The Next Wave, and don't forget to bob

Hannah McGill in today's Guardian shines a spotlight on from where will emerge the next wave of world cinema filmmakers... the successors to Cuaron, Del Toro and Inarritu. Nigeria she maintains.

With Africa having become such a modish backdrop for big-budget English language thrillers - Shooting Dogs, The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond, The Last King of Scotland, Catch a Fire - it seems only fair that wholly indigenous cinema should flourish concurrently. And there's a great deal to discover: we are talking, after all, about hundreds of filmmakers working in 1,000 languages across more than 50 countries. Nigeria's domestic industry alone produces around 1,000 films a year, and ranks as one of the world's most prolific film-producing nations. Established directors such as Dani Kouyaté, from Mali, Abderrahmane Sissako, from Mauritania, and the veteran Ousmane Sembene, from Senegal, are attracting new interest, as emerging names such as Burkina Faso's Fanta Regina Nacro and Mali's Salif Traoré find festival acclaim with fresh titles.

On a facing page, Patrick Goldstein offer developing world filmmakers a cautionary tale.

And the US state department helpfully tells our citizens that scary things can happen abroad in other countries. So stay on your couch and watch those films. No. On second thought, go places and see for yourself.

William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal

Only March but it's like beach season in NYC. If I were headed to the beach this weekend I'd be taking William Dalrymples's "The Last Mughal," the ambitious and definitive account of the 1857 uprising in Dehli. Just begun, the writing brilliant, a volume of great heft. Even more appropriate for a beach in Kerala.

A Bengali friend in Delhi writes me about the response there to the book:

"The big deal in India was that he claimed that he was the first person to look at all the material sitting in the delhi archives and really use them properly in a book - he was right and of course lots and lots of prickly Indian historians were up in arms. Their objection was that you shouldn't touch an archive unless you could read the stuff yourself, and who was will, just an upstart English travel writer who had got himself a translator. But as he said, not being able to read urdu and old urdu, shouldn't stop you from using the most amazing archival material. And that the problem with Indian historians is that many of them are caught up in these finer matters and thus miss out on the gems of material all around them. That it took an upstart foreigner to uncover some of them... Its hit a huge nerve but whats interesting is that the change this book has made here...people are actually beginning to talk about writing narrative history now which they would have scorned for not being serious enough in the past."

also Paris - Radio Nova

... best radio on the internet...

London Liberty Girl

... dinner last night with the anony-blogger Londonlibertygirl, the Brit culture reporter masquerading as a NY fashion journalist (her link to the right). Bibimbop at Doksuni in the East Village, then drinks in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel. The BH is very strange... the lobby all Spanish parador, the bar a Highlands pub. Looked fake but was somehow pleasant.

LLG reports: "I wore: denim mini. black leggings, patent ballerines, DKNY black jacket, TSE cashmere sweater. Big silver hoops. Ponytail."

I can confirm all, except the labels.

Janine DiGiovanni: Paris Notebook

Like all my Parisian friends, I’ve been exhausted for years. Our reasons vary from small children to an abundance of mistresses. Indeed one recent study shows that one third of the French population does not sleep enough. According to one psychiatrist, insomnia is “the language of distress.” And this being France, the government has decided to step in.

Earlier this month, Xavier Bertrand, the Health Minister, launched a seven-million-euro campaign to study the link between chronic fatigue and job performance. People should nap more, he says, even during the work day. His view is backed by the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, which says even three naps a week after lunch reduce the chances of dropping dead from a heart attack.

“Why not nap at work?” Bertrand says. “It can’t be taboo.”

Only in France. This is a country that already has a 35-hour work week and plenty of vacation. The French also have a higher absentee rate at work than the British or Americans. So how will imposing a siesta change their laziness?

In the Mediterranean or parts of Central America, the siesta is the norm. It is proven they have lower rates of heart disease. But these are cultures which don’t multi-task, don’t do Blackberries while walking down the street and eating lunch at the same time, and don’t produce Richard Bransons or Warren Buffets.

Years ago, a senior hack at my Wapping office gve me a tip. The nurse’s office had a couch. You could feign a migraine and go to relieve your hangover for five minutes. I did it once, but felt tremendously guilty.

But the French, as my friend Jean-Jacques often tells me, “suffer no guilt.” It’s not that they are shameless - they just have a different code. The right to sleep is linked to the French culture in the same way that food and good wine, good medical care and good schools are.

Workers would be annoyed if they did not get their employer-provided luncheon vouchers. And now workers will be annoyed if they don’t get their naps.

I will never forget the day my husband, who works for a major television network in Paris, took me to his newsroom. Then he showed me a unmarked door down the hall, which opened on to a double bed made up with paper sheets.

The room was “officially” for exhausted reporters pulling all-night shifts. “But unofficially, come on, you know what it’s used for.” He then recounted two graphic stories about reporters and their trainee journalists. “It’s better than using the loo, isn’t it?” he shrugged.

This, I fear, will be the future if M. Bertrand gets his way: government-approved naps and a new vogue for workplace affairs. It will be quite exhausting.