The Young Vic artistic director tells why she wanted to reframe the story of girls lured to Syria to join Islamic State

In Nadia Fall’s debut feature film, Brides, two teenage girls run away from Britain to join Islamic State in Syria, after being lured by social media posts promising freedom. If the story sounds familiar, it’s because it was inspired by real-life events.

Fall, the artistic director of the Young Vic, said: “I was doing a play with the writer Suhayla El-Bushra at the National [Theatre], and we were approached about making a film.

Strangers passing by an image of a girl holding balloons gave the French photographer an opportunity to play with shadows

The public square in front of Paris’s city hall was undergoing construction work when Mélissa David took this photograph as she passed by en route to an appointment. She had taken her camera along in the hope of taking some pictures, but when she realised she had forgotten to charge the batteries, she used her phone instead.

“It seemed like an ordinary sunny day in Paris, the city full of busy people,” the French photographer recalls. “There were these big panels with images printed on them installed in front of the city hall to shield some of the building work. The light was beautiful, and I wanted to capture the strong shadows of these strangers passing by around the girl with the balloons.”

In Predators, director David Osit goes back to the unease of the prime-time hit To Catch a Predator and asks uncomfortable questions

It would go a little like this.

A man would arrive at a house after chatting to someone he believed was underage, with a plan to have sex or engage in a sexual act. The house would be rigged with hidden cameras and the child would be an actor of age, playing the role of an excitable pre- or young teen, maybe even suggesting they both drank alcohol as a further illicit act. But before things went the way that the guest expected they would, out came TV’s Chris Hansen, an award-winning broadcast journalist accompanied by a camera crew. Tears would be shed, apologies would be given and most often, the illusion of being “free to go” would be followed by an arrest carried out by gun-toting police officers.

Distinctive and critically acclaimed films and drama series from ‘a big hub of talent’ are appealing to audiences around the world

When it comes to film-making, Norway has long been left watching on while its Nordic neighbours Sweden and Denmark put out hit after hit by luminaries such as Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and Ruben Östlund.

But after years in the shadows, the country has finally found its place in the international spotlight with a number of distinctive, relationship-centred and critically acclaimed films and television shows in what many are describing as a Norwegian “golden age”.

The standup and actor on why he’s a huge Judge Judy fan, being impatient and wanting to bring back landlines

Born in London, Stephen K Amos, 57, gained a criminal justice degree before becoming a standup. He made his debut at the Edinburgh festival fringe in 2001, and in 2013 he was given his own Radio 4 show, What Does the K Stand For?, which ran for three series. As an actor, he starred in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and a revival of My Night With Reg, and was nominated for best supporting performer at the What’s On Stage awards. His latest standup show, Now We’re Talking, is touring the UK. He lives in London.

Which living person do you most admire and why?
John McCarthy, the journalist who was held captive for five years in Beirut. I’ve met him and he was so full of peace, humility and forgiveness – it was inspiring.

Since winning the Booker prize, the Indian author has spent two decades writing a follow-up. She talks about being longlisted again — and the immigration raids creating fear in her New York neighbourhood

Not long after the novelist Kiran Desai published her second book, The Inheritance of Loss , which won the Booker prize in 2006, she began working on her third. The title, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny , came to her quickly, and she knew she wanted to write a “modern-day romance that wasn’t necessarily romantic”, one as much concerned with the forces that keep us apart – class, race, nationality, family history – as those that bind us. Writing the book itself took almost two decades.

One problem with devoting so many years to one book is that people worry for your welfare, Desai says with a laugh. “People begin to wonder what’s wrong. Are you really working on something?” One neighbour – who observed how Desai would rise early each morning to write, eat her breakfast and lunch at her desk, take a short break to do her food shop or housework and then write until as late as she could manage in the evenings – attempted an intervention. “You need to come out of your house,” he told her. “You will go crazy writing a book! This is no way to live!” Her 90-year-old uncle observed, with affection, that she was starting to look “like a kind of derelict”, which she acknowledges was true. “It was becoming absurd!” And yet Desai says she loved living this way, in complete service to her writing.

The superstar never wanted to be a sex symbol. But we don’t have a language to discuss what great beauty can feel like for men

Robert Redford, who died this week at the age of 89, was, as well as being one of Hollywood’s brightest stars both in front of and behind the camera, graced with “all-American good looks [that] couldn’t be ignored” as the BBC wrote . Breaking through in the “new Hollywood” era, his luscious blond curls, defined jawline and gentle, charming smile provided him the typical pretty-boy advantages that beauty offers for a career in entertainment, though his talent and zest for acting pushed him further still.

It was his role as the gunslinging, sharpshooting Sundance Kid in 1969, alongside the more established Paul Newman, which propelled him to fame – though the film’s creator, William Goldman, had dismissed Redford as “just another California blond … throw a stick at Malibu, you’ll hit six of him”. Yet what comes through about Redford in the commentary and obituaries following his death is this sense that he transcended his beauty; that he defied the blank California Ken doll archetype to become genuinely prodigious within US cinema.

At Wembley, Chris Martin exhorted the crowd to ‘send love anywhere you wanna send it’. But half-hearted word salad won’t stop the rise of hate

I don’t mind committing to record that I am a fan of Coldplay. A Rush of Blood to the Head, Parachutes and Viva La Vida … are legitimately good albums. And Fix You remains a tearjerker despite decades of overuse in medical dramas.

Yet, if your taste is better than mine, you may not know that they’re on tour . On my Instagram stories, at least, there has been a conspicuous absence of Coldplay posts, compared to the wall-to-wall coverage of the Oasis reunion shows (though I’m not convinced Oasis have more good songs in their catalogue).

Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist

Listening to the album was like waking from a bad dream and liberated me from the shame I’d felt about my sexuality

As a young man, shame was a constant companion to my consideration of my sexuality. It made me question my sexual orientation: was I attracted to men, as I suspected, or did I simply have a desire for gratification?

When I tip-toed around the topic of queerness in conversations with past girlfriends, more than once it was made clear to me that bisexuality was an unattractive trait for a man to have. The shame heaped up. And yet my secret fantasies continued. It wasn’t just men I fantasised about, it was the possibility of different power dynamics, of multiple bodies, of feeling seen.