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In a nearly wordless sequence, the short documentary The Same captures men and women in four of Serbia’s largest prisons in daily routines of eating, working, socialising, grooming and moving mechanically through their environment. While some of these activities, such as baking bread or tending to horses, seem more desirable than others, the constricted nature of the scenes lends the montage a disquieting character. The Serbian director Dejan Petrović augments these images with a soundscape crafted from the rhythms of prison life – the key-clanking and beeps of guards moving through a metal detector, meals moving on and off of trays in a mess hall, sewing machines whirring on a prison factory floor. Despite the film’s alienating effect, there’s also a perhaps dissonant beauty to the images, which are artfully framed and often imbued with metaphor. The result is a complex meditation on identity and individuality, conformity and freedom.
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Stories and literature
Robert Frost’s poetic reflection on youth, as read in his unforgettable baritone
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Film and visual culture
‘Bags here are rarely innocent’ – how filmmakers work around censorship in Iran
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Language and linguistics
Closed captions suck. Here’s one artist’s inventive project to make them better
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Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
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Architecture
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Anthropology
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Subcultures
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Wellbeing
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Rituals and celebrations
A whale hunt is an act of prayer for an Inuit community north of the Arctic Circle
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