“I was doing my shopping in the beauty aisle in Sainsbury’s,” Liz*, an undergrad student at City University recalls, “and a middle-aged man, maybe 50 or 60, comes up to me and asks me with this disgusting smirk on his face: ‘Do you know where the Vaseline is?’ It completely caught me off guard. How are you supposed to react? There’s a chance that person is a complete maniac so what are you supposed to say?”
Liz’s experience is unfortunately not unique. Whether it’s an unpleasant comment, an insistent stare or …

Two years after his hard-hitting crime drama A Prophet, Jacques Audiard is back with a moving love story that unites against all odds a recent amputee and an underground street fighter.
It starts off like an American road-movie: Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), a hefty Belgian bloke and his five-year-old son are standing by the side of the highway, hitchhiking their way down to the South of France. Broke and homeless, father and son settle at the sister’s modest house in Antibes.
Ali’s boxing skills gets him a job as a bouncer in a …

Campaigners that gathered outside the annual meeting of security company G4S last Thursday, called upon the organisation to be held accountable for the death of an Angolan refugee in their custody last year.
46-year-old Jimmy Mubenga died in hospital shortly after he was restrained by three G4S guards on board of a British Airways flight to Angola in October last year. G4S was then employed by the Home Office to escort illegal immigrants on aeroplanes to their home countries.
“Our aim today is to draw attention to some of G4S’ activities on the occasion …

Nicolas Sarkozy, the least popular president of recent history, will struggle hard to win a second term at the Elysee Palace. Meanwhile, the opposition party – the ‘Parti Socialiste’ (PS) – is yet undergoing another leadership crisis, with the arrest of one of their leading figures, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who had been the pollsters’ favourite for the next elections. But the race might be rocked by a strongly performing outsider: Marine Le Pen, the newly appointed leader of the far-right ‘Front National’ (FN).
Synchronicity Magazine spoke to John Lichfield, The Independent’s long …

A thousand people gathered on the red carpet to protest against the projection of Outside The Law, Rachid Bouchareb’s second movie about the French (de)colonisation. Among the demonstrators, far-right and right-wing elected representatives tossed off many recriminations against the movie, calling it: a “revisionist work of propaganda” and an “insult to the Republic”. In 2006, however, Days of Glory [Bouchareb’s previous movie] had a warmer welcome. On the day of its release, the French prime minister announced his good deed: he promised to surviving veterans from ex-colonies that their pensions would be aligned with …

 
Jack wears a poppy on his jacket and Doc Martens on his feet. “It’s the first time I have worn them” he says, proudly showing-off his brand new boots on the way to the demo. Until September 2010, Jack was living in Loughborough and never had the opportunity to raise his voice on the streets. But Jack is not only here to satisfy his curiosity, if he is protesting today, it’s against the rise of the tuition fees: “It’s wrong to encourage people to get into that much debt”.
Raised by …