Culture

This album expresses beautifully the longing of Tuareg nomads in exile whose Saharan homeland has been the site of successive wars. The Islamist militias who took over Northern Mali in late 2012 denounced Tinariwen’s music and even kidnapped one of their members. Several of the band participated in previous Tuareg rebellions, meeting for the first time in a military training camp before they swapped their machine guns for guitars.

Our protagonist, Katherine, is trapped. In an arranged marriage to a weak and bitter man twice her age; in an isolated house out on the moors, where she is repeatedly advised to stay indoors; in the corseted dresses which her maid, Anna, straps her into each morning. Katherine, luminously played by Florence Pugh (who also lit up Carol Morley’s The Falling), is bored.

There is a delicious irony here in that the infamous Section 28 of 1988’s Local Government Act specifically prohibited “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship” and this exhibition, named after the campaign to repeal the act, is overwhelmingly family friendly.

The exhibition marks 50 years since the passing of another piece of legislation — the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967.

Raoul Peck’s new documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, sets the words of author and civil rights activist James Baldwin’s unfinished book, Remember This House, against archive footage of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Sprawling and epic in scope — setting in its sights the whole of the black experience in America, from slavery to the Black Lives Matter movement — it is poetic and almost romantic, yet very angry. It arrives at a time when audiences are being enthused by the anti-racism of Get Out, a more mainstream and comic movie, but just as sharp.