The award-wining composer of soundtracks to video games including Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is composing again for the first time since a traumatic pandemic

For the fortunate among us, the Covid lockdowns have, years later, become a memory – if not distant, then certainly ever-so-slightly faded. We have had a few years now, to get out there, to rebuild careers and relationships, to travel, to live in the world again. That’s not the case for everyone. Award-winning composer Jessica Curry, who crafted the beguiling, elegiac soundtracks to games such as Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther, has only just emerged. Diagnosed with a degenerative disease in her mid-20s and seriously immunocompromised as a result of her condition, she began isolating at the start of the pandemic, and for the next five years barely left her home. While there, unable to work or write, her world began to collapse.

“Like many people I had an extraordinarily painful and difficult pandemic,” she says. “I watched my dad die on Zoom, and then my auntie and more family members. Then they found a tumour in my ovary, and I had major abdominal surgery, but the operation had gone wrong, so I nearly died in 2022. While I was recovering from the third operation, the roof of our house fell in. It felt like a metaphor for everything. If a novelist had written this, no one would believe the story. And things just kept going wrong. So I wasn’t writing music, I wasn’t even listening to music. All of a sudden, I couldn’t bear it. I’m still trying to work out what that rejection was about – I was just in too much of a mental crisis. I wasn’t even feeding or dressing myself.”

All seems perfect for these rich and successful New Yorkers – until a bond is violently shattered in this sharp and pleasurable debut

Amos and Emerson are the best of friends; everyone knows this. They are a model of male intimacy and understanding: confiding in each other, trusting each other, hugging each other (“real, loving hugs, clutches without irony”). Theirs is truly a friendship for the ages.

Or so it seems. For on the weekend of Emerson’s 52nd birthday, an occasion at the centre of Hal Ebbott’s probing and insightful debut novel, something happens that changes everything – and raises the question of whether we can ever truly know anyone.

Hind Meddeb’s documentary draws on her on-the-spot experience in 2019 as protesters rose against the 30-year rule of Omar al-Bashir

Franco-Tunisian-Moroccan film-maker Hind Meddeb is based in Paris but it was her on-the-spot experience in Khartoum in 2019 of the Sudanese uprising against the reactionary 30-year rule of president Omar al-Bashir which has led to this intensely engaged and sympathetic documentary study. The film immerses itself in the world of the protesters – particularly the young and female protesters – a whole generation energised and brought together by the insurgent movement; their passion was complicated and intensified by the fact that the revolution, at least at first, only brought in a “Transitional Military Council” or TMC, which did not seem in any great hurry to transition to democratic civilian rule. In fact, it carried out a grotesque massacre against people at a sit-in in June 2019 , resulting in 127 people dead and 70 cases of rape.

Meddeb finds among the protesters a vivid, vibrant artistic movement: an oral culture of music, poetry and rap which flourishes on the streets. There is also a kind of subversive, surrealist energy: the camera finds a mock traffic roadworks sign reading: “Sorry for the Delay – Uprooting a Regime”. The most amazing performances from both women and men are witnessed, as well as a kind of soixante-huitard culture of slogans and maxims; young women hold up signs and prose-poems.

A lively history of the paper from 1986 to 1995 covers global upheaval, internal conflict and a bold but brilliant redesign

In my early career as a cultural historian, I made many journeys along the Northern line in London to the now defunct British Newspaper Library at Colindale. It was a melancholy place, with that vanilla-and-almonds smell of decomposing ink and paper, and little crumbs of disintegrated newspaper on the floor by the reading desks. Like the mayfly, a newspaper is meant to die on the day it is born. News now lives longer on the Guardian website, but prominently displayed warnings tell us when an article is more than a month old. “Who wants yesterday’s papers?” the Rolling Stones sang. “Nobody in the world.”

So newspaper history is a tricky genre that must capture the ephemeral and show why it matters. Ian Mayes’s excellent book follows two previous, quasi-official volumes of Guardian history by David Ayerst and Geoffrey Taylor. It begins in 1986 when the Guardian was still a one-section, inky, monochrome paper full of misprints and poor quality pictures, newly threatened by Rupert Murdoch’s move to Wapping and the birth of the Independent. It ends in 1995 with a radically restyled paper, with new sections such as G2 and the pocket-sized TV and entertainment supplement, the Guide. A second volume will tell the story up to 2008, when the Guardian moved to its current home in Kings Place.

Residencies in storied venues from a panopticon prison to an ancient amphitheatre gave an appropriate backdrop to the Australian band’s existential new record

‘It’s always good to make yourself feel small,” says Stu Mackenzie. We’re sitting behind the stage of the Ancient theatre in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, after the second night of his band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard ’s three shows there. The marble-hewn amphitheatre was built between 98-117AD. We’re flanked by columns bearing ancient Greek inscriptions from back when this place was called Philippopolis; the precipitous drop behind us reveals the east side of Europe’s longest continually inhabited city, the glowing cross of the Cathedral of St Louis and the shadow of the hills in the distance.

In front of the stage where the Australian experimental rock band have just spent two hours wilding out is an arena where man and beast used to do battle in front of a far more bloodthirsty crowd than the one that just drank the venue dry of beer. It’s hard not to feel like a speck here, awesomely adrift in all of human history.

The band at Lukiškiu prison, Vilnius, Lithuania

Lucian Pintilie’s grimly ironic 1968 film is based on real events, in which delinquents are forced to act out their brawl in front of government cameras

Lucian Pintilie’s Romanian film from 1968 is a bizarre and wayward political satire that at first involves just a handful of people – and finally unveils a dreamlike crowd scene with hundreds of non-professionals swarming across the screen, their expressions of incomprehension and incredulity pressed into service for fiction. Yet the whole thing is stranger than fiction – more metaphorical, more metatextual than fiction – and, of course, taken from real life.

Pintilie co-wrote the screenplay with Romanian author Horia Patrascu, based on Patrascu’s novel about an extraordinary event that took place in the early 1960s. Two drunken, hapless youths were caught brawling at a riverside cafe and were made to re-enact the event in detail for a solemn instructional film produced by the communist party authorities to be shown in schools, offices and clubs as a terrible warning against alcohol and anti-social bourgeois delinquency. The two stars of this strange film are moreover tacitly expected to redeem their offence, to expunge their sins moment-by-moment, by recreating their lives in the service of state-sponsored morality. (The actual official film that inspired this, on which Patrascu worked as a crew member, presumably exists in an archive somewhere.)

An insight into the Valencia floods and how we need to prepare for climate catastrophes. Plus, Jordan Gray’s fun new sitcom. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC One
The anatomy of a modern climate catastrophe is revealed in this sobering documentary about the appalling floods that hit Valencia in October 2024. The first part of the film deals with the events as they were experienced by the citizens, 228 of whom didn’t live to tell the tale. But there’s also an insight into how humanity will have to adapt to increasingly volatile weather as failures in forecasting and preparation are laid bare. Phil Harrison

In 1971, a man held a plane to ransom for $200,000, then parachuted out in his suit and dress shoes, never to be seen again. What happened to him?

On the evening of 24 November 1971, Florence Schaffner, a flight attendant on a Northwest Orient flight heading to Seattle, Washington, from Portland, Oregon, was handed a note by a male passenger seated at the back of the plane. Schaffner assumed the note was a phone number – this wasn’t the first time a passenger had hit on her – so she stowed it in her purse without reading it. The man leaned towards her and whispered: “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”

Schaffner read it: “Miss – I have a bomb in my briefcase and want you to sit by me.”

Sebastian Haffner’s love story set in final days of Weimar Republic published more than nine decades after it was written

A previously unknown novel by one of Europe’s most influential postwar journalists which captures the heady yet fragile spirit of the final days of the Weimar Republic has been published in Germany after his children discovered the hand-written manuscript in his desk.

More than nine decades after he wrote it, Sebastian Haffner’s Abschied or Parting has soared to the top of the Spiegel bestseller list following its debut earlier this month.