Jessica Wongso, 27, is accused of murdering her friend with a coffee laced with cyanide. Image via.

On January 6 this year 27-year-old Wayan Mirna Salihin, along with her friend Hanie Juwita Boon, went to Cafe Olivier in Jakarta's Grand Indonesia Mall. Meeting them was another friend, Jessica Wongso. Police allege Jessica got there first, purchasing a cocktail (it was a sazerac) and a Vietnamese iced coffee. When Mirna arrived, she was handed the iced coffee. She took a sip, complained it tasted weird, then collapsed into convulsions and died. An autopsy would later find she'd been poisoned with cyanide, which investigators found high levels of in her drink.

A former Australian resident, 27-year-old Jessica Wongso has since been charged with premeditated murder, which in Indonesia carries a minimum sentence of 20 years in jail and a maximum of death. The pre-trial began this week at Central Jakarta's State Court, where prosecutors alleged Mirna's death was motivated by jealousy. Police have released only speculative information to support this theory, but that hasn't stopped Indonesia's media from going into overdrive.

Despite being on trial, Jessica has been on nearly every news show in the country. Note, this is in Indonesian.

The case of the iced coffee killer has quickly become Indonesia's version of the OJ Simpson trial. There are memes and hashtags, and an endless stream of non-verifiable updates and theories. Thanks to unending coverage, I even know what Jessica ate for lunch on February 9 in the lead-up to her trail: She had an omelette with sautéed beans.

As far as the media can discern Jessica and Mirna were either lovers, or they shared a boyfriend who Mirna had recently married. They had attended the Billy Blue College of Design in Sydney together until Mirna returned to Indonesia last year. Jessica had remained in Sydney and was visiting Jakarta at the time of Mirna's death. Indonesia has formally requested assistance from the Australian Federal Police to investigate Jessica's movements in the weeks leading up to the incident.

Proponents of the fatal love-triangle theory point to a Whatsapp conversation found on Mirna's phone. "Mirna give me a kiss," is a loose translation of a message allegedly written by Jessica. "You haven't kissed me for a long time." According to her father, Mirna had been in a relationship with her husband for eight years. He also disclosed that Jessica had been eliminated from his daughter's wedding list but did not say why.

Inside Cafe Olivier. Photos by Eric Wirjanata.

Back at Café Olivier, business has picked up. As The Jakarta Post observed, "Customers come and go, taking it in turns to sit at table number 54, the table that bears witness to the last conversation between Mirna and her two companions."

And this is how I ended up there myself. The café was full but not as packed as I'd expected it to be. With all the tables occupied (including table 54) I was seated at the bar. None of the waiters would speak with me at first. "It's been taken care of," said one. "Don't worry about it."

I drank a coffee with my photographer friend. The place is a bit of a wank.

I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting next to me named Sari. "Me and my friends immediately wanted to get our hands on a Vietnamese coffee," she explained when I asked why she'd come. "Not that we are generally interested in coffee, but we suddenly were after the incident."

A bartender also eventually answered some questions under the condition of anonymity. He thought that while the death had brought in some, it had also scared others off. "It's a pro/con kind of thing," he said.

I tried to get some photos of table 54 but was asked to leave. The whole restaurant had been dealing with people like me for two months and they'd clearly had enough. But I won't be last curious visitor. This case has everyone talking and the end is nowhere in sight. In the meantime the police continue leaking evidence to keep the wheels turning, and the media churns out more reports on how much weight Jessica has lost in jail.

I left, as requested, and took some pictures from outside.

Follow Stanley on Twitter.

Stunt performers and vehicles from 'Mad Max: Fury Road' during a May 2015 event in Sydney, Australia, before the film's premiere. (Photo by John Appleyard/Newspix/Getty Images)

Most of this year's Oscar-nominated films contain incredible action sequences: explosions on Mars, harrowing desert chases, and one very brutal bear attack.

The Martian, Mad Max: Fury Road, and The Revenant were all nominated for best picture, but they are also competing in categories of production design, makeup and hairstyling, costume design, and visual effects—as you'd expect from visually stunning masterpieces.

But none were nominated for best stunt coordinator. Because the category doesn't exist.

Many Hollywood stunt professionals want to change that, though. This week, they protested outside the Beverly Hills offices of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and delivered a petition with over 50,000 signatures of support—along with a bouquet of roses as a gift to Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs—asking the Academy to create an Oscar for best stunt coordinator.

The Academy, which did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this story, has yet to respond to the protesters.

"We're not asking to be on the show," says Jeff Wolfe, president of the Stuntmen's Association of Motion Pictures, adding the broadcast is long enough as it is. "Put it in the technical ones. Just have it be stated that there is an award, so that there's some recognition."

Watch our interview with George Miller, the director of 'Mad Max: Fury Road'

The stunt community has been lobbying for this for decades, but Wolfe says that the work stuntmen and stuntwomen do holds a tricky place in the Hollywood hierarchy. Most big stars have stunt doubles, but not all of them are eager to draw attention to that fact.

"There are a couple of very big celebrity names that say they do their own stunts who have had stunt doubles for many, many years," says Wolfe. "There are a few people, like Jackie Chan, who do most of their own stunts because they're athletic and they're amazing—that's true. (But) still in scenes where you don't see their face, the reality is, it's not worth them getting hurt. There are doubles who do some of that action."

Wolfe himself has been in the business over 20 years. He's worked as a double, sometimes uncredited. He's also worked as an actor, albeit in highly physical, stunt-heavy roles—getting beaten to a pulp in an elevator by Ryan Gosling in Drive and getting stomped out by Scarlett Johansson in The Avengers.

But the current campaign isn't focused on establishing an award for performers—most in the business acknowledge that's a long shot—but rather for the stunt coordinators, who work with directors and producers to create action sequences.

"We are the people who come to a movie months ahead of the actors and many other departments," says Andy Armstrong, stunt coordinator on Thor, The Green Hornet, and countless other films. On The Amazing Spider-Man, he brought in a team of highly skilled stunt performers and riggers "to reinvent the way Spider-Man would fly through the city, swinging on webs."

Wolfe, who now works as a stunt coordinator (on J.J. Abrams's Revolution and the upcoming TV series Rush Hour) and second unit director, notes that coordinators often shoot the action scenes themselves as well. He views the work as equivalent to cinematography, editing, and sound design.

"It's not only on par," he says. "If we make a mistake, we could kill someone."

Stunt coordinators don't just show up when there are sword fights or explosions; they work on romantic comedies to choreograph pratfalls and on police dramas to coordinate cop cars driving up to a crime scene.

"It's not just the Mad Maxes and The Martianes," he says. "It's about the things you're not thinking of that are keeping people safe on the show. Flying, rigging, where somebody might float. All of that has to do with stunts. Ninety-five percent of films are going to have a stunt coordinator."

"Stunt performers will probably never be acknowledged as eligible for an Academy Award," says one stunt performer, who asked not to be identified. "However, stunt coordinators will eventually be acknowledged. There already is respect from the movie-making industry." Just not the Academy.

Wolfe wonders if the snub has something to do with stunt work's origins.

"Back in the old days, it was, 'Who's crazy enough to fall off this horse or jump off that building?' When you think of it in terms of 'who's crazy,' you're not thinking of it as technical work or worthy of award winning."

For performers, seeing the coordinator role as an Oscar category would be an acknowledgement of their talents and hard work.

"I have fallen off a motorcycle in a bikini, galloped across the plains on a horse, face-planted on a snowboard, careened into a ballroom wall on roller skates, and landed in a checkerboard of boxes three stories below," says stunt performer Kelly Richardson. "Having a stunt category in the Oscars would acknowledge, appreciate, and formally honor the work we do with the highest recognition, as it should."

Stunt performers have had their own awards ceremony since 2001, the Taurus World Stunt Awards, created by Red Bull CEO Dietrich Mateschitz to fill the void. Categories include best fight, hardest hit, and best work with a vehicle.

Both the Primetime and Daytime Emmys have stunt categories. The SAG Awards added the category in 2008.

The Oscars are, for Wolfe, "the last bastion."

"It's bringing to life what the director's vision is and getting it on the screen," he says. "That's what you're awarding when you're awarding makeup, costumes, and sound design. Why would you not award the same for the action you're creating?"

Charlo Greene quitting her job back in 2014. Photo via Facebook

Charlo Greene, the former Alaska TV anchor who quit her job on air to become a full-time pot activist, was arrested and charged with "smuggling marijuana residue" while trying to enter Canada at the British Columbia border.

Greene, who runs the activist organization Go Greene dedicated to promoting diversity in cannabis culture, was heading to Vancouver as part of a pot-related tour.

But when she got to the border, she said customs agents recognized her as the "Fuck it, I quit" lady and proceeded to search her for hours. After going through her computer, cell phone, luggage, and even searching her dog, Greene was strip searched. Eventually, she said the guards found "marijuana residue" at the bottom of her purse.

"I literally mean less residue than there was lint," Greene said in a statement.

She was detained and charged with "suspicion of smuggling marijuana residue" into Canada. (Apparently one gram of cannabis resin is a violation of Schedule VIII of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act—still not sure this qualifies.)

On her Facebook page, Greene said one of her team members who had a marijuana leaf on her hat was searched and handcuffed.

"This whole experience has just been really crazy and really disappointing."

After the nine-hour ordeal, Greene was sent back into the US. She has canceled all of her Vancouver stops, including a black tie sesh she was set to host with Cannabis Culture.

But she said the setback has made her more determined to come back to Canada.

"It became clear there's still so much more work to be done, and I plan on returning to help," she said.

At a senate meeting held earlier in the week, Liberal MP Bill Blair said the government would consider granting amnesty to people with criminal records based on weed charges. But he said police officers and prosecutors should continue enforcing the current laws.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Over the last few weeks, I've seen blog after blog about the #OscarSoWhite debate. It's become a trending topic, seemingly divorced from the protest origins of its founder, April Reign. Every day a new headline pops up about what some white filmmaker, actress, or celebrity said about the lack of "diversity" across the industry. The answers range from genuine concern or misguided solidarity to outright disregard. In Julie Delpy's comments about the flack that women get in Hollywood, which she claimed was worse than what African-Americans receive, she forgot that women could also be African-American, while Joel and Ethan Coen seemed not to understand why people of color should be in movies in the first place. Somehow, this is supposed to mean something; something is supposed to change. In response to the backlash, the Academy has enacted measures to increase the number of women and people of color members by 2020. But it's 2016.

We forget that at the center of these large, online debates are actual people like me—black women, Latina women, Asian women—who are struggling, striving, and making movies. For us, it's not about Oscars—it's about getting funding for our next film. It's about finding a way to survive while pursuing our film careers.

In 2013, after graduating from CalArts with a dual MFA degree in film directing and creative writing, I had the chance to report on the LA premiere of Ryan Coogler's film Fruitvale Station, at the Los Angeles Film Festival. I'd known the Creed director since I was ten years old, when we met at a summer camp at Mosswood Park in Oakland. We'd maintained a friendship throughout high school and college, and I felt, because of our shared history, a personal connection to his film. As I stood on the red carpet with my audio recorder, I was filled with a mixture of hope and anticipation. I knew that his was the beginning of a promising career, but as I reflect on his rise into mainstream recognition, I wonder if this could also happen for a young black woman, or a woman of color.

The author on set. All photos courtesy of Nijla Mu'min

Of course, one could argue that Ava DuVernay is Coogler's equivalent, but the 43-year-old Selma director worked many years as a publicist and as an independent documentary filmmaker before being recognized by the larger filmmaking community, or rather, before she forced them to recognize her. In many ways, I try to follow her example. Deep down, I'm a Bay Area guerrilla filmmaker, self-sufficient and independent in my ability to get films made and produced. I raise money, assemble crews, cast actors, secure locations, and find time to breathe. Of course putting in the work only gets you so far. I apply to screenwriting contests and I win, then that same script is rejected by a film company. I email people I meet at film events, and I get no response. At one time, these rejections affected me emotionally. Now they just make me want this more.

When I graduated from CalArts, I lived in Los Angeles, sometimes eking by on $100 a week, driving past movie studios and wondering when I'd be let in. I thought my graduate thesis film, a fantasy/drama about a black girl who witnesses her friends drown and is then summoned by black mermaids, would be my way into these environments, but it wasn't. While shooting that film in New Orleans, I worked with a crew of many white men. From the way they questioned how I would direct a pivotal scene in which several black mermaids swim into the frame, I could tell many had never seen a black woman in my position, directing a story like this.

But I kept writing, taping notecards on a wall for a script I planned to submit to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Months later, I received an email invitation to their screenwriters intensive for my script Noor, an epic love story set in Brooklyn about a black woman who develops an intense connection to an Arab man after her brother is murdered by a police officer outside of his bodega. This opportunity opened many doors for me, and I was embraced by an independent filmmaking network including women of color like myself, though we still seemed to face similar barriers when it came to getting our films funded.

My story, and others like it, have become obscured by the "big" story of the Oscars, and why it's unfair that Sylvester Stallone was the only person from Creed, a black movie, to be nominated, or the online feud between the original Aunt Viv, Janet Hubert, and Jada Pinkett Smith about whether black filmmakers and actors should boycott the Oscars entirely. And while these concerns are valid and urgent, they don't address the root issues of why only a few films made by women and filmmakers of color are deemed worthy of consideration each year, or why films about contemporary black life are continually ignored in Oscar conversations.

The author on set

The mainstream Oscar debate has in many ways become a top-down spectacle, in which people with power and influence make comments about what's right, or what's fair, and frankly, I don't really care because I need to raise $99,000 for my first feature film. My colleagues are working full-time jobs as teachers, then coming home at night to revise their scripts to shoot this summer. My black female colleagues are clocking in audition after audition to secure roles in films where black women are underwritten and barely visible. My peers are devoting their lives to the love of cinema, and none of them are worried about the Oscars. One day, perhaps they will, but right now, we are trying to make our movies and build our careers.

One of the biggest barriers that emerging filmmakers face, and especially women and filmmakers of color, is limited access to funding and resources to make their films, to continue making their films, or to make larger, big-budget films. And when I say films, I mean films in which their black, Latina, or women characters are human, flawed, and complex, ones that many studios don't make or that we're told are hard to "sell." While we regale in stories of overnight success and underdogs, there are many more who have the scripts, the talent, and the vision, but simply don't have the money. It's just a fact. The system is intentionally set up for this, so when you find investors and producers who will champion you, it's like getting married and having a honeymoon.

So instead of boycotting an event and wasting time writing blogs about why it's unfair, invest in us, the working filmmakers of color. For every blog and celebrity statement about the misfortune of the Academy, there's a filmmaker striving against all odds to make his or her movie or get into a writing room on a TV show. There's a woman writing a character we've never seen. There's the sounds of exciting, groundbreaking voices that will be silenced if we don't pay attention.

Nijla is a writer and filmmaker from the East Bay Area. Follow her on Twitter.

All photos by Nelson Morales

This article originally appeared in the Colombian edition of VICE magazine.

My first experience of photographing LGBT tribe communities was the muxhes of the Oaxaca isthmus in Mexico, where I'm from. They are part of a homosexual community that has transcended the idea of gender to assume an exaggerated female identity—based on the constant search for beauty. You might say they have developed a so-called "third gender." I photographed their world for several years.

Later, I got involved with a photography project in the Colombian Amazon jungle called 20 Fotografos Amazonas. I wanted to immerse myself in the jungle—in its colors, its myths, its legends. It was there I discovered the Ticuna tribe, another homosexual community with strong similarities with the Oaxaca muxhes. I was struck by how similar their skin color was, how both tribes were preoccupied with the accentuation of excess, and, above all, how the identities of both communities are shaped by femininity.

The Ticuna have loudly campaigned for the right to be able to express their fluid gender, and to be seen and admired by others without prejudice. You see them in the jungle, wading in the river, walking down the streets in their villages, adding color and flavor to the region. Their community accepts them. Some work. Some study with the ambition of one day obtaining a degree. Others help their families with the housework.

Fifteen years ago, none of this would have happened in the Amazon jungle. Only recently—thanks to the influence of mass media—queer culture has taken a hold in these communities. I wanted to create portraits that transmitted the energy I found here—sensual, transgressive, and playful.

Helensburgh (Photo author's own). Homepage thumbnail by Bodger Brooks

If you've ever seen 1973 classic The Wicker Man (and I don't mean the terrible Nick Cage remake), you'll be familiar with the idea of isolated Scottish communities and their weird ways. Well get this: in the west coast town of Helensburgh, which while 25 miles from Glasgow is not exactly remote, its inhabitants worship submarines. That seems to be the only logical explanation for why they've recently been knocking down a church wall so that they can stick an actual submarine inside. And who wouldn't worship a shiny underwater prophet that brings jobs, security and economic wellbeing to all those who cross its path?

In fact they're just building Scotland's first museum dedicated to the history of underwater warfare, with a World War II "Midget Submarine" the star attraction, and they need to get it inside somehow. It hasn't arrived yet, so there's currently just an old church with a hole in its wall.

But submarine warfare isn't just of historical interest in these parts. Modern submarines are based a few miles to the north of Helensburgh in the deep sea lochs that cut across Scotland's west coast. Much to the annoyance of hippies, Jeremy Corbyn and the fairly significant proportion of the country who find the notion of Mutually Assured Destruction in some way objectionable, the subs based there are stacked full of nuclear weapons. This is the home of Trident, Britain's nuclear deterrent.

The subs patrolling the depths are arguably relics of the Cold War. Saying that, each one does possess the firepower to send humanity back considerably further (some time around the Stone Age would be a good estimate). The system which involves two subs covertly prowling the depths of the ocean, primed to retaliate in the event of a nuclear strike on the UK or its allies, while the other two are dockside undergoing maintenance. This neat arrangement is pending a £167 billion replacement in a few years. But that's up for debate: for the first time in about 30 years, the leader of the Labour Party is against their existence. The question is, would the area be able to survive without them?

This quiet area of coastline the number one target for any superpower, rogue state or terrorist cabal intent on wiping out the UK's military capacity. Not that there was much sign of impending nuclear apocalypse along Helensburgh's wind battered seafront on a rainy Sunday. Nor was there much sign of anything, in fact, with most of the town's residents preferring to shelter inside the quaint Italian delis and cosy, military-themed pubs that line the seafront.

Each day, hundreds make the commute from here and towns across the region to Faslane and its sister site of Coulport. The base is reputed to be the largest single-site employer in Scotland, with its current level of 6,900 workers set to exceed 8,000 by 2022. A few decades ago, figures like that were the norm for workplaces, but in a country which has lost virtually all of its major industry, it makes the naval base unique. Even Amazon, with its hundreds of warehouse jobs just across the water in Greenock, barely registers against it. What's more, the jobs serving Britain's submarine fleet are highly skilled, unionised, well paid and secure.

There's a confidence about Helensburgh that marks it out from the depressed, post-industrial malaise that envelopes much of central Scotland. Its affluence is visible; not many of Scotland's seaside towns of 15,000 or so can boast a Waitrose and a private school. Given the area has done this well out of weapons of mass destruction, it follows that local politicians effectively worship at death's altar. Its MSP, Jackie Baillie, is the only Scottish Labour MSP that defied the party's anti-Trident position in a Holyrood vote last year.

"I argued strongly in support of the base and the thousands of jobs it provides for local people, as I have always done, and I will not be changing my position," she told a local paper at the time. "I will put my constituents ahead of my party, and reality ahead of rhetoric."

But given that both the reality and rhetoric of Scottish Labour's prospects at the forthcoming Scottish elections do not, to put it mildly, look great. Baillie is facing an uphill struggle to save the seat she's held since 1999. Her likely successor is the SNP's Gail Robertson, an opponent of Trident and a member of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Does she want to see the base packed up tomorrow and its 7,000 workers queuing up at their nearest Job Centre Plus?

"To suggest the removal of Trident would have negative consequences for the local economy would be to say that all of the employment at the base is directly related to Trident, which is far from being the case," Robertson told VICE. "In fact the cost of renewing Trident comes at the expense of spending on conventional defence and conventional manufacturing jobs. Investment in more conventional defence based at Faslane would be far more beneficial to the local economy."

And it's not lost on the SNP that this apparently Trident-reliant area was one of only four to vote "Yes" in the 2014 independence referendum.

WATCH: The trailer for the new VICE documentary 'Year of Mercy'.

The issue of exactly how many workers rely on the UK's nuclear weapons programme is hotly contested, with supporters estimating anything up to 11,000 jobs. However, in response to a Freedom of Information request in 2012, the MOD quoted 520 jobs as being directly reliant on the Trident programme. For its part, the SNP have been insistent that the removal of nukes, or even independence, would not entail the mass job losses envisioned by Trident's proponents. Local representatives are keen to sweet talk the "base vote", with new MP Brendan O'Hara writing recently that the Navy are "very much at the heart" of the local community.

The TUC and STUC are against renewal, but local trade unionists think differently. Jim Moohan is a senior organiser with the GMB, which represent workers on the base. "It's been there for over 50 years and thousands upon thousands of jobs are at the site. Taking away the main source of income in the area would leave the place desolate," he said. "The contractors have no intension of diversification to other types of job."

The question may be fairly moot. Despite a large demonstration against Trident in London on Saturday, a combination of a Conservative majority and dissenting Labour MPs will almost certainly ensure that the programme is renewed when it comes up over the next couple of years. In Helensburgh and surrounding towns, a community will continue to flourish thanks to the weapons that could destroy us all.

@parcelorogues

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From the Swedish Police preliminary investigations of the Martin Trenneborg case.

This article was originally published on VICE Sweden

Kidnappings might not be that common in Sweden, but when they do happen, they are pretty fucked up. So much so that Stockholm syndrome, a peculiar phenomenon in which hostages develop positive feelings toward their captors, was named after a hostage situation that took place in Stockholm in the 1970s.

The latest kidnapping to take place in Sweden was made public in September 2015. On the evening of the 18th, 37-year-old Martin Trenneborg entered a police station in central Stockholm alongside a woman in her early thirties. After briefly speaking to the receptionist, the pair sat down in the waiting hall. Two hours later, the woman was called into an interrogation room. The man stayed in his seat. Then four police officers came out and arrested him, marking the climax of a disturbing news story that the tabloids dubbed "The Sex Bunker Doctor" and "Swedish Fritzl". The chain of events includes a sound-proof bunker, poisoned strawberries and a sex contract. But more on all that latter.

On the 23rd of February this year, a Swedish court sentenced Trenneborg to 10 years in jail for kidnapping. Ever since the story broke, several criminology experts have stated that this case is one of the most disturbing in Swedish criminal history. In recognition of this alarming milestone, we assembled a brief history of Swedish kidnappings.

The Gevalia Daughter

The first case of kidnapping in modern Sweden took place in 1963 – at least as far as we know. Ann-Marie Engwall, the 7-year-old daughter of Jacob Engwall, Managing Director of Gevalia (Europe's largest coffee roasting company at the time) was abducted on her way to school. The kidnappers, a man and and woman who remained anonymous, claimed they were going to drive her to a school trip she had just missed.

To pass the time while waiting for the ransom money (a sum of about €1,500, which they apparently needed to fund their own private detective agency), the perpetrators took Ann-Marie to a petting zoo and to a café. As soon as the ransom was collected, the kidnappers put Ann-Marie in a taxi to be sent to her parents. Not wanting to go by herself, and unable to grasp the concept of abduction, she tearfully asked the kidnappers to join her.

Mr. and Mrs. Engwall contacted the police right after their daughter arrived. The kidnappers turned themselves in that same day. They would do well later in life, however. Once they served their sentences, they got married, and had successful careers within governmental organisations.

The Ulrika Bidegårdransom photo, taken by the kidnapper. Photo: Swedish Police

The Girl in the Box

The kidnapping of Swedish Olympic equestrian Ulrika Bidegård took place in 1993. Swedish carpenter Lars Nilsson, who had worked on renovating the Bidegård family home, attacked her outside her parents' house in Belgium. He tied her up, gagged her and sedated her with paint thinner. On the way up the stairs to his apartment in Brussels, he dropped Bidegård on her face, busting her lip. Once inside, she was forced to wear a blindfold and noise-cancelling headphones, and was tied sitting up inside a homemade, wooden portable loo. During the four days she was held captive, she was given little food and water.

Belgian police managed to locate Nilsson after he used Bidegård's credit card to make cash withdrawals. They raided his apartment two days later, arrested him and liberated Bidegård from her wooden prison.

A ransom letter arrived at the Bidegård estate the day after Nilsson's arrest, enclosed with a photograph of Ulrika inside the box, demanding $500,000. During the investigation, people close to Nilsson described him as kind and sound, without criminal inclinations.

The Westerberg Case

In 2002, a guy posing as a flower deliveryman kidnapped Erik Westerberg, son of a successful business executive, from his home in Stockholm. Westerberg had been featured at the top of a list of wealthy youths which had been published in an evening paper that same year. Westerberg was also put in a box, and then transported to a cottage on an island outside of Stockholm where he was chained to a bed.

The kidnappers demanded that about €1,000,000 in cash was attached to a wire under a bridge outside of Paris, France. Westerberg's father delivered the money personally. Soon thereafter, the kidnappers released Erik and gave him a pack of cigarettes and some matches. The Swedish Task Force found him after he had smoked roughly three cigarettes. Once his identity had been confirmed, Swedish police notified their colleagues in France, and shortly afterwards French police arrested the two accomplices who had received the ransom.

Another Person, Another Box

The box is a recurring theme in Swedish kidnappings. On the morning of 3rd February, 2005, Fabian Bengtsson was found in a park in Gothenburg, having just been released by his abductors after 17 days in captivity. "Start walking, you are free, don't look back" was the last thing the kidnappers told him before they let him go.

Bengtsson, heir to SIBA, one of the leading Nordic chains for consumer electronics, was attacked with teargas in his garage, crammed into an empty TV box and brought to some kind of hovel. Once there, he was transferred to another soundproof wooden box with a mattress inside. The kidnappers had targeted him in an attempt to extort about €5,000,000 from the Bengtsson family.

Over time, however, the kidnappers grew to like the abductee. When they weren't threatening him with a homemade gun or shoving balls of tape into his mouth, they cooked him omelettes and washed his clothes; drank whiskey and played cards with him. After a little more than two weeks, overtaken by sympathy, they released Bengtsson. They were caught by the police thanks to the many mental notes Bengtsson took while in captivity, such as at what hours he heard the sound of the ice-cream truck turn the corner onto their street, and how long it took the kidnappers to get food from McDonald's.

Bad Students

Alexander Åhman, another son of another wealthy businessman, disappeared from his student flat in Uppsala a few days after Christmas in 2011. His abductees were his housemate, a psychology student, her presumed boyfriend who was a medicine student, and one more of their friends. After the flatmate had treated Åhman to a pie containing sedatives (the pie was bitter apparently, but he ate it anyway to be polite) the kidnappers taped him up, put him in the back of a van and drove 570 kilometres to an abandoned school building in the city of Umeå.

Åhman spent his week in captivity in a dark, unheated basement, with very little food – beer being his only source of nutrition by the end – and only a thin mattress to sleep on. It was very cold, so Åhman tied diapers he found in the room to his feet to retain some warmth.

Four days after the kidnapping, two of the kidnappers were in the vicinity of Stockholm. The pair had taken Åhman's mobile phone in order to text his family, posing as him. With the app "Find My iPhone", the family traced the phone, noting that it moved north on the highway. The police caught the kidnappers with the help of the app, and Åhman was rescued two days later.

The image above is the copy of a sex contract found in a folder called "Master Plan" on Trenneborg's computer. It made headlines due to its sadistic nature.

The Sex Bunker Doctor

Some time in 2010, Dr. Martin Trenneborg allegedly began building a faux machine shed next to his country home, in Knislinge in southern Sweden. Inside the shed he constructed a 60 square metre, soundproof concrete bunker with double security doors equipped with electronic locks.

Five years later, in September 2015, Dr. Trenneborg goes on a date with a woman, in her apartment in Stockholm – 550 kilometers from Knislinge. He stays for two hours, during which they chat and have sex, and then he suggests that they meet again in two days. She accepts. He goes back to Knislinge that same evening to prepare.

On their second date they drink champagne and he feeds her Rohypnol-laced strawberries. Once she is intoxicated beyond comprehension, he hands her a diaper which she puts on herself. He then fetches a wheelchair from his car, rolls her out and puts her in the passenger seat. He injects her with sedating drugs on the hour, throughout the seven-hour drive. The woman's only memory after eating the strawberries is waking up in the car and noticing a heartrate monitor clipped to her finger.

She wakes up in Dr. Trenneborg's bunker. He allegedly says that she's going to stay for a few years, cooking for him, hanging out and having unprotected sex two or three times a day. He takes samples of her blood and vaginal swabs so he can test her for STDs, and gives her birth control pills. He also says he's considering abducting another woman to keep her company – possibly her mother.

Five days after the abduction, Trenneborg leaves for Stockholm to pick up a few things from the woman's apartment and to attend a U2 concert. When he comes home the next day, he offers to drive her back to Stockholm to get some of her stuff. At this point, the police have left a note on the woman's apartment door, stating that she is missed by her family and that her locks have been changed by the police.

During the trip to Stockholm, worried that police are on to him he coaches her to pretend that they are a couple. He says he doesn't want to go to jail. The fact that she is being compliant and has not attempted to escape makes him hope she will not report him. The pair arrive to the police station in central Stockholm, and it's not until she is separated from the man that she tells the police officers what has happened to her.

On the 23rd of February, Martin Trenneborg was sentenced to ten years in prison for kidnapping. He also has to pay the woman a penalty of €19,000 in damages. Trenneborg admitted to kidnapping her but denied and was acquitted of a rape charge.

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A missing person poster in Ireland (Photo by William Murphy via)

Last year, 137,146 people were reported missing in the UK. While we might see many of their faces posted to Facebook or in the back pages of local newspapers, it can be all too easy to look straight through them.

The plight of missing people remains something most of us know very little about – an issue that throws up many more questions than answers. How do so many people simply disappear? What does attempting to track someone down actually entail? And, most importantly, how many missing people are found?

Although nearly 140,000 people were reported missing last year, the real number is thought to be considerably higher. This is because many incidents go unreported. According to the charity Missing People, an estimated 250,000 go missing every year. While the majority of these cases are quickly resolved, they say, an estimated 2,500 people remain untraced for over a year after they first disappear.

The circumstances that lead to people vanishing are manifold, but research conducted by Missing People found that up to 80 percent of missing persons cases involve someone believed to suffer from mental health problems. Of course, it's rare that these cases gain any kind of national attention – broadly speaking, it tends to be attractive white women who make the headlines.

Anthony Stammers, 30, is one of thousands of Britons currently classed as missing. He left his home in Mile End Road, Colchester, on the 27th of May, 2012, and has not been seen since. "He went missing the day before his grandfather's funeral. It massively took us by surprise," explains his mother Julie Stammers. "He was very close to his granddad. He was holding hands with him when he passed away. I think maybe it was a catalyst."

Having moved back home after finishing university, Stammers had been living with his family for five years. "He'd been suffering from depression for two or three years," says Julie. "He'd been looking for a job and had written off for 120 jobs over the couple of years."

Although Stammers distanced himself from friends in the months before he left, he remained close to family throughout. "Anthony is a very family orientated person," says Julie. "But maybe he's gone because he felt a burden because he didn't have a job. He hates to be beholden to anyone."

Every day is plagued with uncertainty for Anthony's family. "It's just soul destroying, because you have all these questions in your head – questions that can't be answered," says Julie. "I do go through some very dark moments. Some nights I don't sleep at all. Mornings are my worst. I get up and have a good old cry, and lock myself in the bathroom with the taps running so no one can hear."

The anxiety, understandably, has had a knock-on effect on how Julie and her husband now lives their lives. "We won't go away for long periods of time for holidays, and I won't change my hairstyle much in case he doesn't recognise me walking along the road," she explains. "It might sound silly to other people, but we kept getting our car repaired every single week because we didn't want to replace it in case he didn't recognise it in the driveway or at a set of lights. In the end we had to replace it."

The police spend 14 percent of their time searching for missing people. Joe Apps, manager of the National Crime Agency's Missing Persons Bureau, told the BBC in 2012 that the bureau – using data from 3,000 previous cases – can make informed assumptions about a missing person's whereabouts, taking into account their age and gender.

"In terms of 15 to 16-year-olds, 30 percent came back to where they'd started from without any police intervention. Just under 30 percent went to friends' houses, and 14 percent were found walking the street," he told the BBC. "In terms of distance travelled, 80 percent of them were found within 40 km. So it just tells you that 'missing' is a very local issue. They are most likely to be found very close by."

Although the police have carried out numerous searches for Anthony Stammers, nothing has been found.

"Essex and Colchester police have been so good," says Julie. "We've had no bad news, so we have to be positive. None of his personal belongings have been found. His passport's still here. But it's not impossible to get anywhere in the world. He could have got on a boat. There are ways of getting round things. He could use a different name and get a different national insurance number or do cash in hand. We all love him to bits and are waiting for the day he comes home."

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When months turn into years, the family and friends of missing people are left living in limbo, experiencing what is termed as "ambiguous loss". Karen Robinson, the head of Partnerships at Missing People, has dealt with dozens of missing person cases. In turn, she has witnessed the destruction and trauma it wreaks for those left behind.

"There's been research into the particular trauma faced by families missing someone. They are unable to grieve," explains Robinson. "As human beings, we emotionally need closure on things, and grief doesn't start until we know for certain that somebody has died. In the absence of a body being found, it's really common for families to remain in that painful limbo."

To put that into perspective: according to a 2011 study by Missing People, between 0.6 percent and 1 percent of all missing person cases reported to the police end in the missing person being found dead.

"In some cases, this is because they have been out of touch for a long time and have died of natural causes before contact was re-established," reads the report. "In other cases, this is because the missing person has become a victim of homicide, or has committed suicide, and may have been reported missing after their death, but before their body was discovered. Research suggests that the risk of being found dead is higher for adults than for young people, and the risk increases with age."

Nobody wants to hear that their loved one has died, of course – but equally, the fact that, in 99 percent of cases, people are left with no clear answer either way gives an indication of just how many people are left in the dark. And as if the emotional trauma wasn't bad enough, those left behind can also be thrust into a financial mess; if your relative goes missing, you're legally prohibited from stopping their direct debits. Their car insurance, mortgage, phone contract or gym membership payments will continue to seep out of their account every month.

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As well as working in partnership with police forces to track people down, Missing People also provides vital support to those affected. "The charity is here 24 hours a day to support anyone who is missing, thinking about running away or the loved ones left behind," Robinson explains. "We're the neutral bridge between the person and the police."

The charity contacts a total of 20,000 missing people by text message each year. "It generates lots of contact back from those missing people, who then use us as a confidential space to explore their options," she says. "We won't tell you what to do. We pass messages like, 'I want to let you know that I'm thinking of you. I'm just not ready to see you yet.' We also do three way calls."

The most affecting cases Robinson mentions are those where people have become so isolated that they don't even realise someone is missing them. "Some people don't realise they are missing because they might have drifted out of contact with their loved ones," she says. "So actually learning that they've been reported missing and somebody is concerned for them might actually be a prompt for them to reconnect."

Nevertheless, it remains immensely difficult for missing people to get back in touch with family and friends. "The longer you're away, the harder it becomes to say to the people that you love, 'This is where I've been and why,'" Robinson explains. "If you didn't go home tonight, how would you explain tomorrow where you were and what you did, and how would you explain after two nights and after a week?"

Interestingly, research has shown that those who go missing make a series of short-term rash decisions. "They might decide, 'I can't take this any more, I'm leaving,' with no intention of staying away for a long period of time, rather than making a calculated plan to leave," says Robinson.

Many adults who remain missing for over a year will never return. While it's not unknown for people to come home – even after ten or 20 years – statistically speaking, the longer a person is missing, the less likely it is that they'll be found or that they'll reconnect with family or friends.

The acute anxiety and uncertainty experienced by the people left behind doesn't bear thinking about. At what stage do you choose to stop going over and over the days and weeks before they disappeared? And is it possible to ever fully give up hope until a body is found? Britain might be the most spied on country in the world – one CCTV camera per every 11 people, to be exact – but there are still many who manage to slip away.

@MayaOppenheim

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"Don't kill us!"—Wolves. Photo via Flickr user Dave Rooney

Since 2005, Alberta, Canada's government has killed 1,360 wolves, mostly shooting them down from helicopters. Aerial shooting caused 84 percent of deaths during that timespan, according to Dave Hervieux, the province's caribou management specialist. Poisoning by strychnine-tainted meat accounted for the remainder. Because wolves are objectively the fucking coolest furry animals aside from Ewoks, the situation has devolved into quite the controversy, with many environmental organizations arguing that wolves are being scapegoated and murdered for the destructive byproducts of industrial activities. The reason for the ongoing massacre circles back, most predictably, to the province's encouragement of hyper-accelerated resource development over the last decade.

Unfortunately, such capitalist frivolities have come at the expense of many woodland caribou, especially in the Little Smoky and A La Peche ranges, located in west-central Alberta near Jasper National Park. And the rapid demise of the reindeer relatives—with the Little Smoky range's caribou population annually declining by between 10 and 20 percent from the late 1990s to mid-2000s—is very much a holy-fuck-our-pet-canary-just-died-from-carbon-monoxide-poisoning moment.

"The Little Smoky features wetter and higher altitude forests, which means it's a good refuge from climate change," says Carolyn Campbell, a conservation specialist with the Alberta Wilderness Association. "If we were to manage this habitat better for caribou survival and recovery, many other species would benefit: migratory birds, Athabasca rainbow trout, fur-bearing animals. The caribou are genetically and ecologically really important because they're indicators of the health of forests and wetlands."

"Don't kill me either!"—Woodland caribou. Photo via Wikimedia

Government scientists have been issuing warnings about the caribou's decline since the 1970s. Woodland caribou were officially designated as "threatened" by the federal government in 2000. The federal caribou recovery strategy was finally released in October 2012. It mandated that 65 percent of the habitat in a caribou range must remain undisturbed, expecting the result that 60 percent of the herd would possibly become self-sustaining. (Campbell quips that "if that was a medical condition, most of us wouldn't be totally enthusiastic about that.")

But it seems that Alberta didn't give many fucks about environmental concerns and completely ignored the advice of such experts. Now, habitat disturbance in Little Smoky is estimated at 95 percent, a full 60 percent above the maximum levels, according to Alison Ronson, ‎the executive director at Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society Northern Alberta. This rampant destruction has also reduced the natural carbon sequestration abilities that boreal forests have historically served.

Seismic lines, roads, clearcuts, and drilling rigs have decimated the range, encouraging moose and deer to pop by for grazing in what is normally caribou territory. This change in behavior has inevitably drawn the attention of wolves, which have discovered quite a taste for juicy caribou flesh. Hervieux argues the "predator management" program has been necessary to keep the Little Smoky caribou population (between 70 and 100 animals) from local extinction, which animal nerds call "extirpation." But while critics agree the program—which recently spread to British Columbia—has allowed the population to stabilize, they seriously dispute the long-term desirability of it.

"It's a bad situation that's made worse by what may be viewed as an essential step in the short term to preserve some herds that might otherwise become extirpated," says Jason Unger, staff counsel at the Edmonton-based Environmental Law Center. "It's a bad way of treating symptoms without dealing with the bigger causes of habitat degradation."

Hervieux stresses the government would prefer not to have to kill wolves at all, but he notes "in the near-term, we need to do this or there would be no caribou left." Between 50 and 80 percent of the wolves in Little Smoky are "removed" every year. He fears the woodland caribou—which have resided in Alberta since the last ice age—may die off within his lifetime. In 2009, an avalanche killed the last five caribou in the Banff herd, leading to an official extirpation in the range. Only four of the 16 remaining caribou populations are "stable." Two of those were sustained because of the "predator management" program. The other two are OK for now because they're in "wild country," far from industrial development.

But the Cold Lake and East Side of Athabasca River herds, located in the heart of tar sands country, are facing near-term extirpation: "Their time on the planet is very short," says Hervieux. In recent years, there have been between zero and four calves per 100 caribou cows in those spots. There's no plan to introduce a wolf cull in such regions, perhaps because of the political implications.

To be sure, there have been some recent improvements. As of the end of July, there haven't been any new energy leases sold in any of Alberta's caribou ranges. It's something Campbell describes as a "huge psychological shift" that's "really overdue." Ronson adds the new provincial government has indicated a greater willingness to engage with indigenous and environmental groups (which the previous government shut out of negotiations when it established a ministerial task force in 2012). A mediator has been brought in to try find a reasonable compromise. The province's energy department is "thoroughly reviewing all land sales in caribou ranges." Plus, the economic downturn has gutted the sale of tenures.

But serious problems persist. Between 2005 and 2015, the province auctioned off over 15,000 square miles of terrain within caribou ranges to energy companies, which continue to build new well sites, pipelines, and roadways. Over $3 billion worth of land, mostly in western Alberta, was sold off in 2012. The usage of recreational vehicles such as ATVs and snowmobilers, something Albertans are inexplicably obsessed with, only exacerbates such damages. Such activities increase potential access for wolves that results in even more caribou being threatened.

Patching up that habitat takes many decades to occur naturally (Campbell notes there could be many job opportunities in intense restoration). And unless a permanent moratorium is implemented, economic pressures such as the growing deficit and potential ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which could potentially boost forestry exports, may cause the provincial government to ease up on the hiatus. If that happens, the caribou in Little Smoky might be completely fucked.

A federal recovery strategy for the Little Smoky range was meant to be published last spring, but government is apparently stacked with people who used to hand in school assignment months late. Unger says a cabinet order from the federal government could mandate that critical habitat of specific ranges be protected in a particular way. But that would require locking antlers with the natural resource companies, something both the provincial and federal government has seemed entirely unwilling to do so far. Unger notes that it "becomes a political decision at a certain stage."

But until such issues are addressed, wolves will continue to be slaughtered in order to allow natural resource development to thrive. It appears to come back to a question of allegiance: Is the role of the provincial government to abide by federal environmental regulations, or bow to the pressures of private industry? If a verdict can't be arrived at soon, perhaps a cage match between a bunch of oil execs and a pack of surviving wolves is in order.

"We have caused this problem," Hervieux says. "The choice is on us whether we attempt to address it and make it right or walk away. That's a societal question. It is an age of consequences. Are we willing to accept addressing those consequences or not?"

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

Image via Flickr user Mark

If New Zealand is shrouded by a long white cloud of anything, it's dope smoke. So how is it that Australia has not only beaten us to legalising medical marijuana, but the bill passed parliament with almost complete support? It's not like Australia is some bastion of liberal, touch-feely values either. Their last holdout state didn't give women the vote until 1911, almost 20 years behind New Zealand, and they held on to the death penalty until 1967, again, four years after its abolition in New Zealand.

If anyone here is likely to force a rethink on medicinal weed, it's cancer patient and former Union leader Helen Kelly. While she's gaining public sympathy for her calm campaigning, so far Kelly has got the cold shoulder from Peter Dunne who declined her application to use medicinal cannabis while undergoing chemo.

So how long will it take to pass similar legislation passed here? And will Australia's move make any difference for Kiwi lawmakers? We asked New Zealand Drug Foundation executive director Ross Bell for an update.

Ross Bell. Image supplied.

VICE: Hi Ross. So do you think New Zealand has fallen behind?
Ross Bell: Well no. The interesting thing with the Australian law change is that it's actually brought them in line with New Zealand. We've been allowing cultivation for research purposes since the 70s. The exciting element is that Australia is having a much more public discussion around the issue.

Do you think Australia's bill will have an influence here?
Maybe. I think the New Zealand government now seems more open to a new approach because they don't want to be left behind. We might be able to hang our hats on the nuclear free and women's vote stuff, but we're not up with the play on this one.

What do you think legalisation would look like here?
This is where things get tricky. See, what do you mean by legalising? Does this mean people growing their own plants or cannabis being issued in a pharmaceutical form? Because the New Zealand government won't go with people growing their own to fix a sore back. Minister (Peter) Dunne is clear that he'd be willing to issue products that have met certain thresholds. He claims he'd schedule them right now, so he says the law doesn't need to change.

So what's stopping medicinal marijuana to meet these "certain thresholds"?
Well, Peter Dunne has announced that he's having another look at the guidelines around how we approve medical applications. Which means he's looking at whether or not the officials have been too strict.

Aside from that, the biggest block is the lack of medical research and the small number of products undergoing trials. If a product was to be approved by the FDA or some other country then New Zealand would make it available. But then there is yet another barrier—nervous doctors who don't want to be seen proscribing a natural plant to their patients. If cannabis could be administered in a white pill I think they would be much happier.

So we're in a holding pattern until Australia brings out some pills or New Zealand's guidelines change?
Look, I've given up trying to predict the future. If you'd asked me three years ago whether commercial cannabis would be available in the USA I'd have laughed at you. If I can say anything I'd say that things are going to move along much more quickly than any of us would have thought. The driver behind this is interesting. See, while recreational cannabis use is something being pushed mostly by the younger demographic, medical cannabis is a 50-plus issue. These are parents and grand parents who have seen the benefits within their families and that is a powerful motivation. We just need more pharmaceutical products to come out of the FDA or more reliable evidence out of Australia.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

James Franco was supposed to make Zac Efron funny, not threaten to cause a nuclear apocalypse. But that's what happened in 2014 when The Interview went from Hollywood to the US President's radar. "If somebody is able to intimidate us out of releasing a satirical movie," Obama said of North Korea's alleged cyber-attack on Sony Pictures over the comedy, "then imagine what they might start doing if they see a documentary they don't like." Cut to the title credits of The Propaganda Game, the new film by Spanish documentarian Álvaro Longoria, that tries to show what it's like to live under the "daily bombardment of propaganda" of Kim Jong-un's regime.

Longoria was given exclusive access to North Korea via Alejandro Cao, a 40-year-old fellow Spaniard who also happens to be the Special Delegate on North Korea's Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Cao acts as a de facto presenter in the film, trying to convince us of North Korea's essential good in comparison with the capitalist West's evil. And Longoria mostly complies with Cao, crafting a film that often evokes an epic grace in sweeping shots of landscapes and tightly choreographed drills and performances, but is clearly made in line with his host's wishes.

The film hits on the injustice North Koreans feel about how they're perceived. Namely, how ridiculous Jong-un's regime seems to all of us living beyond the country's borders. "How many nuclear weapon tests have there been in North Korea since the Second World War?" Cao asks at one point. Three, according to an infographic onscreen—possibly four now, since a test in January. "And how many nuclear tests, in that timeframe, have been conducted by America?" he asks. The answer given is 1,035 (more like 1,054 tests between 1945 and 1992, as per the US Department of Energy).

Like a hall of mirrors, The Propaganda Game is Longoria's journey into a place where no fact can be taken as a given, and no statement accepted with sincerity. By letting himself be used like this, Longoria says more about modern North Korea than any recent hidden-camera doc on the country. And, by extension, he makes a point beyond North Korea: how our ability to manipulate, and be manipulated, by the information we hide and show can come to define our lives. We spoke to Longoria about getting an all-access pass to North Korea, and compromising his directorial independence in the process.

VICE: What were you trying to achieve with this film?
Álvaro Longoria: I wanted to look at how propaganda works, and the different ways it can be used. North Koreans use propaganda on their citizens as part of a massive exercise. From the moment people there are born, they're bombarded with the same ideas all the time. But they also do it to outsiders, and try to use us to spread their message. I found I had also been manipulated by the West. There's virtually no hard information out there about North Korea, so you can write anything about it and people will believe you. North Korea is the most extreme place for propaganda, and, in extremes, things can often become very clear.

How much did you look to other Western depictions of North Korea for information?
I've seen a lot of them. I decided I wanted to stay away from the "hidden camera" style of filmmaking. I didn't want to make a film that claimed to reveal something when, to be honest, it's very hard to reveal anything about North Korea. And it's very easy to fall into doing propaganda yourself. You can prove any point if you want to. The only influence I had was North Korean propaganda films from the 1920s and 30s—purely in terms of aesthetics. I wanted to show propaganda as propaganda, to make it look beautiful and grand.

There are scenes in the film where North Koreans you meet talk about what it's like to know that people around the world may believe stories about their home that aren't true. How did you deal, personally, with not being able to trust anything anyone said, at any time?
It felt like I was caught in a feedback loop a lot of the time. If someone tries to manipulate you all the time, you're going to end up being manipulated. So I wanted the audience to be there with me, to make them part of that manipulation. I wanted to take it as far as it goes, and to see then what might happen.

What surprised you about North Korea?
I knew I was going to be shown the best side of North Korea. I knew they were going to use me for propaganda. That was obvious. The question was whether I was going to be able to resist it. I was kind of surprised, because, in actual fact, their propaganda was very clumsy. I thought they would do a much better job. They're so isolated from the world, and so isolated from the Western media, they're actually not that sophisticated when it comes to how the media works.

The "most benevolent leader" projected behind some performing kids in Pyongyang

Were you taken in at all?
I was. I'm not a news reporter; I became a victim, I got Stockholm Syndrome. After 10 days of being subjected to a huge amount of propaganda, I could start to feel it working. I maintained an accommodationist approach, because I was trying to get them to relax and be very open with me. That means I had to agree with them on some occasions.

But I have to admit, I was starting to like what I saw, and that was only after 10 days. What would happen to me if I had to live there? I find it hard to believe most of us would hold out. The propaganda is constant. It's brutal, non-stop and doesn't broach any discussion. In other communist countries, you feel, when you talk to the people, there's some dissidence. People have an opinion, they complain. North Korea is absolutely solid. There's no room for any dissidence—not even positive or constructive criticism.

Does North Korea have anything on the West? Are they better off than us in some ways?
Who is happier? North Koreans, who do not realize they live in a fake world, or have any idea of the world beyond their country, and who truly believe in their system? Or the Western people who are struggling to keep up, and live as outliers? North Koreans are happy because they don't know anything. We're unhappy because maybe we know too much. If I was going to be poor, I think I'd rather be poor in North Korea than New York City.

You gained access to North Korea through Alejandro Cao. What's he like?
I don't think there's ever been such an extreme case of a Westerner turning like Alejandro. He met his first North Korean friends in Madrid when he was 16. He's gone through extensive training, and he's very good at his job. Sometimes, you talk to someone off the record—you go for a drink and they relax and let their guard down. He never did that, not even once.

"My dream was always being a member of our Korean People's Army," says Cao, in this exclusive clip.

I went to his home, I met his parents, I've travelled with him across the world, and he always stayed on message. He's a very efficient machine. They call him "the Spanish Soldier." He's a celebrity over there, and he feels like he has a mission. He is grilled in the West on a constant basis, but he's absolutely prepared to defend his adopted nation. He doesn't seem to have any regrets.

Was there anything you had to leave out of the film?
We visited the German embassy in Pyongyang, and I was put inside what was essentially a big safe. They closed the door behind us and said we were in the only place in North Korea where they can't listen to you. For two hours, German intelligence officers briefed me on what was going on. A lot of those stories I hadn't heard before, and haven't heard again. I wanted to be very careful not to be manipulated, by either side. But I wish I had recorded that. One of the things they stressed is Kim Jong-un's position is not as strong as it may seem.

The North Koreans are pretty upfront about their use of propaganda. They don't try and hide it. In the UK, we're arguably the recipients of propaganda too. Are you interested in showing that?
That's a central thesis of my film. People often tell me how trapped the people of North Korea are, and I respond: "Yes, they're not free. But the question is, are we free?" You're only free if you have the power to make a decision. And you can only make a decision if you have enough information. How often are we given that information? It's sometimes difficult to know whether we're that much different from them.

The Propaganda Game is out in the UK Friday, February 27.

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This year marks the 30-year anniversary of Cher wearing the amazing outfit above to the 1986 Academy Awards. The look, which was designed by Bob Mackie, was widely mocked in the press at the time, and has appeared in pretty much every Worst/Most Shocking Oscar Dresses of All Time list written since that day.

Mackie, who has been designing clothes since the early 60s, has devoted the majority of his career to creating extreme and outlandish looks. Which isn't to say he makes clothing that is intentionally awful; his work consistently manages to be beautiful, while never taking itself too seriously. Over the years, he's dressed everyone from Beyoncé to David Bowie to The Supremes to Whitney Houston to Barbie.

There's a reason a look from 1986 is still talked about every awards season: People don't wear crazy shit on the Oscars red carpet anymore. On most lists of shocking/bad red carpet looks, the most contemporary outfits are Diane Keaton's tuxedo or Uma Thurman's weird Swiss geisha dress, both from the 2004 ceremony.

I spoke to Mackie about creating a look so absurd that people are still talking about it three decades later, and why nobody takes chances on the red carpet anymore.

Bob Mackie. Photo by Harry Langdon

VICE: What do you remember about the look for Cher?
Bob Mackie: I remember it well and everybody was so horrified and said "That's not fashion!" and I remember saying to my friends "Well, of course it's not fashion–it's about getting attention and having a good time," you know?

I was reading a couple of interviews with Cher about the look and she said presenting was performing, so she wanted to look like a performer.
Well she had been doing movies and plays and playing unglamorous things, and she hadn't been dressed up in these funny outfits and she kind of missed it because she liked it. She really enjoys that, dressing up and having people look at her and make comments. She wasn't horrified or hurt if someone didn't like it, she kind of liked that actually, and so it was a funny time. She was in New York and she was dating Tom Cruise at the time, so she was in his apartment and I met her in the apartment and she says "You know, nobody has seen me dressed up in a long time..." and I went "Oh dear."

What's the process for putting together a look like that?
She asked "What're you going to make for me?" and I said, "To begin with, you're giving an award—I don't think you should upstage." She said, "Oh they don't care, they won't care." She was determined to be dressed up in something funny or amusing or flamboyant or whatever. It was what made her Cher. For her it was perfectly all right. You know if she'd just worn a gown we would've never seen that picture, we would've never seen that gown again; this picture is re-printed every year over and over again. It's amazing to me. I said "OK, I'll do it for you." It wasn't like I was a fashion designer and I wanted to show my latest whatever off the runway, this was strictly a Cher thing.

Do you think at the time that people might still be talking about it in 2016?
Listen, I had been working with her since 1971. I had put her in so many crazy things and she's a very interesting woman. Especially then, the body was amazing, there was no extra flesh anywhere, you could put her in the most wild things and she never looked vulgar, it kind of looked like it just belonged on her. It was an odd situation with her always, I've never had a client quite like that. But then people started thinking that's all I knew how to do and I was doing all of these other people, plays, things like that, but people just thought Bob Mackie shows navel, Bob Mackie does crazies, you'll wear a funny hat. But that's OK.

I like performers to look like performers, and I like a little bit of pizzaz. I think there's a trend to look a little bit more normal these days.
Well there's a reason to look normal. It depends on the person, the personality, their product that they're selling. I always approach it like a costume designer. With a character or an image that we've started that we're going to continue and just try to update it or whatever. But the whole red carpet thing has gotten to be so boring.

I think today there is such a fear of ending up on worst dressed lists, so they end up having these very safe looks and safe designs.
I see these tabloid magazines and very often what they say are the best dressed at an event I think are the worst. They think that's good? Why do they think that's good? Or do they just want to print that woman's picture in the magazine because that makes the magazine more full of stars or whatever.

I think people tend to pick safe and bland designs.
For me there's nothing worse then seeing an actress walk out and seeing the whole front of her dress gaping open down to her waist and you're seeing unfortunate breasts. Unless they're absolutely gorgeous and perfect... But when it's kind of saggy and they are kind of taping it under and all of that. Come on, she can't be comfortable–you're going to get a bad shot of it eventually that night and they will print that bad shot for sure and its not good. You don't have to look like you're just barely 19 for the rest of your life. A lot of almost do which is OK. I think that's fine. But to look foolish is not a good thing, you just don't want to look like you're trying too hard or trying to hang on, that's not a good thing.

I think Jane Fonda is a good example of someone who dresses great for the red carpet. Was it the Globes recently where she wore the white dress with the ruffles? Did you see that one? I liked that a lot.
Yeah I did. I think the clothes should be extreme enough that it makes you look at them and say oh look at that. You know, not just oh another slip dress. Another boring slip dress.

One of the moments that stands out for me was Bjork in 2001 when she wore the Marjan Pejoski dress with the swan, did you like that at the time?
No. I didn't like it because, to begin with, it was so badly made. Her stockings were all wrinkled like an old swan with wrinkled legs. I mean, it looked really sad and kind of like trying too hard. If you're going to do this crazy stuff it better be made like a piece of fine jewelry. Everything has to sit in the right place, everything has to fit, everything has to be taken care of, and she certainly didn't look attractive or even magical. She just looked really silly, all she needed was a big Donald Duck beak.

Is there anyone you think has good red carpet looks?
There are people there are people that obviously take chances in their fashion, like a Cate Blanchett always takes chances but she always looks like a Cate Blanchett. She never looks like she's trying to be anybody else. I don't think about it too much... That little girl Zendaya is working her way into becoming a red carpet star because she's very attractive and she seems to have a good taste level even when it's different from the usual.

What do you consider to be good style in terms of presenting someone on the red carpet? What do you think is good lasting style?
I'm the one that's done the most iconically horrifying styles, and I got away with it. I just think you want to look like a goddess when you walk out. It needs to be oh my god, how beautiful that is.

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Shannon Mann, center, between the girl her character killed and the guy in their love triangle

Kinzie Noordman is likely to spend the rest of her adult life in prison. You probably don't recognise her name, but she's been the subject of more than one TV show, including one shown in the UK last summer. In 2003 when she was a 19-year-old first-year uni student, Kinzie and her friend Damien Guerrero drove their former schoolmate and sort-of frenemy Kelly Bullwinkle to a secluded citrus grove outside a California city, shot the 18-year-old in the head twice and buried her body in a shallow grave.

Then Kinzie and Damien – who'd previously cheated on his girlfriend with Kelly, apparently sparking jealousy in Kinzie – went to see a film. Once Upon a Time in Mexico, if you were curious.

Kelly's death was both unexpected and salacious, making it ideal dramatisation fodder. It didn't take long for the story, all goth teen stereotypes and a secondary school love triangle, to get picked up by Discovery's Lifetime Movie Network channel for a true crime episode that was broadcast in 2014. I Killed My BFF: Under a Deadly Spell generally plays out in the way you'd imagine, given its title. It's got all the markers of the type of true crime TV that came before podcast Serial made murder feel high-brow: soft-focus reenactments spliced between interviews with the real investigators and friends connected to the case and intense reaction shots complete with wild gesticulation and what looks like mimed shouting.

"You're genuinely yelling when you do that, but they just cut the sound," says actress Shannon Mann, who played Kinzie in that episode of I Killed My BFF. "You're improvising a certain amount and they might get you to say certain lines. You're also not allowed to swear," and she giggles, "which is hard when you're in character, because that's totally what a group of teenagers would've done."

Shannon, a smiley blonde, has wound up portraying dark-haired teen murderers like Kinzie – "the guidelines were 'butch, high school goth lesbian'" – twice in her career so far. She isn't really sure why either. I've called her up to get a sense of what it's like to play a killer, knowing that the character you're trying to embody is a real person. "The fact that some of these people are still alive and incarcerated made me want to give them their space," she says of the process behind preparing for the role. "And I don't really want them to find me either." Now she laughs.

Shannon, in a regular headshot on the left, and all gothed up on the right. (Photos: Joe Ferrucci and Paul Newland)

True crime entertainment spruced itself right up last year. Before we were in the pub over Christmas, scrambling to one-up our friends' Making a Murderer theories, crime-based non-fiction entertainment hadn't crossed over into "classy" territory. Channels like Crime Investigation or Investigation Discovery were still reliably on Sky, pumping out series with names like I Dated A Psycho, Killer in the Family and Forbidden: Love Gone Wrong. None of that was becoming the subject of Guardian or New York Times long reads, though, and few of the blood-spattered cases shown on a never-ending feed of death-as-entertainment would end up the subject of Making a Murderer's Redditor-led investigations or Change.org conviction pardon petitions.

But the low-brow stuff still has an audience. Shannon herself, for starters. "Oh yeah, I love it," she says, speaking from New York over Skype. "I remember watching it a few years ago and finding the way they did things sort of tacky, but it's gotten better. They've figured out the genre, and how to seamlessly put the parts of the story together." Isn't it morbid, though? To find ourselves so caught up in these dark stories, for 30 minutes to an hour, before basically forgetting about the actual people involved in them? She pauses. "It's like seeing a car accident on the side of the road. You want to slow down, mostly because you don't want anyone not to be hurt, but you're also kind of happy you're not in it the wreck. There's also ... I guess there's also something about seeing the dark side of humanity that we know is there but want to recognise before it hurts us."

Catherine Willis, a London-based casting director, agrees. Watching true crime, "we like to confront our fears and think, 'how would I deal with that? How would I cope with that?' And I often get to the end of one of these stories and think, 'Well, I'd be sitting under a table, weeping'," she says, with a chuckle. Willis cast 10 episodes of Investigation Discovery's Obsessed: Dark Desires and says she's been in casting for about 15 years. She's moved between film, theatre and TV but understands the addictive nature of true crime that doesn't aim for the lofty heights of HBO's The Jinx and the like. It's filled with performances that to me smack of overacting, but that Catherine consider necessarily extreme. "What I'm actually looking for is someone who commits the emotion and who, in the moment when you look at their face, makes you fear for them."

Shannon, centre, as Kinzie Noordman in a stock photo-primed "mates laughing at school" scenario

Watching Hiding in Plain Sight, a Dark Desires episode listed as one Catherine worked on, I can't be so sure that always works. One scene features a fake-pregnant actress sitting on the floor, pointing a shotgun at her open bedroom door, half-expecting her stalker to walk in. She then falls asleep with the gun in her hand, before waking with a wide-eyed start and aiming her weapon at her ringing mobile phone, with which the stalker's been harassing her. There's none of the slow, "low-key" drama that Catherine says has become the norm elsewhere on TV, on The Fall or Nordic noir successes like The Bridge. But hysteria and all, I still watch the entire Dark Desires episode. And I've definitely watched other late-night true crime, slumped on the sofa with family.

The slightly overblown storylines hit the same emotional places as more recent, slickly produced programs, often leaving me feeling jumpy after watching more than two episodes in one sitting. According to criminology professor Scott Bonn, that's a natural reaction. "The public is drawn to true crime," he wrote in a piece for Time earlier this year, "because it triggers the most basic and powerful emotion in all of us – fear. As a source of popular culture entertainment, it allow us to experience fear and horror in a controlled environment where the threat is exciting but not real."

Sometimes that giddy shot of adrenaline makes us react in ways that feel totally inappropriate. Actress Maggie Borlando played Amy Locust, Bullwinkle's close friend and the last person to see her alive, and keeps laughing during our conversation. She's never met the real Amy, but like Shannon and Catherine, giggles when talking about watching back footage of the real people from the case recounting their stories. "It's definitely strange. With I Killed My BFF, say, I laugh with you about it now because, somehow, it's darkly funny. But really, that must be terrible for Amy to recount now."

Surely it is. True crime TV that moves this far away from documentary, and feels almost like pantomime, is great for keeping insomniacs entertained but swings death like a blunt instrument. Now that The People Vs. OJ Simpson's started on BBC 2, we may see that dissonance play out with a bigger audience as a grisly 1990s death connects to current reality TV celebrities. Khloe Kardashian, whose father fought OJ's case, has already started fact-checking the series, while OJ's in prison for another crime altogether. "The scariest part of this is that there are real people out there," as Mann says. "It's extremely dark."

@tnm___

More death-related stuff on VICE:

What Does Our Obsession With True Crime Podcasts Say About Us?

The Men Making Money Off the Art and Personal Effects of Rapists and Serial Killers

Haunting Photos of London Murder Scenes

Human performers during a rehearsal for 'Beyond the Fence.' Photo by Robert Workman

In 1992, as personal computers were beginning to reshape everyday life, Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka wrote that computing could never overshadow human achievement, because of one missing quality: creativity. "A computer isn't creative on its own because it is programmed to behave in a predictable way," he wrote in Fortune. "Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. Computers simply cannot do that."

But new projects are challenging the question of computer creativity—like Beyond the Fence, the world's first computer-generated musical, which opens at the Arts Theater in London today.

"From the beginning, it was an experiment to see how much you could get a computer to do," said Benjamin Till, who came up with the idea. Till is a composer by trade, probably best known for creating a musical rendition of his own wedding to writer and actor Nathan Taylor. For this project, Till and a team of researchers from around the world designed a series of algorithms to create the "magic formula" for a hit musical. Each part of the production—the premise, the narrative, the lyrics, the score, and even the size of the cast—was determined by a computer system. If it's a hit, it'll be the musical theater equivalent of passing the Turing Test.

"There is not a single song in this show, not a single moment, that wasn't at some point inspired by or written by a computer," said Till. Altogether, computers fully determined the premise and generated 25 percent of the music and lyrics.

The experiment challenges the categorical divide between "science" and "art," and the belief that what makes humans human is, at its heart, creativity. Computers can be programmed to do all sorts of things, but algorithms can't create the X factor—that piece of art that resonates with us emotionally, on a human level. If a computer can write a musical, or write a storyline that moves us, then what is it that separates man from machine?

Computer music researcher Nick Collins introduces Benjamin Till to "Android Lloyd Webber," the algorithmic composition software he created to generate lead sheets for Beyond the Fence

The question is relevant to a growing field of "computer music" researchers, who study the constellation of music composition, performance, orchestration, engineering, computing, signal processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, data analysis, and the general question of how technology can be used to further artistic pursuits. Ge Wang, a professor of music and computer science at Stanford University, says an experiment like Beyond the Fence is interesting because it tests the boundary between what can be made only by humans and what can be outsourced to machines.

"These things do make you wonder about the role between human creativity and machine creativity," said Wang. "I mean, machine creativity—what does that mean?"

In a technical sense, there is no such thing: Computers aren't exactly imaginative, and they don't create things on their own volition. They are, however, extremely good at replication and creating things in a particular artistic style. As early as the 1950s, computers could follow simple algorithms to compose a musical score; by the 1990s, computers could learn to paint in the style of Picasso or compose music that sounded distinctly like Bach.

"The history of music composition by computers goes back almost as far as computing itself," said Roger B. Dannenberg, a professor of computer science, art, and music at Carnegie Mellon University. "Machine learning is evolving very rapidly, and there's been a lot of recent work on applying techniques of machine learning to areas like music."

Take, for example, Spotify's discovery algorithms. The machine can't judge the artistic merit of a song, but it can use data to predict which songs you'll enjoy. Computers aren't emotional, but for years, they've been able to guess at the things that will move us, using data and replication. Part of starting a new artistic project is sourcing inspiration, and what is inspiration if not data?

Maria Teresa Llano, Benjamin Till, and Nathan Taylor, using the "What-If Machine" to generate the show's premise

Data-mining was the first, and perhaps most important, step in building Beyond the Fence. Statisticians at Cambridge University designed an algorithm to sort through nearly 2,000 musicals to find patterns that separated the hits from the flops. (It constitutes the largest study of data on musical theater in the world.) What they found was that, based on the statistical analysis, their best shot at a hit musical should take place in Europe in the 1980s, feature a female protagonist, and involve a war conflict. There had to be a high-energy musical number at the top of each act, a death halfway through the second act, a strong comedy number. They used a "What-If Machine"—a computer system that spat out various premises, designed by a team at Goldsmiths, University of London—to complete the parameters for the plot. Afterward, Till said the team just had to "fill in the dots."

Giving machines license to create these parameters freed up the team to focus on the emotional material, like the dialogue ("there is not yet a single computer program that can write dialogue," said Till). A machine listening analysis rendered thousands of bars of music, and a poetry generator created lyrics—most of them very, very bad—that the team sorted through to find phrases that might work. Machines did the churning, but it was human curation at the helm.

The Cloud Lyricist, a poetry generator used to compose lyrics for 'Beyond the Fence'

Till wrote the first draft of Beyond the Fence in a few weeks, and they finished the entire show in four months. For comparison, he spent over a year just researching and writing the first draft of previous musicals. And while Till said there was something slightly uncomfortable about surrendering a key part of the creative process to an algorithm, Wang points out that the process played to both the strengths of people and computers.

"Machines are good at sorting through data; people are good in a curatorial role," said Wang. "It's not like someone wrote a program and pressed a button and out came the score and script for the musical," said Wang. "There's a lot of human decision-making." (Till, for his part, said the symbiosis was reassuring: "If I'd have done this project and suddenly realized in ten years time I'd be completely out of a job, then that would be a terrifying thing.")

Beyond the Fence officially opens tonight, and throughout the show's preview week, Till says he didn't hear much conversation about the computer-generated aspects of the show. "People seem to be watching it without having that discussion, which is extraordinary," he said. "Instead, people are talking about the plot, as you'd expect ."

And that's exactly the point: It's not a robot's vision of musical theater. It's musical theater enhanced by technology.

"The source of material may be very different from a normal musical, but it still feels like our show, rather than something created by the computers."

Beyonce the Fence will play at the Arts Theater in London's West End until March 5. Get tickets here.

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Shia Labeouf—a man quite regularly accused of pretension—with a bag on his head, for art. Photo by Siebbi via

I've always had an aversion to pretension. I think most of us do. No one wants to be viewed as pretentious, and a quick Twitter search shows that the word is used roughly once a minute to call people out for everything from enjoying soy lattes to owning a fancy lamp. Calling someone or something "pretentious," it seems, has become the easiest way to police somebody else's taste.

Enter Dan Fox and his book, Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, which blends pop culture with high art, philosophy with rap lyrics, and Stanislavski's system with George Clooney. It not only gets to the heart of where pretentiousness comes from and why we all hate it so much, but it also suggests that it's a crucially important cog in the great wheel of progression.

I had a chat with him about all that.

VICE: Let's start with an easy one. What is pretentiousness?
Dan Fox: The Oxford dictionary definition is "attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc. than is actually possessed." But in popular usage, it can be taken to mean "affected," or "arty," "snobbish," "conceited," "exaggerated," "ostentatious"—none of which necessarily mean the same thing. You'll find it applied to a surprisingly disparate range of things. No one can really quite agree on what it means.

But you're in pretentiousness's corner?
The moment you start unpicking why people use the term as an insult, you realize that it says more about the accuser than the accused. It's a false note of objective judgment that affirms the accuser's supposed "authenticity" or "ordinariness" against someone else's fakery. People use it as a way of shutting down things they don't understand, or which differ from their idea of what art, culture, or other people "should" be. Pretension is often a sign of a curious mind. And what, really, is wrong with taking an interest in ideas or things around you? Is it pretentious to show enthusiasm, to have an enquiring attitude? You'll never lead an interesting life if you spend your time policing yourself or other people out of curiosity for the world.

You argue in your book that it's taken a social role. Can you explain that a bit?
It's used as a way to police class status—to stop people getting ideas above their station, from doing something not usually associated with their class background. Pretension is often assumed to be someone's deliberate attempt to pull a fast one, to consciously be a poseur, a con-artist, a faker, and yet in so many instances, what one person regards as pretentious is another person's genuine enthusiasm or way of expressing themselves. It's often much more innocent than is assumed.

So why is it so common for us to dislike people we think of as pretentious?
We have a profound distrust, yet fascination, with people not being who they say they are. You can find this way back in classical mythology, and stories about shape-shifting gods or changelings. You can see it in the ways we both love and hate actors and theater. Also, in the West, since the Enlightenment, we've grown to believe in the primacy of authenticity as a value to aspire to, as something that's deeply connected to our understanding of ourselves as democratic individuals. To be pretentious is seen to shun that somehow.

Right. But I get pissed off about some pretentious people—I admit it. I'm not perfect. I see them as dilettantes and fakes. What's that about?
It's about the authority we give to professionals or to people with educational qualifications. In the arts, dabbling, being an amateur, can often be more productive than following the rules and orthodoxies that are drummed into the professional. The dilettante often does not know the "correct" way to do something, and so can sometimes be better placed to happen upon an innovative way of doing something that the professional, in their fixed way of thinking, wouldn't. That said, you probably wouldn't want to be an open heart surgery patient being operated on by a dilettante.

A dilettante is also someone self-taught, an autodidact, which is interesting to think about in a field such as pop music, for instance: The entire history of pop music is one that's been shaped and innovated by amateurs, by people teaching themselves music in their bedrooms or in pub backrooms—not in music conservatoires.

I'm feeling I'm going to have to adjust the way I look at things. Let's keep with the pop music theme. Kanye West. He's probably a genius, but then he also does seem a bit affected.
I'm not sure it's a case of premeditated behavior, as if Kanye is sat in the studio thinking, "Today, I'm going to make a pretentious song." On the contrary: He's making the music he wants to make. The issue is that pretension is in the eye of the beholder. In pop music, there's often an association of a certain sound or way of performing that's taken to be "authentic"—for example, the pained white man singer-songwriter, emoting the truth of his heartbreak in a croaky voice over an acoustic guitar. But that itself is as much an act, as much a pretense, as Kanye making a concept album that might seem overblown, but is doing something musically far more interesting.

I've been listening to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly recently. Is a white, middle-class English guy into a rap album about systematic American racism pretentious? Am I overthinking this?
Well, what do you think would be sincere for you to listen to? Mumford & Sons? God help you if that's the case.

I can confirm that it's not.
I can't see why listening to an album about another person's experience of the world that's different to your own is insincere. For instance, a whole generation of black American techno producers in 1980s Detroit were influenced by Kraftwerk, four white guys from Dusseldorf with classical music training, making music about technology in postwar Europe. So too was Afrika Bambaataa in early 1980s New York, who sampled Kraftwerk's "Trans Europe Express" for his track "Planet Rock." Would you describe their interest in Kraftwerk as "insincere"?

Related: Watch The first episode of 'Gaycation,' a show on VICE's new American TV network VICELAND. In this episode, hosts Ellen Page and Ian Daniel explore LGBTQ culture in Japan.

No, because these guys have been given the legitimacy of making good art. But I get what you've been saying.
One thought experiment I enjoy doing is taking a massively popular, best-selling album or film and trying to describe it without naming the artist or title, and see if it sounds pretentious.

Hit me.
For instance: a concept album about an imaginary Edwardian military band, featuring songs written in a number of styles ranging from psychedelic rock, through Indian classical music, to European avant-garde composition, and vaudeville. Its cover features Karl Marx, Carl Jung, Marlene Dietrich, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

I think I know this one.
That's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, an album that sounds remarkably pretentious when you remove the band name, when you take away the associations we have with that name—of global popularity, of a celebrated British export, of a high point in 1960s pop culture.

Context is everything, then.
Pretentiousness is a driving force in art, because it entails risk—the risk of over-stretching your ability, of perhaps falling flat on your face. But if you played it safe all the time, you'd never get anywhere interesting.

Would you rather be perceived to be pretentious, while actually being authentic, or be perceived to be authentic, while actually being pretentious?
My interest in things such as "arty" black and white films with subtitles, weird music, strange books, modern art, and so on has always felt genuine to me. I liked them because they showed me other ways of seeing the world, possible paths to leading an interesting life outside the small town I grew up in. It was never an affectation, yet in some people's eyes it would probably be seen to be pretentious. But those are my interests. It's what I enjoy doing. I'm perfectly happy to be perceived to be pretentious if that's the case. After nearly 20 years working in the contemporary art field, I'm not expecting to receive from the National Authenticity Board a certificate of merit for not being a pretentious wanker anytime soon.

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When we last spoke with Arnold Frolics about his dizzying nude photography a couple of years ago, we were smitten with the meditative, almost subconscious way he approaches his work. Naturally we were stoked when he sent us what he's been working on for the last couple of years and saw how he's been scaling up his approach to mixing nakedness and skewed perspectives.

You can see more of Arnold's work here.

Images courtesy ofAbou Bakar Sidibé, Moritz Siebert, and Estephan Wagner

Of the many directors who presented films at the Berlin Film Festival this month, Abou Bakar Sidibé's route into filmmaking is surely the most remarkable. A Malian refugee trying to get to Spain, but stuck in Northern Africa for nearly a year, Sidebé had not even thought about creating movies when he was handed a small consumer camera by two filmmakers. The duo, Moritz Siebert and Estephan Wagner, wanted to make a full-length feature about refugees traveling to Europe, but wanted it to be told on the subject's terms.

"When I was given a camera, I thought it was a joke," Sidibé says. At the time, he was one of approximately 1,000 men, mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa, living rough on Morocco's Mount Gurugu, a mountain that overlooks Melilla, a Spanish city on the African mainland. From the peak of the mountain, the lights of Melilla can be seen, but they are unreachable—protected by razor-wire fences and border guards armed with pepper spray, and truncheons. Nonetheless, being one of the few land borders into the European Union makes the enclave an enticing entry point for many African refugees.

Siebert and Wagner had a hunch. By giving a refugee a camera and finally letting the life of migrants be documented by migrants themselves, they would get a different perspective on life on Mount Gurugu. The result is the remarkable Les Sauteurs (Those Who Jump), which had its world premiere at the Forum section of the Berlin Film Festival, and will screen in North America at the True/False Festival in Columbia, Missouri, in March.

Over the course of three months after he was given the camera, Sidibé, with the occasional help of his friends, filmed what was happening around him on Mount Gurugu. He filmed himself collecting rainwater to wash, he filmed men from the Ivory Coast taking on Malian men in a soccer game, he filmed what happens to men who break unwritten rules like informing the local police about the refugees' activities. (There is a remarkable lack of women in his footage.)

Mostly, the documentary looks at how Sidebé and his friends exist on Mount Gurugu, how they live in between their attempts to jump the wall dividing Morocco and Europe. The filmmakers aim to share a slice-of-life portrait of the area, rather than impose a narrative. Indeed, much of the time, the refugees are living in a state of boredom, though the doc itself is never boring. We're provided an arc by witnessing Sidebé transform from a barely capable cameraman to a filmmaker who frames his images. We also see the protagonist planning his escape to Europe, a gambit that involves trying to cross the border with as many men possible, in the hope that some may get through. When Sidebé finally manages to cross the wall, the film reaches a natural conclusion.

Now 30, Sidibé is currently in Germany seeking papers, though Europe isn't what he expected. "Europe is not the same as we see on television and the media," he tells me at a screening of the film. "When you arrive, you see the true reality of Europe, and I think it's not as good as it's made out."

For more about the documentary, I spoke with Siebert and Wagner about their motivations behind the project and the oddity of editing someone else's deeply personal footage.

VICE: Why did you want to make this film and put a camera in the hands of Sidibé?
Estephan Wagner: We have been interested in making this film for a long time, partly, in my case, because of my personal background. I come from Chile, but I have a German father who left when I was small, but he also left a passport behind, which made it possible for me to be here. I've always felt this—it's not a guilt really—but a sense of injustice, that some people are lucky enough to have this piece of paper, while others don't. It's not that you're a better person.

Before making this film, we have both been involved—on a personal level and as filmmakers—with migration and made different works surrounding this theme. Then in 2014, more and more, we started to read about these mass "jump" attempts, where sometimes a thousand people try to storm the fence in these big groups, in order that some may pass. We wondered: How can we go beyond whatever has been done so far about it?

How did you meet Sidibé?
Moritz Siebert: We found a journalist who lives and works in Melilla. For years, he's covered the refugee situation. We contacted him, and said, "Listen, we have a project. We want to give away a camera to a protagonist, can you help us?" He knew the people from the Mali community living in Mount Gurugu, including Sidibé, who had already been there for 14 months when we arrived.

Playing devils advocate, do you think it matters that you had an agenda from the start? This is a film made to prove something, rather than being objective.
Siebert: In a way, we had an agenda. That agenda had to do with a point of view. But we don't live in Melilla, we don't live on Gurugu, and we didn't hire a cameraman who made images for us. We were far away, we were in Copenhagen and Berlin. Sidibé could completely do what he wanted, or not do anything. Of course, in the editing, we took over again. During the filming, though, it's not like we could point and say, "Shoot this or that."

Did you ever give Sidibe prompts of what you wanted to see in his footage?
Siebert: We tried that in the beginning. We wrote out a list of scenes, which, from our research, we thought would be great in the film. A couple of things Sidibé did shoot, but most of what was on the list he couldn't be bothered with, and he filmed a lot of other stuff instead. That was a process for us, realizing that what he films is what he's interested in. It's so much better than what we thought and what our agenda was. But, yes, on a conceptual level, we had an agenda. But I think that is OK. I'm not afraid of that.

Wagner: That was part of the whole idea, the concept of the film, to say, "We are not just giving him the camera for an aesthetic reason, or to make it easier for people to identify," or whatever. We took the choice to give up responsibility, create power, and pass it over to him so he would have the chance to talk to us.

Can you tell me more about Sidibé's voiceovers in the film?
Siebert: We did several interviews with him, from a few days after he had jumped , to when he was in Madrid, and several interviews here in Germany that we combined with his diaries. He had been writing his story down. It wasn't approached like a journalist or filmmaker. We didn't ask what do need to explain for the audience to understand what is happening. We wanted much more interior, insightful voiceovers. Sidibé obviously knew his story best and also, we used his turns of phrase on the voiceover so he could shape it in the way that he felt was right.

Also, I think, giving this distance gives the possibility for reflection and, therefore, the possibility to shape a different image of the migrant. When we talk about refugees, we are typically bombarded with this pitiful image of the poor man who needs our care, but we wanted to focus on the strength of people in this situation—not from a perspective of pity.

You had to pay Sidibé to film, correct? In the voiceover heard in the film, he says if he weren't paid, he would have sold the camera.
Siebert: That, for example, was important for us to keep in the final cut. It shows our distrust in the protagonist at the time. We didn't know if he was going to sell the camera. We didn't know if he was going to film at all. We didn't know him before. The relationship built up during the process. So it was important to show it was an economic relationship at the beginning.

Documentaries are traditionally about seeking objective truth. Then in recent years, with the rise of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, documentaries have become more subjective and are made for entertainment. Where do you see Those Who Jump in that context?
Wagner: We neither believe that we have the truth, or that the film does, nor do we want to see this film as 80 minutes of pure entertainment. This is an opportunity to try and open up a dialogue, where all too often we talk about something and we don't listen. So here, there is a chance to listen to somebody who talks to us, not in an activist tone, but very much in a human tone.

For more on 'Those Who Jump,' visit the film's website here.

Follow Kaleem on Twitter.

Another weekend, another set of scuffles over British identity. On Saturday afternoon, far-right group the North West Infidels landed in Liverpool to exercise their "democratic rights to freedom of expression, speech, movement and assembly". In this case, that meant meeting at the Crown Hotel, not far from Liverpool's Lime Street train station, and encountering by a counter-protest before they'd even started marching.

Police quickly surrounded the front of the pub, to keep back the growing group of anti-fascists and passersby as they escorted the Infidels to their congregation point in the city centre. By the time the fascists had met up with another of their group on the steps of St George's Hall, things kicked off. Police had to pen in the far-right group while members of the counter-protest and Infidels reportedly pelted each other with loose missiles.

Counter-protesters stood against the police barricade, chanting "Nazi scum" while bottles, firecrackers and other projectiles flew from both sides. Altogether, Merseyside police made 34 arrests, according to the BBC, and ended the afternoon with one of their officers concussed when hit by an object thrown in his direction. Here's what we saw.

All photos by the author

Michael, my husband, is a strapping six-foot-four dream with strong German-Irish-Swedish blood by way of the Midwest. There are Ivy-leaguers in his family. His grandfather lived to be 90. His sperm is liquid gold.

Valentina and Alissa, a queer lady-couple who are some of our dearest friends, had spent two and a half years and $20,000 trying to get Alissa pregnant with no success. Working with anonymous donors at sperm banks in Oakland, they'd return for more juice only to find that their carefully-considered donor was sold out.

At our wedding this past summer, they formally asked my groom if he'd donate his seed, to which he enthusiastically agreed. A few months and two flights from Berlin later, we arrived in the Bay in order to provide as much of Michael's sperm as was humanly possible to generate in two weeks. This meant that I would be sex-starved and Michael would be chafed, small compromises to make in the name of life-making.

The act itself was simple biological mechanics: Michael would come in a cup, hand it over, and Alissa and Valentina would retreat to their bedroom for an attempted insemination via a needle-less syringe. He'd also make several deposits at California Cryobank, leaving behind frozen sperm for future attempts or someday-siblings.

Then there was the paperwork. We signed and notarized contracts stipulating we wouldn't sue them for custody and they wouldn't sue us for child support. Standard. They weren't going to pay for the sperm—that seemed unethical and plus they didn't offer—but they would cover the costs of flights, housing, car rental, doctors appointments, therapy, and separate legal counsel. And before Michael could gift his junk, he would have to go through all kinds of genetic testing and physicals and blood work and poking and prodding—all required by the sperm bank in order to rid themselves of liability.

The first night we roasted a chicken and talked again through our intentions and anxieties. Valentina and Alissa assured us that they wanted us to be present in the child's life—or as present as we could be while living in Europe. We'd be like uncles, a responsibility we looked forward to and expected to excel at. At worst, Michael worried that meeting his offspring could result in his own biological clock going off. At worst, I worried that Michael's mom wouldn't be able to stop herself from sending knitted booties, a possible overstepping of grandma-donor-boundaries.

On Saturday, I went along to what's been described as the largest anti-nuclear demonstration in a generation, ahead of this year's expected vote to renew the Trident weapons system. Tens of thousands of us drifted in dregs and clumps from Marble Arch to Trafalgar Square in London, and the message throughout was clear: instead of spending vast sums of money to turn the seas to ash and the skies to radioactive fire, we should put that money towards the NHS, public transport, and education instead.

This is a fairly sensible suggestion, and at the same time deeply weird. Because Trident is not, as was claimed, just another example of Tory hypocrisy, or an enormous vanity project, or a hidden subsidy to the arms industry. Trident is the end of the fucking world. The more of these weapons there are, and the longer they're kept around, the less chance any of us have of making it out alive. Say Russia decides to invade a Britain that doesn't have a nuclear deterrent: the worst-case scenario is a lifetime under the brutal and crushing rule of someone called Boris, but not the one we'd expected all those years ago. If they try to invade a Britain with its missiles intact, we'll all be killed.

The rockets contain the potential death of every single person on the planet, packed tight into metal tubes and sent off to prowl through the oceans. Usually, in films and fairytales, when the heroes come across some ancient sarcophagus housing an evil power that could destroy the entire world, they take what should be the obvious step of immediately destroying it. They don't have to draw up a risks-benefits analysis and present it to a parliamentary committee. They don't have to explain, in a measured and sensible tone, why wiping out all life would probably, on balance, be a bad thing.

But the world we live in is often stupider than fiction: keeping the deadly relic lying around isn't just an honestly expressed opinion – it's the dominant political orthodoxy. Saturday's protesters had to come up with the pragmatic case against nuclear winter. So this is what they ended up with: please don't kill us and everyone we love; it'll be too expensive.

But what can ordinary people do when faced with the sheer terror of the nuclear bomb? The bomb stands outside history or society – it's the condition of our extinction, a power too monstrous to fully comprehend, and has been put in the hands of a few preening public schoolboys. Who would win in a fight between tens of thousands of normal, fragile bodies, and one Trident missile? If it came down to it, all the people packed in to Trafalgar Square, with their hopeful banners and their shouts of "wanker!" whenever anyone mentioned George Osborne, would be turned into a few wispy trails of radioactive smoke in the flash of an instant. What about a hundred thousand people? A million?

The thing about the atomic bomb is that the more of you there are to fight it, the more crushingly you lose. How do you organise a march against the violent death of every living thing? The answer is, of course, that you can't. There's a fury and a madness that comes over people who are really fighting for their lives and the lives of their families. That fury was not on display this Saturday; death has been hanging over us for too long. A few speakers made a game attempt to give some sense of the stakes: the sheer carnage that would come out of even one nuclear explosion, the bodies, the famine, the living envying the dead. But really, it was just another slow, strolling demonstration through central London on a Saturday afternoon.

We gathered around Nelson's Column, a monumental middle finger of British imperialism, the intercontinental ballistic missile of the nineteenth century, and clapped for Jeremy Corbyn. Some people shouted for free education or council houses or for the entire Tory cabinet to resign. (When the right wing assembles to protest, there's usually one thing in particular they want to change, and they usually get it. The left, standing for all the abandoned innocents of history, has to oppose everything.)

There were big creepy puppets and "v for vendetta" masks, whistles and bongos, men dressed like Gandalf riding around on heavily customised bicycles, Trotskyites with messenger bags hawking the Socialist Worker, and halfway down Park Lane we stopped briefly to watch an impromptu folk gig, as if acoustic guitars and sincerity could fight back against the primordial evil of nuclear fission.

The Black Bloc contingent, the hooded anarchists who can usually be relied upon to inject some sense of urgency into the proceedings, were mostly up in Liverpool, trying to fight back a group of right-wing extremists calling themselves the North-West Infidels. Saving the world from total annihilation might seem to be a more important cause than throwing bricks at some wretched, pug-faced Nazis, but at least the fascists have a reasonable chance of being defeated. The nuclear bomb, not so much.

Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP (in red) and Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton, smiling beside her

The demonstration was vast, and it hosted the leaders of three major political parties and the sitting MP for another. Nicola Sturgeon, the head of government of the UK's second-largest constituent country, marched at the head of the protest. This was not, as all the assembled worthies kept pointing out, a fringe movement. But as much hope as they might have had for victory, everyone seemed to know that the cause was lost. If Trident renewal comes to a Parliamentary vote, it'll pass. The Conservatives have an absolute majority, and a big chunk of Corbyn's Labour party are in love with easeful death, to the extent that they reacted with horror when he said that as Prime Minister he'd refuse to push the big red button marked 'exterminate the brutes.'

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn addressing the crowd in Trafalgar Square

This is mad, but the atomic bomb is madness itself, and we're living in the world that the atomic bomb built. So we tried to be sensible: we gathered in our thousands to make the pragmatic case against being murdered as we sleep, even though being sensible in the face of the catastrophe has never done much good. As Corbyn spoke, clouds pulled away from the sky and it gleamed with the approaching dusk. And then everyone went home.

@sam_kriss / @cbethell_photo