Apocalypto
Tuesday 19 December 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
Isabel Hilton and guests discuss Mel Gibson's new film Apocalypto. More Braveheart than The Passion of The Christ, Apocalypto is set in Central America 3,000 years ago and performed in Mayan dialect. But will this tale of indigenous culture draw the Latino and Native American audiences in the way that his previous film attracted Christians?
A scene from Apocalypto
A scene from Apocalypto
A scene from Apocalypto
Playlist
On Night Waves this evening, film critic Nigel Floyd joins Isabel Hilton to discuss Apocalypto, Mel Gibson's new film set among the Maya in Mexico on the verge of the first Spanish landings. Does this unapologetic chase thriller offer a serious insight into a lost civilisation - and does the implicit parallel with today's allegedly decadent Western civilisation really hold up?
Also on Night Waves on tonight:
As the debate about prostitution continues in the wake of the killing of five sex workers in Ipswich, Isabel is joined by the journalist Bea Campbell and historian Lucy Bland to explore the history of British thinking about the selling of sex. How much have the underlying paradigms really changed since the mid nineteenth century?
And Lebanese novelist Nada Awar Jarrer talks to Isabel from Beirut about the vital role of the writer in Lebanon as the country is once more swept by political turmoil - and about her new novel Dreams of Water, which explores the possibility of hope in the face of civil war.
'Apocalypto' opens nationwide on January 5th 2007
'Dreams of Water' is published by Harper Collins on January 2nd 2007
