Still courtesy of TIFF. During the Islamic revolution of 1979, political unrest forced many Iranian Kurds to seek refuge in neighbouring Iraq, where they were then placed into refugee camps. Mandoo, which is featured in TIFF‘s Discovery program this year, follows the saga of Sheelan, a young female doctor of Kurdish origin who fled to [...]

“Stop the torture—end the war,” read one colourful placard at Queen’s Park. “End the siege of Gaza,” read another. Voicing solid opposition against the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq, immense columns of demonstrators took over Queen’s Park and Bloor Street on Saturday. “From Iraq to Palestine,” they shouted, “occupation is a crime!” [...]

The highly-respected British science journal Nature has called the Harper government’s record on science and the environment “dismal.” The PM was unavailable for comment yesterday, as he was in an emergency cabinet meeting called after Wednesday night’s lunar eclipse to determine why the moon had disappeared. An independent panel of experts has come up with [...]

David Miller delivered a balanced budget yesterday, thanks to higher property taxes, some fabulous new tariffs, and a one-time infusion of $150 million from the the provincial government. According to Miller, the property tax increase of 3.75% is in line with his commitment to limit raises to the rate of inflation (1.9% in Toronto last [...]

Palace of the End, Judith Thompson’s most recent play, is not only her most political work, it is also her best. As most auditioning actors in this country have discovered, Thompson’s greatest strength has always been her monologues, and in this piece, she uses that strength to its full advantage. In fact, she dispenses with [...]

It’s Boxing Day! Go spend money! If you don’t, Canada’s economy will suffer and it will all be your fault! You probably don’t even own all the seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD yet, do you? You slacker. Turkey explains how well its airstrikes in Kurdish Iraq have worked. Short answer: they worked [...]

You may remember our coverage of the excellent Vice film Heavy Metal in Baghdad. A documentary following the Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda, we reviewed it at TIFF and called it “one of our top films of the festival” before interviewing one of the directors, Suroosh Alvi. Although Acrassicauda have since managed to escape Iraq [...]

Torontoist has 25 admit-two passes to give away to our readers for a promo screening of Redacted at 7 p.m. on Monday November 12, 2007 at the Royal. Directed by Brian De Palma (you've probably heard of him) and produced by two Torontonians––Simone Urdl and Jennifer Weiss––Redacted is "a profound meditation on the way information is packaged, distributed and received in an era with infinite channels of communication," and centres on a group of...

So, things are rapidly going to hell in Pakistan. Somewhere between one and two thousand people have been “detained” (i.e., dragged away) since Saturday and all private television stations shut down and the country is about ninety percent of the way to pure chaos, which, given that they have nuclear weapons, is bad. Of course, [...]

October 16 is the day that the Walt Disney Company was founded (1923), the day that Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act in response to the October Crisis terrorist kidnapping (1970), and the day that President Bush signed into law the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (2002). It is also, though [...]