Greetings, one and all! 

Jane here, bringing you our non-spooky (Halloween) Weekend Edition.

But first, and I am trying not to sound too smug here, this week the Nerve was shortlisted for Innovation of the Year in the prestigious British Journalism Awards – just one year old and here we are, battling it out with the big legacy titles. 

In fact, the shortlists are peppered with nominations for other independent publications as well, revealing the positive side of a rapidly changing media landscape. Are we part of an insurgency?

So heartfelt thanks to you, the Nerve family, for supporting us with the monthly subscriptions that make our work possible.

And so to today’s articles. They include Sangita Myska on Andy Burnham’s noise crackdown, a Recommender from polymath playwright/poet/artist Inua Ellams, Ellen E Jones on Boots Riley’s riotous heist film I Love Boosters, and an unmissably trenchant column by Stewart Lee on the betrayal of Ukraine by Trump and (closer to home) by Boris Johnson. Rest assured, Stewart does not pull his punches. 

Over the last couple of decades immigration, small boats, refugees – lies, damned lies and statistics – have come to dominate news feeds and to upend global politics. Often these stories ignore the people behind the headlines. A remarkable new documentary, One in a Million, directed by Itab Azzam and her husband, Jack MacInnes, is a welcome antidote. 

It follows an 11-year-old Syrian girl, Israa, and her life over a decade. Natasha Walter, a regular Nerve contributor who founded the charity Women for Refugee Women, interviews Itab about her poignant film and talks of Itab’s own journey, growing up in Damascus and arriving in London to study just as her home country descended into civil war. 

One in a Million premiered at Sundance at the start of the year where it picked up both audience and directing awards. As Natasha says: “One of the great tragedies of our times is the dehumanisation of those who cross borders. Enabling Israa and her parents to tell their stories in all their intimate, messy truth pushes back against that dehumanisation.”

Do go and watch One in a Million if you can. Below are the links for Natasha’s interview and more. And don’t forget we have our first “watch party” this weekend followed by panel discussion online on Monday evening – see below.

“I simply cannot believe that Trump will ditch the ­Ukrainians,” wrote Boris Johnson two years ago in a liberal-baiting piece for the Daily Mail: a prediction that almost – almost – turned out to be correct, Stewart writes, except for the fact that “Trump has now sided with Putin against Ukraine and allows his missiles to strafe Kyiv undetected, killing toddlers in parks in their pushchairs”. Despite his many shortcomings, though, Johnson is still somehow allowed “to burp out his journalistic mouth farts”, Stewart writes, even as every warning the so-called wokerati made about the US turns out to be true. Read Stewart’s column here.

There has been a growing buzz around One in a Million since it picked up two awards at the Sundance festival at the start of the year. Natasha Walter spoke to Itab Azzam, the co-director of the film who, over the course of a decade, followed the emotional journey of a family that fled Assad’s Syria before eventually settling in Germany. Read the interview here.

Our fearless political commentator has a confession to make: “Ten minutes into a journey, fortified by solidarity eye-contact from other passengers, I step up to ask those blasting their music or conversation at full volume on speakerphone to turn it down.” So she was delighted to see that Andy Burnham is leading an initiative to clamp down on antisocial noise. Isn’t that a trivial issue for the prime minister to be bothering with? No, Sangita writes: “The fact is, the so-called small stuff matters. It matters because mutual respect and empathy in shared public spaces helps to oil the wheels of community cohesion” – especially in a country where political divisions need to be healed. Read her column here.

Best known for his smash-hit play Barber Shop Chronicles, the poet, playwright, artist and all-round creative whirlwind Inua Ellams was born in Nigeria in 1984 before moving to London as a child. As his latest play, Once Upon a Time in Sokoto, tours the UK and he prepares to publish two books next month, he took time out to tell us about the culture that he’s been loving lately, from a must-listen music podcast to a “sublime” production of August Wilson’s Fences – and an epic new TV drama starring Jason Momoa. Read his choices here.

Starring a trio of high-end shoplifters, a teleporter powered by communist theory and Demi Moore continuing her post-Substance run of career-bests as fashion designer Christie Smith, I Love Boosters is a technicolour riot, says our film critic Ellen E Jones. Before he made movies, Boots Riley was a community organiser and rapper with the Coup and you may remember his anarchic directorial debut, Sorry to Bother You, in 2018. Now he’s back with another unhinged takedown of capitalism in the form of a bold, bonkers heist movie. Read Ellen’s five-star review here.

Recalling her childhood growing up in a bustling home outside Dublin, the chef Erica Drum remembers that even while she and her three siblings were still eating breakfast, they were asking their mum what’s for supper. Her no-nonsense debut cookbook, Dinner, targets those “needing some inspiration while juggling the million other things life throws at you” and has the cheeky subtitle “Meals to Match the Day You’re Having”. Today she shares a favourite – and easy – autumnal dish. Get the recipe here.

NERVE EVENT

There’s still time to get tickets for this weekend’s “watch party” for Jeanie Finlay’s powerful documentary All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea – a David v Goliath tale centred on the battle to save the fishing industry in Teesside following an ecocide. Here is the feature we published last month centred on Stan Rennie, the Hartlepool fisherman at the heart of the story.

You can watch the film anytime from 7pm on Saturday 31 October to 6pm on Monday 2 November, and then join Jeanie Finlay, Carole Cadwalladr and others on Monday evening at 6.30pm for an online panel discussion. We are co-hosting this screening on the US platform Kinema. You will need to create a Kinema account and buy tickets here. 

Nerve subscribers get 33% off the ticket price using the code NERVE_ATR_33

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back again on Tuesday. If you’re enjoying this newsletter please do forward it on to your family and friends as it really helps us grow.

Jane