Welcome to the August issue of the newsletter A group of us watched Gillo Pontecorvo's brilliant black and white movie The Battle of Algiers (1966, re-released in 2007) recently. The film uses a gritty newsreel effect to recreate France's suppression of the 1950s Algerian uprising. The film is as gripping now as when it was first released, although it is noticeable that Islam is not mentioned once and there is a sense of the world being simpler then somehow. These days, we have much more exposure to so many different cultural layers and influences...