Arts and Culture

Japan has introduced new rules restricting how names are spelled and pronounced. The new regulations, announced last week, aim to quell a growing practice of Japanese parents giving their babies unconventional names, known as “kira kira”, or glittery, in kanji, one of Japan’s major writing systems.

But why are such names a problem for Japanese authorities? And do the new rules spell disaster for parents who want to break the mould and name their children Nike, the shoe brand, or Pikachu, the little lagomorphic animated character with lightning powers, which is part of the Japanese media franchise Pokemon?

What are kira kira names?

A kira kira name is a non-traditional name where the pronunciation is unusual or does not match the standard or phonetic pronunciation in kanji.

Japan primarily uses three systems of writing: hiragana, katakana and kanji. Kanji employs Chinese characters and is used in writing names. Parents in Japan can choose from among 2,999 kanji characters to name their child – out of these, 2,136 characters are commonly used. Hiragana and katakana can also be used.

Kira kira names, while relatively uncommon, started to grow in popularity in Japan in the 1980s, influenced by pop culture, brands and popular games like Pokemon or characters from the world of Tokyo-based animation house Studio Ghibli.

Parents pick what they want to call their child – say, Pikachu or the fictional character Hello Kitty. Then, they try to piece together kanji characters that sound like the name they picked.

But often, the kanji pronunciation is nowhere near what the name is supposed to sound like.

What’s the problem with kira kira names?

The names are spelled a certain way, but are meant to be pronounced very differently, making it difficult even for Japanese speakers to read the name correctly, causing confusion at places like hospitals and schools.

Take a name written like “今鹿” in kanji characters. Those letters suggest a pronunciation like “imashika”, typically a family name, said John Maher, a linguist at Temple University’s Japan campus who specialises in the sociolinguistics and languages of the country.

However, what the parents might have intended is the given name “Naushika,” inspired by the titular character of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1984 animated Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

“A primary school teacher taking roll stares at the kanji of the little girl in the front row and scratches her head. ‘Huh? Naushika?! Are you kidding me?’ It’s the name of a Ghibli studio anime film,” Maher told Al Jazeera.

He cited another example — “七音,” which is pronounced as “nanane,” typically a given name. However, it is supposed to be pronounced like “doremi” – either a nod to the early 2000s anime, Ojamajo Doremi, or to a character in the manga series Doraemon.

“It’s causing a public fuss for one basic reason: frustration in everyday life. Schoolteachers cannot figure out how to pronounce their pupils’ names. Bosses cannot figure out their worker names,” said Maher.

Why do people use kira kira names?

The “glittery” names appear to represent an effort to subvert tradition.

A study using data from Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance from 1913 to 2015 revealed that variations in naming patterns were growing over the course of the century.

Still, “until the government’s National Institute for the Japanese Language conducts an objective study, we don’t have the numbers”, Maher said. The National Institute for the Japanese Language (NINJAL) is a Tokyo-based independent research institute for the Japanese language, established in 1948 with the purpose of researching the Japanese language and making recommendations about its correct usage.

Linguist and author Adam Aleksic said he believed the trend represented a pushback against tradition.

“There used to be traditional names and these names are a reaction against those cultural heirlooms,” Aleksic told Al Jazeera.

But he added that this phenomenon was not restricted to Japan. “There are pop culture names everywhere,” Aleksic said, citing the example of how many parents around the world named their children Katniss after the popularity of the dystopian book series, the Hunger Games, and the resulting films.

In Japan, he said, the rise in kira kira names might represent a cultural trend towards individuality, “probably because of Western influence, whereas historically, it [Japan] was more of a collectivist culture”.

What has the Japanese government done?

The recent law was an amendment to a family registry law originally passed on June 2, 2023, Jay Allen, a Tokyo-based journalist for a publication called Unseen Japan, told Al Jazeera.

The revised law, which came into effect on May 26, requires families to register furigana readings of names on the family register. A furigana reading is a smaller script comprising syllabaries in hiragana and katakana to indicate the phonetic reading of kanji names.

Previously, the furigana was not notarised on the family register. Allen explained that the change would allow authorities to check for any mismatches between spelling and pronunciation.

Now, Japanese authorities will mail notifications to households to confirm the phonetic readings of the names of the members. This will be done not only for newborns, but for every household member with existing registered names. While older people with kira kira names will not have to change names, experts said, this exercise would help the government know exactly how all names are supposed to be pronounced.

Those who want to correct the phonetic readings of their names will need to submit corrections within a year of receiving the notification. Parents of newborns may have to explain the pronunciation of their children, and local media have reported that they may be referred to legal bureaus.

The government has not directly banned kira kira names, but the new law seeks to restrict parents from using unorthodox pronunciations of kanji characters. “If they’re using kanji, which most Japanese parents do, then they have to show that the pronunciations they chose somehow relate to common pronunciations for those kanji.”

Allen explained that the new law rejects names that have no relationship to the kanji spelling; and names that are easy to mispronounce.

What’s next?

Aleksic said that he believes that the new law could lead to a decrease in non-standard pronunciations. However, he added that parents might find other ways to make their children’s names unique and interesting, “maybe [using] rare characters, maybe focusing more on katakana”.

“I strongly believe that the desire for individuality wins out in the end and these parents will find other ways to make their [children’s] names unique, and then that will still annoy the old guard.”

Ngugi wa Thiong’o loved to dance. He loved it more than anything else – even more than writing. Well into his 80s, his body slowed by increasingly disabling kidney failure, Ngugi would get up and start dancing merely at the thought of music, never mind the sound of it. Rhythm flowed through his feet the way words flowed through his hands and onto the page.

It is how I will always remember Ngugi – dancing. He passed away on May 28 at the age of 87, leaving behind not only a Nobel-worthy literary legacy but a combination of deeply innovative craft and piercingly original criticism that joyfully calls on all of us to do better and push harder – as writers, activists, teachers and people – against the colonial foundations that sustain all our societies. As for me, he pushed me to go far deeper up river to Kakuma refugee camp, where the free association of so many vernacular tongues and cultures made possible the freedom to think and speak “from the heart” – something he would always describe as writing’s greatest gift.

Ngugi had long been a charter member of the African literary canon and a perennial Nobel favourite by the time I first met him in 2005. Getting to know him, it quickly became clear to me that his writing was inseparable from his teaching, which in turn was umbilically tied to his political commitments and long service as one of Africa’s most formidable public intellectuals.

Ngugi’s cheerfulness and indefatigable smile and laugh hid a deep-seated anger, reflecting the scars of violence on his body and soul as a child, young man and adult victimised by successive and deeply intertwined systems of criminalised rule.

The murder of his deaf brother, killed by the British because he did not hear and obey soldiers’ orders to stop at a checkpoint, and the Mau Mau revolt that divided his other brothers on opposite sides of the colonial order during the final decade of British rule, imbued in him the foundational reality of violence and divisiveness as the twin engines of permanent coloniality even after independence formally severed the connection to the metropole.

More than half a century after these events, nothing would arouse Ngugi’s animated ire more than bringing up in a discussion the transitional moment from British to Kenyan rule, and the fact that colonialism didn’t leave with the British, but rather dug in and reenforced itself with Kenya’s new, Kenyan rulers.

As he became a writer and playwright, Ngugi also became a militant, one devoted to using language to reconnect the complex African identities – local, tribal, national and cosmopolitan – that the “cultural bomb” of British rule had “annihilated” over the previous seven decades.

After his first play, The Black Hermit, premiered in Kampala in 1962, he was quickly declared a voice who “speaks for the Continent”. Two years later, Weep Not Child, his first novel and the first English-language novel by an East African writer, came out.

As he rose to prominence, Ngugi decided to renounce the English language and start writing in his native Gikuyu.

The (re)turn to his native tongue radically altered the trajectory not just of his career, but of his life, as the ability of his clear-eyed critique of postcolonial rule to reach his compatriots in their own language (rather than English or the national language of Swahili) was too much for Kenya’s new rulers to tolerate, and so he was imprisoned for a year without trial in 1977.

What Ngugi had realised when he began writing in Gikuyu, and even more so in prison, was the reality of neocolonialism as the primary mechanism of postcolonial rule. This wasn’t the standard “neocolonialism” that anti- and post-colonial activists used to describe the ongoing power of former colonial rulers by other means after formal independence, but rather the willing adoption of colonial technologies and discourses of rule by newly independent leaders, many of whom – like Jomo Kenyatta, Ngugi liked to point out – themselves suffered imprisonment and torture under the British rule.

Thus, true decolonisation could only occur when people’s minds were freed from foreign control, which required first and perhaps foremost the freedom to write in one’s native language.

Although rarely acknowledged, Ngugi’s concept of neocolonialism, which owed much, he’d regularly explain, to the writings of Kwame Nkrumah and other African anti-colonial intellectuals-turned-political leaders, anticipated the rise of the now ubiquitous “decolonial” and “Indigenous” turns in the academy and progressive cultural production by almost a generation.

Indeed, Ngugi has long been placed together with Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as the founding generation of postcolonial thought and criticism. But he and Said, whom he’d frequently discuss as a brother-in-arms and fellow admirer of Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad, shared a similar all-encompassing focus on language, even as Said wrote his prose mostly in English rather than Arabic.

For Said and Ngugi, colonialism had not yet passed, but was very much still an ongoing, viscerally and violently lived reality – for the former through the ever more violent and ultimately annihilatory settler colonialism, for the latter through the violence of successive governments.

Ngugi saw his link with Said in their common experience growing up under British rule. As he explained in his afterword to a recently published anthology of Egyptian prison writings since 2011, “The performance of authority was central to the colonial culture of silence and fear,” and disrupting that authority and ending the silence could only come first through language.

For Said, the swirl of Arabic and English in his mind since childhood created what he called a “primal instability”, one that could be calmed fully when he was in Palestine, which he returned to multiple times in the last decade of his life. For Ngugi, even as Gikuyu enabled him to “imagine another world, a flight to freedom, like a bird you see from the [prison] window,” he could not make a final return home in his last years.

Still, from his home in Orange County, California in the United States, he would never tire of urging students and younger colleagues to “write dangerously”, to use language to resist whatever oppressive order in which they found themselves. The bird would always take flight, he would say, if you could write without fear.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

In the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, escaping the war with Russia is nearly impossible.

On certain days, when the wind shifts, residents of this historic city can hear the distant rumble of artillery fire from the front line, some 30km (18.5 miles) away.

Most nights, Russian kamikaze drones packed with explosives buzz overhead as parents put their children to bed.

Three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the unrelenting war exerts a heavy psychological burden on many in Kharkiv. Yet, there is a place in the city where, for a few fleeting hours, the war seems to vanish.

Beneath the Kharkiv National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, in a dim, brick-walled basement, a dance company has established a refuge from drones and bombs – a space where audiences can lose themselves in performances of classic ballets.

In April, this underground venue hosted performances of Chopiniana, an early 20th-century ballet set to the music of Frederic Chopin. Despite the improvised setting, the ballet was staged with full classical grandeur, complete with corps de ballet and orchestra.

It marked a significant milestone for Kharkiv’s cultural life: the first complete classical ballet performance in the city since February 2022, when Russian troops launched their invasion of Ukraine.

“In spite of everything – the fact that bombs are flying, drones, and everything else – we can give a gift of something wonderful to people,” said Antonina Radiievska, artistic director of Opera East, the ballet company behind the production.

“They can come and, even if it’s just for an hour or two, completely immerse themselves in a different world.”

Despite Ukraine’s rich tradition in classical ballet, the art form now seems far removed from the everyday existence of Ukrainians living through war. Daily routines revolve around monitoring apps for drone alerts, sleeping on metro station floors to escape air raids, or seeking news of loved ones on the front line. Pirouettes, pas de deux and chiffon tutus feel worlds away.

Nevertheless, the journey of Kharkiv’s ballet through wartime reflects the ways in which Ukrainian society has adapted and evolved.

On February 23, 2022, the National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre staged a performance of the ballet Giselle. The next day, Russia launched its full-scale invasion. As Moscow’s forces advanced towards Kharkiv and threatened to seize the city, the theatre closed its doors and much of the ballet troupe departed.

Some regrouped in Slovakia and Lithuania, mounting ballet productions abroad with assistance from European sponsors.

By 2023, although the conflict ground on, the situation in Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s northeast, had stabilised after Russian ground troops withdrew. A new realisation took hold – this was a long-term reality. Locals began referring to the city, and themselves, with the Ukrainian word “nezlamniy”, meaning invincible.

That year, work began on transforming the theatre’s basement into a performance venue. By October 2023, it was being used for rehearsals. The following spring, authorities permitted the theatre to admit audiences, and small-scale ballet performances, including children’s concerts, resumed.

The revival of Chopiniana marked the next chapter in Kharkiv’s wartime cultural journey.

Staging a classical opera again signals that Ukraine endures, says Igor Tuluzov, director-general of Opera East. “We are demonstrating to the world that we really are a self-sufficient state, independent, in all its aspects, including cultural independence,” he said.

The auditorium now seats 400 people on stackable chairs, compared with the 1,750 seats in the main theatre above, where the plush mustard seats remain empty.

The stage is a quarter the size of the main one. Grey-painted bricks, concrete floors, and exposed pipes and wiring form a stark contrast to the varnished hardwood and marble of the theatre above. The basement’s acoustics, performers say, fall short of the cavernous main auditorium.

For artistic director Radiievska, however, the most important thing is that, after a long pause, she and her troupe can once again perform for a live audience.

“It means, you know, life,” she said. “An artist cannot exist without the stage, without creativity, without dance or song. It’s like a rebirth.”

Ngugi’s work critiqued both British colonialism in Kenya and postcolonial Kenyan society.

Renowned Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o has died at age 87, his family members have announced.

“It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of our dad, Ngugi wa Thiong’o,” his daughter Wanjiku Wa Ngugi wrote on Facebook on Wednesday.

“He lived a full life, fought a good fight,” she said.

At the time of his death, Ngugi was reportedly receiving kidney dialysis treatments, but his immediate cause of death is still unknown.

Born in Kenya in 1938, Ngugi will be remembered as one of Africa’s most important postcolonial writers. Formative events in Ngugi’s early life included the brutal Mau Mau war that swept British-ruled Kenya in the 1950s.

Ngugi’s work was equally critical of the British colonial era and the postcolonial society that followed Kenya’s independence in 1963. Other topics in his work covered the intersection between language, culture, history, and identity.

Ngugi made a mark for himself in the 1970s when he decided to switch from writing in English to the Kikuyu and Swahili languages – a controversial decision at the time.

“We all thought he was mad… and brave at the same time,” Kenyan writer David Maillu told the AFP news agency.

“We asked ourselves who would buy the books.”

One of his most famous works, “Decolonising the Mind”, was published in 1986 while living abroad. The book argues that it is “impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors”, AFP reports.

Besides holding the position of acclaimed writer, Ngugi was a prisoner of conscience. In 1977, he was jailed in Kenya for staging a play deemed critical of contemporary society.

He once described the country’s new elite class as “the death of hopes, the death of dreams and the death of beauty”.

In 1982, Ngugi went into self-imposed exile in the UK following a ban on theatre groups and performances in his home country. He later moved to the US, where he worked as a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He also continued writing a range of works, including essays, memoirs and novels about Kenya.

Following news of Ngugi’s death, praise for his life and work quickly appeared online.

“My condolences to the family and friends of Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a renowned literary giant and scholar, a son of the soil and great patriot whose footprints are indelible,” Kenya’s opposition leader Martha Karua wrote on X.

“Thank you Mwalimu [teacher] for your freedom writing,” wrote Amnesty International’s Kenya branch on X. “Having already earned his place in Kenyan history, he transitions from mortality to immortality.”

Margaretta wa Gacheru, a sociologist and former student of Ngugi, said the author was a national icon.

“To me, he’s like a Kenyan Tolstoy, in the sense of being a storyteller, in the sense of his love of the language and panoramic view of society, his description of the landscape of social relations, of class and class struggles,” she said.

Colombo, Sri Lanka — As a girl, when Srimathi Mallika Kaluarachchi would go to the cinema with her family, and a man on the screen would hit the character played by superstar Malini Fonseka, Kaluarachchi would cry.

Then she would turn to her father in desperation. “We used to scream at the screen, telling our father to save her,” Kaluarachchi, now 68, recalled. “That was how much we loved her.”

On Monday, Kaluarachchi joined thousands of fans in bidding a final goodbye to Fonseka, who died on May 24 at the age of 78 while receiving treatment in hospital. Neither Fonseka’s family nor the hospital has publicly revealed the nature of her illness. One of the country’s most popular actresses, Fonseka was widely regarded as the queen of Sri Lankan cinema.

She was cremated with full state honours, as fans dressed in the mourning colour of white flocked to Colombo’s Independence Square to catch a glimpse of her coffin before she was cremated. Songs from Fonseka’s films were played while a projector drone flew above the crowd, displaying a montage of scenes from across her career.

Describing Fonseka as “a true icon of Sri Lankan cinema whose grace and talent inspired generations”, Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake said that “her legacy will forever shine in our hearts and on our screens”.

A trailblazer

Fonseka, who starred in more than 140 films, had a career in Sinhala cinema spanning more than five decades.

“Whenever we saw her, we’d forget all the pain we had in our hearts,” said Kaluarachchi, wiping away tears. “Now, we know films aren’t real, but when we were children, we didn’t realise.”

Fonseka was special, Kaluarachchi said, because of the way she represented how everyday people experienced love and, often, the violence that comes with it for women in patriarchal societies.

Fonseka started her career as a stage actress before making her film debut with the 1968 film Punchi Baba.

Her popularity peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, as she collaborated with renowned directors, including Lester James Peries and Dharmasena Pathiraja.

Many of her most famous roles shared a common theme: the struggles of women in a male-dominated society. She played a wife murdered by her husband in the film Nidhanaya (1972), a college student in a complicated relationship in Thushara (1973), a village girl hounded by male attention in Eya Dan Loku Lamayek (1975), and a girl from a rural fishing village enticed by the big city lifestyle, in Bambaru Avith (1978).

This success continued into the 1980s, when she also expanded into directorial ventures, including in the films Sasara Chethana (1984) and Ahimsa (1987).

‘A bridge’ across generations

She also starred in the first Indian-Sri Lankan co-production Pilot Premnath in 1978, opposite legendary Indian Tamil actor Sivaji Ganesan.

“She never limited herself to one category. She was in commercial cinema and arthouse cinema,” said 27-year-old teacher Prabuddhika Kannagara. “She played a village girl, a young girl, a married woman, a mother, and even a grandmother. She represented women across all generations.”

Kannagara was one of the last mourners at the funeral, sitting and watching as sparks emanated from the white cloth tower in the square, specially erected for Fonseka’s cremation, according to Buddhist rituals.

She told Al Jazeera that Fonseka had acted as a “bridge” across various eras of cinema, from black-and-white to digital, and had remained a star not only for her mother’s generation, but also for her own.

Fonseka was a five-time Best Actress winner at Sri Lanka’s Presidential Film Awards. Her most recent win was in 2006 for her role in Ammawarune, a film she also directed. She also won international accolades at the Moscow International Film Festival and the New Delhi Film Festival.

She became Sri Lanka’s first female television drama director in the 1980s, a time when women’s participation behind the camera was unusual. Fonseka also had a short-lived foray into politics, serving as a member of Sri Lanka’s parliament from 2010 to 2015 under former President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Film critic and journalist Anuradha Kodagoda told Al Jazeera that Fonseka was “rare and unique in Sri Lankan cinema” for the range of characters she played.

Petite and fair, with an oval face and soft features, Fonseka was a “pioneer” in representing working-class women onscreen, and “represented the beauty idol for Sri Lankan women”, said Kodagoda.

“She portrayed her characters very organically and authentically. That is the magic of it, I think,” Kodagoda said.

‘There will be no other queens’

Many mourners, some of whom travelled long distances to attend the funeral, recalled moments when they had met or spoken with Fonseka.

“She was a role model for us. We saw her as an example when we went to the cinema,” said 56-year-old jam factory worker Pushpa Hemalatha. “She wasn’t arrogant. We loved her when we were young.”

Fonseka’s final acting performance was in the 2024 music video Eya Wasanathaya Nowe, playing an elderly woman remembering her deceased husband.

Ivanka Peiris, an actress and musician who acted with her in the TV drama Hithuwakkara, told Al Jazeera that Fonseka was “very empowering” as a role model for women, and “everything” for younger actresses in the industry.

And, she said, Fonseka would never be replaced.

“She’s the queen. That’s it,” Peiris said. “There will be no other queens in Sri Lanka. She will be the first and the last.”

Bulls are yoked together by thick wooden frames in a sun-scorched field in rural Pakistan. Behind them, clutching nothing more than ropes – and his pride – stands a man perched on a plank.

Hundreds of spectators whoop and cheer as the animals thunder down a track, kicking up clouds of dust and a tangible sense of danger.

This is bull racing, Punjabi style.

The traditional sport encapsulates the raw vibrancy of village life and stands in stark contrast to the floodlit cricket and hockey stadiums of Pakistan’s cities.

In the Attock district of the eastern province of Punjab, bull racing runs deep. Here, it is more than a pastime. It forms part of the region’s living heritage.

In the village of Malal, a key hub for the sport, crowds gather annually to witness the spectacle. Jockeys crouch low behind the bulls on their wooden planks, gripping the reins and relying upon experience and instinct to claim victory.

Yet chaos is never far away. It is not uncommon for bulls to unseat the jockeys, sending them tumbling through the dust.

“This isn’t just entertainment. It’s tradition,” said Sardar Haseeb, whose family has organised races for generations. “We take pride in our animals. Farmers and landowners raise their bulls year-round just for this moment. People are willing to pay high prices for a winning bull. It becomes a symbol of pride.”

The event has a festive air with dancing and showers of banknotes tossed into the sky – a celebratory gesture more usually associated with weddings.

The aroma of freshly fried sweets wafts from sizzling pans, enticing the crowds. Stallholders serve roasted chickpeas and other delicacies. The bustling scene generates income for local vendors, who benefit from the celebration of culture.

At the most recent event put on by Haseeb, more than 100 bulls competed, and participants came from across Pakistan to take part.

Among the competitors was farmer Muhammad Ramzan.

“My bull came in fifth place, and I’m thrilled,” he said. “It left 95 others behind.”

Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s film, It Was Just an Accident, has been awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The dissident has endured years of travel bans and prison terms in Iran for his filmmaking, which served as inspiration for his award-winning work.

The film is inspired by dissident director Jafar Panahi’s own experience in jail.

An Iranian thriller film that explores corruption and state violence in the country has won the the Palme d’Or, the coveted top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

It Was Just an Accident, directed by dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, was crowned at the world-famous festival on Saturday, hours after a power outage briefly threw the event off course.

The festival’s crowd burst into a roaring standing ovation for Panahi, who has endured years of travel bans and prison terms in Iran due to his provocative cinema, often produced in secret. He had been banned from leaving Iran for more than 15 years.

“Art mobilises the creative energy of the most precious, most alive part of us. A force that transforms darkness into forgiveness, hope and new life,” said jury president Juliette Binoche when announcing the award.

On stage, Panahi said what mattered most was the future of his country.

“Let us join forces,” Panahi said. “No one should tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, or what we should or shouldn’t do.”

Partly inspired by Panahi’s own experience in jail, It Was Just An Accident follows a man named Vahid (played by Vahid Mobasseri), who kidnaps a man with a false leg who looks just like the one who tortured him in prison and ruined his life.

Vahid sets out to verify with other prison survivors that it is indeed their torturer, and then decide what to do with him.

Critics have praised the film as a clever, symbolic exploration of justice that blends dark humour with its intense themes.

Iraqi film “The President’s Cake” wins Best First Film

The festival’s Grand Prix, or second prize, was awarded to Joachim Trier’s Norwegian family drama, Sentimental Value, his lauded follow-up to The Worst Person in the World.

Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Brazilian political thriller, The Secret Agent, won two big awards: best director for Fihlo and best actor for Wagner Moura.

The jury prize was split between two films: Oliver Laxe’s desert road trip, Sirat and Mascha Schilinski’s German, generation-spanning drama, Sound of Falling.”

Best actress went to Nadia Melliti for The Little Sister, Hafsia Herzi’s French coming-of-age drama.

Cannes also honoured Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake with a best first film award, marking the first time an Iraqi film has won an award at the festival.

The Cannes closing ceremony took place after a major power outage struck southeastern France on Saturday, knocking out traffic lights and forcing businesses to close along the main shopping street in the Alpes-Maritimes holiday region. Police suspect arson as the cause.

Geopolitical tensions were also a constant backdrop at the festival, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza and US President Donald Trump’s proposal of tariffs on foreign-made films fuelling discussion.

More than 900 actors and filmmakers signed an open letter denouncing the genocide in Gaza, according to the organisers.

Bangkok, Thailand – Over several years in the mid-1960s, the crumbling ruins of an ancient temple in northeast Thailand were picked clean by local looters.

Possibly hundreds of centuries-old statues that were long buried beneath the soft, verdant grounds around the temple were stolen.

To this day, all the known artefacts from the pillaging spree, collectively known as the Prakhon Chai hoard, sit scattered thousands of miles away in museums and collections across the United States, Europe and Australia.

In a matter of weeks, though, the first of those statues will begin their journey home to Thailand.

The acquisitions committee of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum recommended the release last year of four bronze statues from the hoard, which had been held in its collection since the late 1960s.

San Francisco city’s Asian Art Commission, which manages the museum, then approved the proposal on April 22, officially setting the pieces free.

Some six decades after the late British antiquities dealer Douglas Latchford is suspected of spiriting the statues out of the country, they are expected to arrive back in Thailand within a month or two.

“We are the righteous owners,” Disapong Netlomwong, senior curator for the Office of National Museums at Thailand’s Fine Arts Department, told Al Jazeera.

“It is something that our ancestors … have made, and it should be exhibited here to show the civilisation and the belief of the people,” said Disapong, who also serves on Thailand’s Committee for the Repatriation of Stolen Artefacts.

The imminent return of the statues is the latest victory in Thailand’s quest to reclaim its pilfered heritage.

Their homecoming also exemplifies the efforts of countries across the world to retrieve pieces of their own stolen history that still sit in display cases and in the vaults of some of the West’s top museums.

From Thai temples to the Acropolis in Athens

Latchford, a high-profile Asian art dealer who came to settle in Bangkok and lived there until his death in 2020 at 88 years of age, is believed to have earned a fortune from auction houses, private collectors and museums around the world who acquired his smuggled ancient artefacts from Thailand and neighbouring Cambodia.

In 2021, Latchford’s daughter, Nawapan Kriangsak, agreed to return her late father’s private collection of more than 100 artefacts, valued at more than $50m, to Cambodia.

Though never convicted during his lifetime, Latchford was charged with falsifying shipping records, wire fraud and a host of other crimes related to antiquities smuggling by a US federal grand jury in 2019.

He died the following year, before the case against him could go to trial.

In 2023 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York agreed to return 16 pieces tied to Latchford’s smuggling network to Cambodia and Thailand.

San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has also previously returned pieces to Thailand – two intricately carved stone lintels taken from a pair of temples dating back to the 10th and 11th centuries, in 2021.

While Thailand and Cambodia have recently fared relatively well in efforts to reclaim their looted heritage from US museum collections, Greece has not had such luck with the British Museum in London.

Perhaps no case of looted antiquities has grabbed more news headlines than that of the so-called “Elgin Marbles”.

The 2,500-year-old friezes, known also as the Parthenon Marbles, were hacked off the iconic Acropolis in Athens in the early 1800s by agents of Lord Elgin, Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Greece at that time.

Elgin claimed he took the marbles with the permission of the Ottomans and then sold them in 1816 to the British Museum in London, where they remain.

Greece has been demanding the return of the artefacts since the country’s declaration of independence in 1832 and sent an official request to the museum in 1983, according to the nongovernmental Hellenic Institute of Cultural Diplomacy.

“Despite all these efforts, the British government has not deviated from its positions over the years, legally considering the Parthenon marbles to belong to Britain. They have even passed laws to prevent the return of cultural artefacts,” the institute said.

‘Colonialism is still alive and well’

Tess Davis, executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, a Washington-based nonprofit campaigning against the illicit trade of ancient art and artefacts, said that “colonialism is still alive and well in parts of the art world”.

“There is a mistaken assumption by some institutions that they are better carers, owners, custodians of these cultural objects,” Davis told Al Jazeera.

But Davis, who has worked on Cambodia’s repatriation claims with US museums, says the “custodians” defence has long been debunked.

“These antiquities were cared for by [their] communities for centuries, in some cases for millennia, before there was … a market demand for them, leading to their looting and trafficking, but we still do see resistance,” she said.

Brad Gordon, a lawyer representing the Cambodian government in its ongoing repatriation of stolen artefacts, has heard museums make all sorts of claims to defend retaining pieces that should be returned to their rightful homelands.

Excuses from museums include claiming that they are not sure where pieces originated from; that contested items were acquired before laws banned their smuggling; that domestic laws block their repatriation, or that the ancient pieces deserve a more global audience than they would receive in their home country.

Still, none of those arguments should keep a stolen piece from coming home, Gordon said.

“If we believe the object is stolen and the country of origin wishes for it to come home, then the artefact should be returned,” he said.

Old attitudes have started breaking down though, and more looted artefacts are starting to find their way back to their origins.

“There’s definitely a growing trend toward doing the right thing in this area, and … I hope that more museums follow the Asian Art Museum’s example. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go,” Davis said.

Much of the progress, Davis believes, is down to growing media coverage of stolen antiquities and public awareness of the problem in the West, which has placed mounting pressure on museums to do the right thing.

In 2022, the popular US comedy show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver dedicated a whole episode to the topic. As Oliver said, if you go to Greece and visit the Acropolis you might notice “some odd details”, such as sections missing from sculptures – which are now in Britain.

“Honestly, if you are ever looking for a missing artefact, nine times out of 10 it’s in the British Museum,” Oliver quips.

Gordon also believes a generational shift in thinking is at play among those who once trafficked in the cultural heritage of other countries.

“For example, the children of many collectors, once they are aware of the facts of how the artefacts were removed from the country of origin, want their parents to return them,” he said.

Proof of the past

The four bronze statues the San Francisco museum will soon be returning to Thailand date back to the 7th and 9th centuries.

Thai archaeologist Tanongsak Hanwong said that period places them squarely in the Dvaravati civilisation, which dominated northeast Thailand, before the height of the Khmer empire that would build the towering spires of Angkor Wat in present-day Cambodia and come to conquer much of the surrounding region centuries later.

Three of the slender, mottled figures, one nearly a metre tall (3.2 feet), depict Bodhisattva – Buddhist adherents on the path to nirvana – and the other the Buddha himself in a wide, flowing robe.

Tanongsak, who brought the four pieces in the San Francisco collection to the attention of Thailand’s stolen artefacts repatriation committee in 2017, said they and the rest of the Prakhon Chai hoard are priceless proof of Thailand’s Buddhist roots at a time when much of the region was still Hindu.

“The fact that we do not have any Prakhon Chai bronzes on display anywhere [in Thailand], in the national museum or local museums whatsoever, it means we do not have any evidence of the Buddhist history of that period at all, and that’s strange,” he said.

The Fine Arts Department first wrote to San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum about the statues’ illicit provenance in 2019, but started to make progress on having them returned only when the US Department of Homeland Security got involved on Thailand’s behalf.

Robert Mintz, the museum’s chief curator, said staff could find no evidence that the statues had been trafficked in their own records.

But they were convinced they had been looted and smuggled out of Thailand – and of Latchford’s involvement – once Homeland Security provided proof, with the help of Thai researchers.

“Once that evidence was presented and they heard it, their feeling was the appropriate place for these would be back in Thailand,” Mintz said of the museum’s staff and acquisition committee.

‘Pull back the curtain’

The San Francisco Asian Art Museum went a step further when it finally resolved to return the four statues to Thailand.

It also staged a special exhibit around the pieces to highlight the very questions the experience had raised regarding the theft of antiquities.

The exhibition – Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities – ran in San Francisco from November to March.

“One of our goals was to try to indicate to the visiting public to the museum how important it is to look historically at where works of art have come from,” Mintz said.

“To pull back the curtain a bit, to say, these things do exist within American collections and now is the time to address challenges that emerge from past collecting practice,” he said.

Mintz says Homeland Security has asked the Asian Art Museum to look into the provenance of at least another 10 pieces in its collection that likely came from Thailand.

Tess Davis, of the Antiquities Coalition campaign group, said the exhibition was a very unusual, and welcome, move for a museum in the process of giving up looted artefacts.

In Thailand, Disapong and Tanongsak say the Asian Art Museum’s decision to recognise Thailand’s rightful claim to the statues could also help them start bringing the rest of the Prakhon Chai hoard home, including 14 more known pieces in other museums around the US, and at least a half-dozen scattered across Europe and Australia.

“It is indeed a good example, because once we can show the world that the Prakhon Chai bronzes were all exported from Thailand illegally, then probably, hopefully some other museums will see that all the Prakhon Chai bronzes they have must be returned to Thailand as well,” Tanongsak said.

There are several other artefacts besides the Prakhon Chai hoard that Thailand is also looking to repatriate from collections around the world, he said.

Davis said the repatriation of stolen antiquities is still being treated by too many with collections as an obstacle when it should be seen, as the Asian Art Museum has, as an opportunity.

“It’s an opportunity to educate the public,” Davis said.

“It’s an opportunity to build bridges with Southeast Asia,” she added, “and I hope other institutions follow suit.”

Known for sweeping black-and-white photography that captured the natural world and marginalised communities, Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado has passed away at age 81.

His death was confirmed on Friday by the nonprofit he and his wife Lelia Deluiz Wanick Salgado founded, the Instituto Terra.

“It is with deep sorrow that we announce the passing of Sebastiao Salgado, our founder, mentor and eternal source of inspiration,” the institute wrote in a statement.

“Sebastiao was much more than one of the greatest photographers of our time. Alongside his life partner, Lelia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, he sowed hope where there was devastation and brought to life the belief that environmental restoration is also a profound act of love for humanity.

“His lens revealed the world and its contradictions; his life, the power of transformative action.”

Salgado’s upbringing would prove to be the inspiration for some of his work. Born in 1944 in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, he saw one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems, the Atlantic Forest, recede from the land he grew up on, as the result of development.

He and his wife spent part of the last decades of their life working to restore the forest and protect it from further threats.

But Salgado was best known for his epic photography, which captured the exploitation of both the environment and people. His pictures were marked by their depth and texture, each black-and-white frame a multilayered world of tension and struggle.

In one recent photography collection, entitled Exodus, he portrayed populations across the world taking on migrations big and small. One shot showed a crowded boat packed with migrants and asylum seekers crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Another showed refugees in Zaire balancing buckets and jugs above their heads, as they trekked to retrieve water for their camp.

Salgado himself was no stranger to fleeing hardship. A trained economist, he and his wife left Brazil in 1969, near the start of a nearly two-decade-long military dictatorship.

By 1973, he had begun to dedicate himself to photography full time. After working several years with France-based photography agencies, he joined the cooperative Magnum Photos, where he would become one of its most celebrated artists.

His work would draw him back to Brazil in the late 1980s, where he would embark on one of his most famous projects: photographing the backbreaking conditions at the Serra Pelada gold mine, near the mouth of the Amazon River.

Through his lens, global audiences saw thousands of men climbing rickety wooden ladders out of the crater they were carving. Sweat made their clothes cling to their skin. Heavy bundles were slung over their backs. And the mountainside around them was jagged with the ridges they had chipped away at.

“He had shot the story in his own time, spending his own money,” his agent Neil Burgess wrote in the British Journal of Photography.

Burgess explained that Salgado “spent around four weeks living and working alongside the mass of humanity that had flooded in, hoping to strike it rich” at the gold mine.

“Salgado had used a complex palette of techniques and approaches: landscape, portraiture, still life, decisive moments and general views,” Burgess said in his essay.

“He had captured images in the midst of violence and danger, and others at sensitive moments of quiet and reflection. It was a romantic, narrative work that engaged with its immediacy, but had not a drop of sentimentality. It was astonishing, an epic poem in photographic form.”

When photos from the series were published in The Sunday Times Magazine, Burgess said the reaction was so great that his phone would not stop ringing.

Critics, however, accused Salgado during his career of glamourising poverty, with some calling his style an “aesthetic of misery”.

But Salgado pushed back on that assessment in a 2024 interview with The Guardian. “Why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world? The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there.”

In 2014, one of his sons, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, partnered with the German filmmaker Wim Wenders to film a documentary about Salgado’s life, called The Salt of the Earth.

One of his last major photography collections was Amazonia, which captured the Amazon rainforest and its people. While some viewers criticised his depiction of Indigenous peoples in the series, Salgado defended his work as a vision of the region’s vitality.

“To show this pristine place, I photograph Amazonia alive, not the dead Amazonia,” he told The Guardian in 2021, after the collection’s release.

As news of Salgado’s death spread on Friday, artists and public figures offered their remembrances of the photographer and his work. Among the mourners was Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, who offered a tribute on social media.

“His discontent with the fact that the world is so unequal and his obstinate talent in portraying the reality of the oppressed always served as a wake-up call for the conscience of all humanity,” Lula wrote.

“Salgado did not only use his eyes and his camera to portray people: He also used the fullness of his soul and his heart. For this very reason, his work will continue to be a cry for solidarity. And a reminder that we are all equal in our diversity.”

A small town in western France has set a new world record for the largest gathering of people dressed as Smurfs, organisers say, with more than 3,000 participants counted over the weekend.

Landerneau, a town of 16,000 in Brittany’s far west, had twice previously attempted to claim the record from Lauchringen, a German town that brought together 2,762 Smurfs in 2019.

But on Saturday, the French enthusiasts finally broke through, assembling 3,076 people clad in blue outfits, faces painted, donning white hats and singing “smurfy songs”.

The Smurfs – created by Belgian cartoonist Peyo in 1958 and known as “Schtroumpfs” in French – are tiny, human-like beings who live in the forest.

The beloved characters have since become a global franchise, spawning films, television series, advertising, video games, theme parks and toys.

“A friend encouraged me to join and I thought: ‘Why not?’” said Simone Pronost, 82, dressed as a Smurfette.

Albane Delariviere, a 20-year-old student, made the journey from Rennes, more than 200km (125 miles) away, to join the festivities.

“We thought it was a cool idea to help Landerneau out,” she said.

Landerneau’s mayor, Patrick Leclerc, also in full Smurf attire, said the event “brings people together and gives them something else to think about than the times we’re living in”.

Pascal Soun, head of the association behind the gathering, said the event “allows people to have fun and enter an imaginary world for a few hours”.

Participants were relieved to have good weather, after last year’s attempt was hampered by heavy rain that deterred many from attending.

In 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe, as a record 1.3 million people, mostly Syrians fleeing civil war, sought asylum, Pau Aleikum Garcia was in Athens, helping those arriving in the Greek capital after a perilous sea journey.

The then 25-year-old Spanish volunteer arranged housing for refugees in abandoned facilities like schools and libraries, and set up community kitchens, language classes and art activities.

“It was kind of a massive cascade of people,” Garcia recalls.

“My own memory of that time is oddly patchy,” he admits. Though there was one encounter that stood out.

In one of those schools in Athens’ Exarcheia neighbourhood, where refugees painted the external wall to illustrate their memories of their journeys, Garcia met a Syrian woman in her late 70s.

“I’m not afraid of being a refugee. I have lived all my life. I’m happy with what I have lived,” he recalls her telling him. “I’m afraid that my grandkids will be refugees for all their life.”

When he tried to reassure her that they would find a place to start anew, she protested: “No, no, I’m worried, because when my grandkids grow [up] and they ask themselves, ‘Where do I come from?’ they won’t be able to answer that question.”

The woman told him how, during the family’s journey to Greece, all but one of their photo albums were lost.

Now, she said, all the memories of their lives in Syria existed only in her and her husband’s minds, unrecorded and unrecoverable for the next generation.

Connecting generations

The woman’s story stayed with Garcia after he returned to Barcelona and his work as cofounder of the design studio, Domestic Data Streamers (DDS).

Over the years, the studio has grown into a 30-person team of experts in varied disciplines such as psychology, architecture, cognitive science, journalism and design. The studio has collaborated with diverse institutions such as museums, prisons and churches, as well as the likes of the United Nations, and uses technology to bring “emotions and humanity” to data visualisation.

Then, in around 2019, with the rise of generative artificial intelligence – a model of machine learning that uses algorithms to create new content from data scraped from the internet – the team began to explore image-generating technology, following the release of ChatGPT.

As they did, Garcia thought of the grandmother from Syria and how this technology might help someone like her by constructing images based on memories.

He believes that memories – captured through records like photographs – play an integral role in connecting generations.

“Memories are the architects of who we are. … It’s a big part of how social identities are built,” he says.

He also likes to cite Montserrat Roig, a Catalan author, who wrote that the biggest act of love is to remember something.

But in the past, people had fewer opportunities to document their lives than their mobile phone-wielding contemporaries, he says. Many experiences have been omitted or erased from collective memory due to lack of access, persecution, censorship or marginalisation.

So with this in mind, in 2022, Garcia and his team launched the Synthetic Memories project to use AI to generate photographic representations of memories that were lost, due to missing photos, for instance, or never recorded in the first place.

“I don’t think there was an eureka moment,” Garcia says of the evolution of the idea. “I’ve always been intrigued by how documentaries reconstruct the past … our goal and approach were more focused on the subjective and personal side, trying to capture the emotional layers of memory.”

For Garcia, the chance to recover such memories is an important act in reclaiming one’s past. “The fact that you have an image that tells this happened to me, this is my memory, and this is shown and other people can see it, is also a way to say to you, ‘Yes, this happened’. It’s a way of saying, of having more dignity about the part of your history that has not been depicted.”

Building memories

To create a synthetic memory, DDS uses open-source image-generating AI systems such as DALL-E 2 and Flux, while the team is developing its own tool.

The process starts with an interviewer asking a subject to recall their earliest memory. They explore various narratives as people recount their life stories before picking the one they think can be best encapsulated in an image.

The interviewer works with a prompter – someone trained in the syntax that the AI uses to create visuals – who inputs specific words to build the image from the details described by the interviewee.

Nearly everything, such as hairstyles, clothing, and furniture, is recreated as accurately as possible. However, figures themselves are usually depicted from behind or, if faces are shown, with a degree of blurriness.

This is intentional. “We want to be very clear that this is a synthetic memory and this is not real photography,” says Garcia. This is partly because they want to ensure their generated images don’t add to the proliferation of fake photos on the internet.

The resulting images – usually two or three from each session, which can last up to an hour – can appear dreamlike and undefined.

“As we know, memory is very, very, very fragile and full of imperfections,” Garcia explains. “That was the other reason why we wanted a model that could be full of imperfections and also a bit fragile, so it’s a good demonstration of how our memory works.”

Garcia’s team found that people who took part in the project said they felt a stronger connection to less detailed images, their suggestive nature allowing for their imagination to fill in the blanks. The higher the resolution, the more someone focuses on the details, losing that emotional connection to the image, Airi Dordas, the project’s lead, explains.

The team first trialled this technology with their grandparents. The experience was moving, Garcia says, and one that grew into medical trials to determine whether synthetic memories can be used as an augmentation tool in reminiscence therapy for dementia sufferers.

From there, the team went on to work with Bolivian and Korean communities in Brazil to tell their stories of migration, before partnering with Barcelona’s city council to document local memories. The sessions were open to the public and held last summer at the Design Museum in Barcelona, generating more than 300 memories.

Some wanted to work through traumatic experiences, like one woman who was abused by a relative who avoided jail and wanted to recreate a memory of him in court to share with her family. Others recalled moments from their childhood, like 105-year-old Pepita, who recreated the day she saw a train for the first time. Couples came to relive shared experiences.

There was always a moment, Ainoa Pubill Unzeta, who carried out interviews in Barcelona, says, “when people actually saw a picture that they would relate to, you could feel it … you can see it”. For some, it was just a smile; others cried. For her, this was confirmation that the image was done well.

One of the first memories Garcia recorded during their pilot sessions was that of Carmen, now in her 90s. She remembers going up to a stranger’s balcony as a child, her mother having paid the owners to let them in, because it looked into the courtyard of the jail where her father, a doctor for the Republican front during the Spanish Civil War, was being held. This was the only way the family could see him from his cell window.

By incredible coincidence, Carmen’s son was employed in the same prison as a social worker decades later, but neither son nor mother knew that. When the whole family came to see an installation at the Public Office of Synthetic Memories last year, her son recognised the prison immediately from his mother’s reconstruction. “It was a kind of closing the loop … it was beautiful,” Garcia says.

Clandestine assemblies

The team was particularly interested in telling stories of civic activists who have played a key role in different social movements in the city over the last 50 years, including those concerning LGBTQ and workers’ rights. While initially the focus was not on the dictatorship era, it “naturally brought us to engage with people who, by the historical circumstances, were activists against the regime,” Dordas explains.

One of them was 74-year-old Jose Carles Vallejo Calderon.

Born in Barcelona in 1950 to Republican parents who faced oppression under General Francisco Franco, Vallejo came of age during one of Europe’s longest dictatorships, which lasted from 1939 to 1975. During the civil war of 1936-39, and following the defeat of the Republican forces by Franco’s Nationalists, enforced disappearances, forced labour, torture and extrajudicial killings claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people.

Vallejo became involved in opposition to the fascist regime first at university, where he attempted to organise a democratic student union, and then as a young worker at Barcelona’s SEAT automobile factory.

He recalls an atmosphere of fear, with most people terrified of speaking out against the authoritarian government. “That fear sprang from the terrible defeat in the Spanish Civil War and from the many deaths that occurred during the war, but also from the harsh repression from the post-war period up to the end of the dictatorship,” he explains.

Informants were everywhere, and the circle of trusted individuals was small. “As you can imagine, this is no way to live – this was living in darkness, silence, fear, and repression,” Vallejo says.

“There were few of us – very few – who dared to move from silence to activism, which involved many risks.”

Vallejo was imprisoned in 1970 for attempting to set up a labour union among SEAT employees, spending half a year in jail, including 20 days being tortured by Barcelona’s secret police. After another arrest in late 1971 and the prosecution demanding 20 years for what were then considered crimes of association, organisation and propaganda, Vallejo crossed the border with France in January 1972. He ultimately gained political asylum in Italy, where he lived in exile before returning to Spain following the first limited amnesty of 1976, which granted pardons to political prisoners after Franco’s death in 1975.

Today, Vallejo dedicates his time to human rights activism. He presides over the Catalan Association of Former Political Prisoners of Francoism, created in the final years of the dictatorship.

He learned about synthetic memories through Iridia, a human rights organisation that collaborated with DDS to help visualise memories of police abuse victims during the regime in a central Barcelona police station.

Vallejo was drawn to the project, curious about how the technology might be applied to capturing resistance activities too dangerous to record during Franco’s rule.

In 1970, SEAT workers organised clandestine breakfasts in the woods of Vallvidrera. On Sunday mornings, disguised as hikers, they would make their way through the dense forests surrounding the Catalan capital to discuss the struggle against the dictatorship.

“I think I must have been to more than 10 or 15 of these forest gatherings,” Vallejo recalls. Other times, they met in churches. No records of these exist.

Vallejo’s synthetic memory of these meetings is in black and white. The image is vague, almost like someone has taken an eraser to it to blur the details. But it is still possible to make out the scene: a crowd of people gathered in a forest. Some sit, others stand beneath a canopy of trees.

Looking at the image, Vallejo says he felt transported to the clandestine assemblies in the Barcelona woods, where as many as 50 or 60 people would gather in a tense atmosphere.

“I found myself truly immersed in the image,” he says.

“It was like entering a kind of time tunnel,” he adds.

Vallejo suffered memory loss around the ordeal of his arrests, imprisonment and torture.

The process of creating the image provided “a feeling – not exactly of relief – but rather of reconciling memory with the past and perhaps also of filling that void created by selective amnesia, which results from complicated, traumatic, and above all, distant experiences”. He found the reconstruction a “valuable experience” that helped him process some of these events.

‘We are not reconstructing the past’

Emphasising that memory is subjective, Garcia says, “One of the things that we are kind of drawing a very big red line about is historical reconstruction.”

This is partly due to the drawbacks of AI, which reinforces cultural and other biases in the data it draws from.

David Leslie, director of ethics and responsible innovation research at the Alan Turing Institute, the United Kingdom centre for data science and AI, cautions that using data that was initially biased against marginalised groups could create revisionist histories or false memories for those communities. Nor can “simply generating something from AI” help to remedy or reclaim historical narratives, he insists.

For DDS, “It is never about the bigger story. We are not reconstructing the past,” Garcia explains.

“When we talk about history, we talk about one truth that somehow we are committed to,” he elaborates. But while synthetic memories can depict a part of the human experience that history books cannot, these memories come from the individual, not necessarily what transpired, he underlines.

The team believes synthetic memories could not only help communities whose memories are at risk but also create dialogue between cultures and generations.

They plan to set up “emergency” memory clinics in places where cultural heritage is in danger of being eroded by natural disasters, such as in southern Brazil, which was last year hit by floods. There are also hopes to make their finished tool freely available to nursing homes.

But Garcia wonders what place the project could have in a future where there is an “over-registration” of everything that happens. “I have 10 images of my father when he was a kid,” he says. “I have over 200 when I was a kid. But my friend, of her daughter, [has] 25,000, and she’s five years old!”

“I think the problem of memory image will be another one, which will be that we are … [overwhelmed] and we cannot find the right image to tell us the story,” he muses.

Yet in the present moment, Vallejo believes the project has a role to play in helping younger generations understand past injustices. Forgetting serves no purpose for activists like himself, he believes, while memory is like “a weapon for the future”.

Instead of trying to numb the past, “I think it is more therapeutic – both collectively and individually – to remember rather than to forget.”

What happened in Palestine in 1948?

Every year on May 15, Palestinians around the world mark the Nakba, or catastrophe, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

Having secured the support of the British government for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, on May 14, 1948, as soon as the British Mandate expired, Zionist forces declared the establishment of the State of Israel, triggering the first Arab-Israeli war.

Zionist military forces expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands and captured 78 percent of historic Palestine. The remaining 22 percent was divided into what are now the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

The fighting continued until January 1949 when an armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria was forged. The 1949 Armistice Line is also known as the Green Line and is the generally recognised boundary between Israel and the West Bank. The Green Line is also referred to as the (pre-) 1967 borders, before Israel occupied the rest of Palestine during the 1967 war.

Israel’s military occupation of Palestine remains at the core of this decades-long conflict that continues to shape every part of Palestinians’ lives.

Mapping the Palestinian villages Israel destroyed

Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist military forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed in a series of mass atrocities, including dozens of massacres.

On April 9, 1948, Zionist forces committed one of the most infamous massacres of the war in the village of Deir Yassin on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. More than 110 men, women and children were killed by members of the pre-Israeli state Irgun and Stern Gang Zionist paramilitary organisations.

Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta documented detailed records of what happened to these 530 villages in his book, The Atlas of Palestine.

Where are Palestinian refugees today?

Some six million registered Palestinian refugees live in at least 58 camps located throughout Palestine and neighbouring countries.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) provides assistance and operates hundreds of schools and health facilities for at least 2.3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, 1.5 million refugees in Gaza, 870,000 refugees in the occupied West Bank, 570,000 refugees in Syria and 480,000 refugees in Lebanon.

The largest camps in each are Baqa’a in Jordan, Jabalia in Gaza, Jenin in the occupied West Bank, Yarmouk in Syria, and Ein el-Hilweh in Lebanon.

More than 70 percent of Gaza’s residents are refugees. About 1.5 million refugees live in eight refugee camps around the Gaza Strip.

According to international law, refugees have the right to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced. Many Palestinians still hope to return to Palestine.

The plight of Palestinian refugees is the longest unresolved refugee problem in the world.