For more information contact Mark Grimmer editor@theLIP.org.

PLUS…Photography from Martin Parr, Alex Masi and Kate Peters, graffiti art from Elph and new micro fiction from Rose Heiney and Helen Oyeyemi.

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Too many young artists, writers, photographers and designers are expected to work for free upon completion of their training. At the LIP, we believe that newly qualified creatives are the people with the strongest ideas and the most vital approach to their work. We also believe that they should be paid.

The new LIP magazine is a quarterly national politics and arts publication. It is dedicated to providing exposure to the UK’s best young creatives – writers, photographers, artists and designers. The LIP bucks the trend of expecting young contributors to offer their work for free in order ‘to get a foot in the door’. At the LIP, we hold the door open.

The LIP will pay its contributors a competitive fee for their work, as well as promoting the professional interests of its network of freelance staff. There will be two arms to the distribution of the magazine. The first could be described as ‘traditional’ – book shops, galleries, universities and cultural centres will sell the magazine to their visitors and customers. The second arm of the distribution strategy will see the magazine distributed for free to decision makers in the creative industries. The LIP will be a single port of call for editors looking for young journalistic talent, creative directors looking for fresh designers and other arts employers who want to have a finger on the pulse.

As well as being a showcase of the best new creative work, the LIP fills a gap in the national magazine market. No publication successfully combines intelligent artistic review, political comment and cutting edge design targeted at the 18-30 age group. Further kudos will be given to the project by the regular contribution of work from major figures in the arts and politics.

In order to give the LIP the kickstart it deserves, we need your help. A preview edition is being compiled so that we can get our message to as many people as possible, and we want your work to feature in it. Every issue of the LIP has a broad theme and we allow contributors to interpret it how they wish. Where better to start than ‘The Media’. We invite you to submit articles, interviews, illustration, graphic design or photography which take ‘The Media’ as their theme. The outlook of the LIP is global – we live in a richly multicultural world and contributors should aim to consider the big picture.

Alongside the best new work, seasoned professionals will offer their experienced opinions – many of them wish that there had been an equivalent of the LIP when they began their careers.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. As well as contributions, the LIP is looking for a team of dedicated freelance staff who are interested in taking on editorial responsibilities. More information on the project and archived articles from the back issues can be found online at www.theLIP.org. For printed back issues, email editor@theLIP

We look forward to seeing your work.

Riz tells the LIP of his unwelcome treatment on arriving back in the UK.

“When our flight landed at Luton Airport from Berlin, Shafiq Rasul was stopped at the Immigration Desk. Soon after, I was detained and questioned. I was not told the reason for this.

The officer had initially questioned me extensively by the baggage claim, taking notes from my answers and from my passport. When I asked what all these questions were for, and whether this was an interview, she led me to a small interview room and said that it was “if I want it to be”.

I gave my basic details, explained about the festival, and the film being the reason for our visit to Berlin, which she said she believed. She said they need to stop us and the Tipton boys as anyone with “terror links” must be questioned – not that I had any necessarily, she said. I added that the Tipton Three didn’t either, as is widely documented. She then asked to go through the contents of my wallet. I felt uncomfortable about the ambiguities in the purpose of the detention and this proposed search, and so asked to speak to a lawyer.

I was denied access to legal advice, supposedly officially, under powers used to detain me. However the specific powers under which I was being held were deliberately made unclear by the detaining Special Branch officer. She gave me a blank copy of a “Section 7 of the Terrorism Act Detention Form” to explain why I couldn’t contact anyone. The form stated that someone detained under its powers can be prevented from contacting anyone, including legal advisors, for up to 48 hours, by a superintendent officer. I asked her whether she was a superintendent. Her reply was that I was not in fact being held under the powers outlined in this form. I was only being denied legal advice for the first hour of questioning, rather than 48hours. The reason why I had been given this form was now unclear.

She left the room, and said she was bringing in a male colleague to enforce the wallet search, since “a lot of Muslims don’t like dealing with women do they.” As she left I quickly called an academic lawyer, Ravinder Thukral, on my mobile.

He called back as she re-entered and spoke directly to the her on my phone. It was unclear now whether I was officially not allowed to call anyone, or whether she simply wouldn’t help me to do so but had no power to stop me. I took another two calls from lawyers during the interview. Each lawyer was unclear about the powers she was using to detain me, prevent me from getting full legal advice, and search my wallet. Her explanations were often unclear and seem to contradict her earlier explanations about the form and its relevance.

Under the threat of “prolonging” my detention, I cooperated in allowing her to go through my wallet. She took detailed notes on all its contents. All of my bankcard details were noted down, as were the details on other people’s business cards I had in my wallet. I was searched for objects that I might use to “hurt” the officers. However this took place about halfway through the interview after I had been with the interviewer alone for some time.

While searching through my wallet she asked me whether I intended to do more documentary films, specifically more political ones like The Road to Guantanamo. She asked “Did you become an actor mainly to do films like this, you know, to publicise the struggles of Muslims?”.

She also asked me what my political views were, what I thought about “the Iraq war and everything else that was going on”, whether the Iraq war was “right” in my view.

She then asked me whether I would mind officers contacting me regularly in the future, “in case, for example, you might be in a café, and you overhear someone discussing illegal activities”.

I then took a call from Clive Stafford Smith who had been contacted by Ravinder Thukral, the first Lawyer I had contacted. He told me to wait a moment as he was on his way to Gareth Peirce’s (Human Rights Lawyer who helped secure the Tipton Three’s release) office, and she would call me in a moment. When I told the interviewer I’d have to take a call from Gareth Peirce’s office shortly, she said she wouldn’t allow me to. She started raising her voice, and behaving in a more urgent and aggressive way. She called in a male colleague who threateningly told me to give him the phone before gripping my hands and wrestling it from me. He then sat on a table in the room, grinned at me, winked and went through my phone. I protested, but he ignored me and continued to go through my phone. Then a third officer entered, and all three adopted very aggressive stances, threatening to take me to a police station, calling me a “fucker”, moving in very close to my face, pointing and shouting at me to “shut up and listen”. I complained at being called a fucker. The officer who still had my phone, and who had sworn at me, smiled at me and then said “now you’re making things up, no one called you that”.

I finally convinced the original officer to allow me to call Ms. Peirce’s office simply to ascertain the validity of the detention and the denial of full access to lawyers. She agreed on condition that if I tried to ask any further questions of the lawyer my phone would be taken away. As soon as I got through to the lawyer, she suddenly said “we’re done with you, you can go, whats the point in calling lawyers”. The lawyer on the phone told the officer (again, speaking directly to her on my phone) that he hadn’t heard of such powers existing in Section 7 of the TACT. She changed the subject and said that I was free to go now anyway and that I was now prolonging my detention by my own insistence on calling lawyers.

I took the opportunity, took the lawyer’s advice, and left the room. She advised me to go home and read up on anti terror legislation. I advised the officers in the room to learn some people skills.

I asked for any notes from the interview, and for names/ranks of the officers. I was denied both, and given a small, pink, police search record sheet – specifying that the purpose of the search was for “intelligence” and that I had been examined under the “TACT 2000”. The reverse of the sheet, “Sheet 2 “which as stated on the form itself “officers must also complete” was missing.”

Set against the background of the violence in occupied Palestine, the film sketches the lives of two young men who find themselves on the front line of the Palestinian resistance movement, for very different reasons, and with very different consequences. For Khaled, the allure of martyrdom lies in religion and infamy, for Said, his darkly brooding best friend, the motivation is personal and historical – to atone for his father’s collaboration with the settlers which resulted in his execution. The suicide mission they are sent on by local teacher and family friend Jamal promises to make the two men all that they perceive they are not – heroes, winners, and the rightful inhabitants of a peaceful kingdom in which they can live in the present, free from the violence which has formed the past and the uncertainty which haunts the future; a paradise – now. But all does not go according to plan and the two men find themselves separated on the way to Tel Aviv. Whether to go ahead with their mission after their initial effort is jeopardised is the question with which the two wrestle, a question which forces them to reassess their most fundamental beliefs.

The voice of common sense comes from Suha, the daughter of a famed Palestinian activist whose life was claimed in the conflict some years previously. The influence of her father has the obverse effect to that played on Said – she detests violence and is horrifed when she learns of his devastating intention to commit mass murder in the name of the Palestinian cause, especially given their developing romance.

Khaled, like his best friend, sees life in the Occupied Territories as ‘a life sentence’. He is unmoved by the pleas of Suha to shake off his delusions, ‘I’d rather have paradise in my head than live in this hell’, he exclaims. His almost infantile excitement at the prospect of his fate gives way to doubt just as Said’s initial reticence is galvanised into an unshaking commitment to right the wrongs of history, and of his father.

Yet Said and Khaled are not presented as fanatical monsters. Abu-Assad employs some wonderfully deft human touches- Khaled forgetting his sandwiches on the day of the mission and being pursued by his mother, the camera malfunctioning as the men make video statements for broadcast after their deaths. It is the avuncular Jamal who is chilling in his conviction and callousness, sending two of his friends to their deaths with a smile on his face. Khaled is comforted by the detailed organisation of the mission. ‘What will happen afterwards?’, he asks on the way to Tel Aviv. ‘You will be met by two angels’, Jamal replies, hesitating momentarily and drumming his fingers on the dashboard of the car. For Khaled, it is the reassurance he needs. Said’s mind is already made up.

Inevitable criticisms have been levelled at Abu-Assad for humanising suicide bombers, portraying them in a sympathetic light. The effect of Paradise Now is to bring to the forefront the human drama of the most inhuman of situations. We see in Said a normal young man driven to abnormal action by the conjunction of events beyond his control and a life that offers him nothing. His dedication is not to Islam, nor primarily to the liberation of the Occupied Territories, but to correcting mistakes from the past. Unlike Suha (and to an extent Khaled) he is unable to see the metaphor represented by the bomb belt –that of a restrictive force from which it is only possible to free oneself with the co-operation and cautious action of others, like the cycle of historical violence which calls him to arms. This film movingly illustrates the hopelessness of the situation in the Middle East and shows that whilst paradise may not be completely lost, it will take a long time to get there.

Caché tells the story of the kind of the bourgeois nuclear family that Haneke is so frequently drawn to – professional parents (in this case Anne, a publisher, played by Juliette Binoche and Georges, a TV cultural commentator played by Daniel Auteuil), and their 12 year old son, Pierrot. Their middle class life is derailed by the arrival on their doormat of video tapes showing their daily lives – someone is watching. Binoche as Anne is wonderfully sympathetic and frustrated, fearing for the safety of her family, whilst her husband Georges becomes increasingly angry, and increasingly certain that he knows the culprit. The drama which unfolds reveals both an ugly latent racism traceable back to the Algerian conflict of the 60s and a disruptive distrust between Anne and Georges which threatens to destroy their domestic bliss.

Haneke plays down the inspiration of a surveillance culture and instead concerns himself with addressing our trust in the truth as presented through the media, ‘there’s a pervasive delusion that we know more than we really do, we’re open to manipulation and I want to reflect that danger.’ The thrilling and disturbing drama which is set in motion by the arrival of the videos makes that danger a haunting central conceit, and one which provokes more questions than it provides answers; ‘when a film answers the questions that it raises, well, the work ends there’, says Haneke. Whilst the answers to his questions may remain hidden, they are certainly still worth pursuing.