Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Since becoming India’s prime minister in 2014, Narendra Modi has been the figurehead of the nation’s shift away from secular pluralism and towards Hindu nationalism. This transformation has been accompanied by a major uptick in violence against religious minorities by Hindu extremists, and especially towards the Muslims who represent the country’s largest religious minority. In his disquieting documentary/narrative film Holy Cowboys, the Indian director Varun Chopra transports viewers to small-town India, where Hindu nationalist extremism most often proliferates. Combining observational documentary filmmaking with some scripted sequences, Chopra charts how a group of teenage boys slide into the grips of violent ideology, guided by leaders of a local extremist group and fuelled by the Hindu belief that cows are sacred. Through his subtle and sometimes shocking portrait, Chopra offers a penetrating look at the manner in which nearly any kind of violent extremist movement spreads – the fervent belief that not acting is the greatest moral wrong.
Director: Varun Chopra
Producer: Anna Hashmi
Website: Holy Cowboys
video
Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
video
Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
video
Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
11 minutes
video
War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes