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Front Row: ABBA Voyage, Terence Davies,  Zaffar Kunial's poem for George Floyd

24/05/2022

ABBA Voyage, Terence Davies,  Zaffar Kunial's poem for George Floyd

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, ABBA Voyage, Terence Davies,  Zaffar Kunial's poem for George Floyd

ABBA Voyage, Terence Davies, Zaffar Kunial's poem for George Floyd

The director and choreographer of the ABBA Voyage discuss making the show, Terence Davies on his new film Benediction, and Zaffar Kunial's poem for George Floyd.

48 years after the British jury gave them nul points at the Eurovision song contest, ABBA the avatars begin a long term arena residency in London. Samira talks to the director Baillie Walsh and the choreographer Wayne McGregor about creating the show.

Terence Davies, director of some of the finest films ever made in the UK, such as Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, talks to Samira Ahmed about his new film Benediction. It’s based on the life of Siegfried Sassoon, one of the great poets of the Great War. As well as writing about its horrors and having fought with great courage, he declared his refusal to take any further part in it because he saw that the people in power, who could bring the suffering to an end, were prolonging the slaughter. The film chronicles his troubled life as a gay man after the war.

It is two years tomorrow since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. To mark this sad anniversary, we asked the poet Zaffar Kunial, whose first collection Us was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize, to reflect on this and see if he could write a poem. He did, and reads Watershed, for the first time.

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ABBA Voyage, Terence Davies, Zaffar Kunial's poem for George Floyd

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