she was inspired by the film’s director Carol Morley. She also pays tribute to casting director Shaheen Baig who helped her secure roles in subsequent films including Lady Macbeth, and remembers working alongside Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson when she played Cordelia in a television version of King Lear. Florence Pugh chooses the song She’s Only Happy In the Sun by the American singer songwriter Ben Harper as source of inspiration, and reflects on her own musical ambitions which started as a teenage singer-songwriter posting videos on YouTube under the name Flossie Rose. She also discusses the pressures of fame, gossip columns and why she’s learned to stop searching for references to herself in social media. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Shirin Neshat is the world’s foremost Iranian-born artist. Best known for her black and white portraits of veiled women, often with hands and faces overlain with intricate Farsi calligraphy, she works primarily as a photographer and filmmaker. A winner of one of the biggest international arts prizes, the Praemium Imperiale, she has shown art in galleries all round the world - except in Iran, as she has lived in exile in America since 1996. As human rights protests continued in Iran, a huge artwork by Shirin, called Women Life Freedom, was shown on billboards at London’s Piccadilly Circus where a rally was staged in support of Iranian protesters. Shirin Neshat tells John Wilson about her upbringing in an artistic, liberal family who lived amidst the conservative and religious Iranian city of Qazvin. She recalls how she was studying art at the University of California, Berkeley, when the Islamic Revolution took place in 1979. With new restrictions imposed on women, including the mandatory veil, she decided to remain in America. Returning to Iran for the first time in 1990, she was shocked by the changes and began to make artworks in response, primarily exploring the theme of power and oppression in two series of works entitled Unveiling and Women Of Allah. Shirin also reveals the huge influence on her work of the Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad, who was killed in a car accident in 1967 aged just 32. Producer: Edwina PitmanExtracts from The Wind Will Carry Us by Forugh Farrokhzad, read by Shahrbanou Nilou

Over six decades, Ken Loach has forged a reputation as Britain’s foremost politically-engaged filmmaker, exploring issues of social justice, freedom and power. He has twice won the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2006 for The Wind That Shakes The Barley, set amidst the Irish struggle for independence, and twenty years later for I, Daniel Blake, a contemporary British story about unemployment and poverty. Ken Loach recalls his Midlands childhood as the son of a factory worker, and annual summer holidays in Blackpool. It was there that he saw end-of-pier variety acts and comedians, including Jewell and Warris, Nat Jackley and Frank Randle, all of whom helped ignited an early passion for storytelling and performance. He recalls how, after studying law at Oxford, he joined the BBC’s Wednesday Play production team, with the aim of creating television drama out of contemporary social issues. His television films Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home, which tackled abortion, unemployment and homlessness, were each seen by over 10 million people, and played an influential part in the public debate about the issues. Loach reveals that Czech cinema of the 1960s, including the films of Miloš Forman, were a huge inspiration on his own filmmaking career, with the use of the naturalistic performances and camera-work that captured the environment from a distance most clearly seen in his classic 1969 film Kes. Ken Loach also chooses as a major influence, the real lives of people whose stories have inspired his films throughout his career, including veterans of the Spanish civil war and Nicaraguans who had seen schools and health centres destroyed by the Contra rebels. Producer: Edwina Pitman