Secret Ink
BBC News
This look into South Korea’s underground tattoo scene shows how female artists risk fines and prosecution as only licensed doctors can tattoo legally.
Venturing into Seoul’s underground studios, this documentary interviews the women tattoo artists navigating an illegal trade while fighting to overturn restrictive laws.
BBC 100 Women was established in 2013 as an annual series focused on 100 inspirational and influential women from around the world and contains features, documentaries, investigations and interviews highlighting their work.
Secret Ink will be transmitted on the BBC News channel on Feb 1 at 10.30am and Feb 2 at 8.30am and 4.30pm. It will be available in English and Korean. The Korean version will stream on BBC News Korean YouTube channel after the broadcast.
For details, go to Secret Ink’s programme page (str.sg/yuVK), BBC News Korean YouTube channel (str.sg/nvrU) and BBC 100 Women List (str.sg/eSi8).
Invincible 3
Prime Video, premieres on Feb 6
Steven Yeun voices superhero Mark Grayson (centre) in the series Invincible.PHOTO: PRIME VIDEO
Season 2 of this gripping animated superhero series aired in April 2024, ending on a sad note. Teen superhero Mark Grayson (voiced by Steven Yeun) is still tormented by the deeds of his supervillain father, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons), while trying to deal with the emotional damage his father had inflicted on his mother Debbie (Sandra Oh).
After all, she had discovered that the man she loved was an alien using their marriage as a cover to further his aim of enslaving everyone on Earth.
Series co-creator, comic book writer and producer Robert Kirkman – also the originator of The Walking Dead comics – used the Superman stories as a starting point when he created Invincible. Instead of a hero who would embody the motto “truth, justice and the American Way”, he made Omni-Man a racist who views humans as gullible idiots who believe anything he says, as long as he was theatrically heroic.
Many critics disliked the second season’s angsty tone and slower pacing, so fans are hoping that the coming one will be a return to the show’s earlier brilliance.
The Seed Of The Sacred Fig (NC16)
168 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on Jan 30
★★★★☆
(From left) Soheila Golestani, Missagh Zareh, Setareh Maleki and Mahsa Rostami in The Seed Of The Sacred Fig.PHOTO: THE PROJECTOR
Iranian dissident writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof’s 2024 Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize winner charts the fissuring dynamics within the household of an investigating judge in Tehran during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom revolution.
To be an investigating judge in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court is to rubber-stamp the executions of dissenters, and Iman (Missagh Zareh), the paterfamilias in The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, is a busy man, signing several hundred death penalties a day.
His fealty is to the regime and his devout wife’s (Soheila Golestani) is to him. But their two daughters (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki) witness the female demonstrators being beaten and “disappear”, and are horrified by the authorities’ brutal crackdown.
Then Iman’s handgun goes missing from his bedside drawer. Curtains and hijabs are the visual motifs for the suffocating veil of paranoia as the family unit plays out the state’s patriarchal theocratic repression.
Already banned for his seditious works, Rasoulof fled an eight-year prison sentence plus flogging on the eve of the movie’s premiere by trekking to Germany, where he and his actresses now live in exile. – Whang Yee Ling
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