Samira Ahmed

Friday

Samira Ahmed

Another voice: Casablanca state of mind

From our UK edition

‘I don’t buy and sell human beings,’ says Rick to the rival club owner hoping to get the pianist Sam. ‘Too bad,’ comes the reply, ‘that’s Casablanca’s leading commodity.’ Desperate men and women pay fortunes to people smugglers or have sex with them. Many are abandoned penniless, trapped and unable to return home, fearful of arrest. Police and cross border agencies monitor known people trafficking routes across the Mediterranean from North Africa. Passports are stolen and doctored, the price for the right papers is extortionate. There is no mercy if you cannot pay the price. Every so often the local police, under pressure from the powerful German authorities, smash a ring of traffickers.

Thursday

Samira Ahmed

Lights, camera, education

From our UK edition

Earlier this year I went as a reporter to cover Julie Walters’ return to her hometown of Smethwick, where she was talking to schoolchildren as part of the FILMCLUB charity’s Close Encounters programme. The town where Oswald Mosley was MP, and where Malcolm X once came to challenge racist election campaigning, remains a place struggling with deprivation and poverty. However what I saw in that room, organised by teachers and pupils in their spare time, was the power of a simple idea: to use film to improve aspiration and educational achievement. Walters shared experiences of her difficult grammar school days, her career change (from nursing) and most importantly the idea of ambition and hard work.

Sunday

Samira Ahmed

Truth more terrifying than fiction

From our UK edition

When I worked in Berlin in 1998 the trendy record store in the city’s gay-friendly Schöneberg district had a category called “schwarz” music. It took up a lot of the shop and seemed a bizarrely useless generalisation, given the huge popularity of both imported and home-made Rap music. There was even a whole cluster of GI rap stars – African American soldiers who stayed on after their tour of duty because of the huge German market. But the record shop captured something of the unsettling oddness that persists in modern multi racial Germany’s mono-racial insistence on labeling and categorisation.

Sunday

Samira Ahmed

Why I love Westerns

From our UK edition

We ran a version of this post by Samira Ahmed, the newsreader and reporter for Channel 4, on a previous incarnation of this blog. But with the Coen Brothers’ take on True Grit out next week, Samira has updated and extended it for us now. You can follow Samira on Twitter. here A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born,” the Wild West was still – just about – in living memory. And a little British Asian girl growing up in 70s suburbia could read the opening lines to Laura Ingalls Wilders’ Little House on the Prairie, or turn on the TV and enter the frontier lands of the movie Western.