分类： entertainment

Under the bright stadium lights of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, a sea of glowing yellow crowns bobbed in unison, thousands of voices rising in synchronized Korean chants that rolled through the near-capacity venue. When the iconic opening synth riffs of *Fantastic Baby* cut through the air, a roar of explosive energy erupted across the crowd: Big Bang, the trailblazing South Korean group that redefined K-pop’s global potential, was finally back.

Fourteen years after the band’s first major European tour, and a tumultuous decade marked by mandatory military service, member departures and high-profile legal scandals, the trio of G-Dragon, Taeyang and Daesung touched down in London Saturday as part of their 20th anniversary *XX: Cosmos* World Tour. For everyone in attendance, the night was far more than a standard concert stop—it was a landmark homecoming, and a masterclass in K-pop’s decades-long rise to global domination.

Emerging on stage in their signature high-fashion, glittering ensembles, the group set a celebratory, grounded tone from the first note. Unlike their 2012 European debut at London’s Wembley Arena, which was fueled by a hungry drive to prove K-pop could win over Western audiences and promote a new record, this reunion tour was crafted entirely for their decades-long dedicated fandom, nicknamed VIPs. The band reworked classic hits and remixed fan favorites to accommodate their two absent former members, leaning into pyrotechnics, their iconic live backing band and unmatchable stage presence instead of over-the-top elaborate staging. The result was a playful, heartfelt night that balanced nostalgia with fresh energy.

Long before BTS sold out Wembley Stadium and Blackpink headlined London’s Hyde Park, Big Bang blazed the trail for K-pop’s global crossover. As music industry scholars and fans alike emphasize, this group was the first to prove Korean pop could find massive, sustained success far beyond East Asia’s borders.

Their pioneering legacy stretches back more than 15 years: in 2011, they made history as the first K-pop act to win a major Western music award, taking home the MTV Europe Music Awards’ inaugural Worldwide Act prize. When they played their first UK show at Wembley Arena in 2012, the first date sold out in less than two hours, prompting organizers to add a second. By 2016, Forbes estimated the group had earned $44 million over the previous year, earning them a spot on the outlet’s Celebrity 100 List—the first K-pop act ever to receive the honor.

“There is no doubt Big Bang made a huge contribution to opening the global K-pop market,” explained Dr Haekyung Um, senior lecturer in music at the University of Liverpool. “Earlier acts found popularity within Asian markets, but Big Bang were true international stars. I would call them the Kings of K-pop, just as we call Michael Jackson the King of Pop. Their success was the first real proof that K-pop could fill stadiums across the Western world.”

Before Big Bang rose to fame, K-pop groups were widely dismissed as heavily manufactured products of entertainment agencies. The group shattered that stereotype: members wrote and produced their own music, cultivated their own iconic streetwear-inspired aesthetic, and blended a radical range of genres from hip-hop and R&B to trot, South Korea’s traditional folk genre. This independent, genre-bending identity set them apart across Asia, and created the blueprint for the self-produced modern K-pop acts that dominate the industry today.

For fans, Big Bang is more than a band—they are the “idols’ idols,” the starting point for an entire global love of K-pop. “They were different because they didn’t follow the uniform K-pop cookie-cutter pretty boy phase,” said Sharon, a fan who traveled from Singapore to attend the show. “They leaned harder into hip-hop and stayed true to their sound. They are the absolute OGs for me.”

Beyond their musical innovation, Big Bang revolutionized fan culture in K-pop, creating a template that groups still follow today. The band’s iconic yellow crown-shaped lightstick, the “Bang Bong,” was the brainchild of leader G-Dragon, who pushed for a custom, distinct symbol for VIPs at a time when fans relied on generic glow sticks or plain colored balloons. “Big Bang helped modernize the physical side of fan engagement,” Um noted. The Bang Bong established the model for the custom-designed lightsticks that have become a core part of K-pop concert culture worldwide.

Outside the stadium, that fan-led energy spilled onto the streets, with attendees trading handmade gifts and photo cards—a ritual Big Bang helped popularize on Western arena tours. Volunteer fan organizing groups distributed 35,000 custom printed banners across the venue, coordinating a stadium-wide tribute where fans lifted the banners in unison during select songs.

Big Bang’s 20-year journey has been far from smooth, however. All able-bodied men in South Korea are required to complete mandatory military service, and the group’s members enlisted at separate times, forcing a years-long hiatus. That break was then extended by a series of devastating scandals that split the original five-member group. In 2017, original member T.O.P was convicted of marijuana use—an offense heavily criminalized and stigmatized in South Korea—and received a suspended prison sentence before departing the group permanently. In 2019, youngest member Seungri retired from the entertainment industry entirely amid the high-profile Burning Sun scandal, a police investigation into a Seoul nightclub that exposed a ring of sex trafficking, bribery and illicit filming. South Korea’s Supreme Court upheld an 18-month prison sentence for Seungri in 2022 on charges including prostitution mediation, overseas gambling and embezzlement.

While the trio did not openly address the departures of their former bandmates on stage, their absence was palpable for long-time fans—but for many attendees, the group’s perseverance through hardship only deepened their connection to the music. “Big Bang was my introduction to K-pop,” said Annie, who flew from New York to attend the show. “I love how they’ve moved through every obstacle—it gives me hope. After all these years apart, it’s amazing to have them back. They’re the OGs.”

The K-pop industry that Big Bang helped build is almost unrecognizable today, but their 20th anniversary return has drawn a striking multi-generational crowd, blending original second-generation K-pop fans who grew up with the group and young Gen Z listeners who were barely born when Big Bang debuted. Many new fans discovered the group through archival content circulating on TikTok and YouTube, turning decades-old music and performances into viral hits for a new audience.

Gemma, who traveled to London from Edinburgh with her daughter Casey, both wearing custom handmade Big Bang jackets, explained how she first discovered the group after seeing T.O.P in the hit series *Squid Game*, then fell down a rabbit hole of their discography. “I’ve converted so many of my friends to K-pop now,” she said. “It’s all about that unmatched Big Bang energy.”

For Korean diaspora fans, the concert carried an even deeper cultural resonance. “I got into Big Bang when their 2012 *Alive* EP came out, because they felt so groundbreaking,” said Kevin. “Before, a lot of Korean artists felt like they were just mimicking what was popular in the West, but Big Bang owned their unique identity completely. It’s so rare for a K-pop group to last 20 years, and they absolutely were the ones who made K-pop mainstream globally.”

This cross-generational appeal is no accident: YG Entertainment, Big Bang’s label, was an early adopter of digital platforms like YouTube, archiving all of the group’s content and building a lasting global fan base that has grown across two decades. “Nostalgia can be built around something people didn’t even experience live when it first happened,” Um explained. “It comes from shared digital memory, and that’s kept Big Bang’s fan base growing for 20 years.”

Though the band avoided direct discussion of their turbulent history on stage, the emotional weight of their two decades together peaked during the finale performance of *Still Life*. When T.O.P’s unmistakable baritone rang through the stadium via pre-recorded vocals, a visible wave of emotion washed over the crowd. During the encore, a visibly moved G-Dragon told the audience that the group never expected their music to leave such an enduring global mark, 14 years after their first London show. As fireworks lit up the North London night sky, the three members linked hands and bowed deeply—closing out a triumphant night for the group that changed modern K-pop forever.

Against all odds, a tiny-budget debut feature from one of India’s most remote regions has captured one of global cinema’s most prestigious honors, opening the door for underrepresented Indigenous storytelling on the world’s biggest stage.

*Angh*, the first feature film from 24-year-old Naga director Theja Rio, was filmed entirely in Konyak—a little-known tribal language spoken by fewer than 300,000 people in Nagaland, India’s mountainous northeastern frontier state that is home to less than two million residents overall. With nearly every cast member making their first ever on-screen appearance, the quiet, intimate drama claimed the Toronto International Film Festival’s Platform Prize, an award granted by a jury of industry peers to films with uniquely distinctive directorial voices, this September. Jury members highlighted Rio’s “refreshing perspective” and his sensitive portrayal of a world that has rarely, if ever, been centered in mainstream international cinema.

The unexpected victory also grants *Angh* a historic, unconventional path toward 2027 Academy Awards consideration. New Oscar rules allow winners of designated awards at six major international festivals to qualify for the International Feature Film category without needing to be selected as their country’s official entry—an opportunity that has pulled a work from a marginalized tribal community into a global conversation that has long excluded these types of narratives.

In an interview just 72 hours after his win, Rio admitted he still feels stunned by the reception. “There were a lot of good films in the competition, including work from far more seasoned directors,” he said. “My producers were confident we’d win. I wasn’t.” Before turning to filmmaking, the first-time director originally dreamed of becoming a rapper, drawing eclectic inspiration that ranges from *The Roots* frontman Black Thought to legendary Iranian arthouse director Abbas Kiarostami. For his debut, he chose to turn his camera toward the place and people he knows best.

Set in the early 1960s, just months before Nagaland formally attained statehood within India, *Angh* follows ageing hereditary village chief Anghba—leader of a Konyak community, where traditional chiefs are known as *Anghs*—and his curious young son, as sweeping social and religious change arrives at their doorstep. As Christianity spreads across the region, the pair remain among the last adherents of their community’s ancestral faith, until the arrival of an American missionary, played by Scottish actor Douglas Henshall, deepens the generational rift already growing between them: the father holds fast to inherited tradition, while his son is drawn to the new world on offer.

Rio drew the inspiration for the film from a work trip to Nagaland’s Mon District, the heart of Konyak country, where he was struck by the extraordinary coexistence of past and present in local communities. “It feels like you’ve jumped on a time machine,” he explained. “Within a single family, a grandfather might be a former headhunter with traditional facial tattoos, and two generations later, his grandson could play guitar in a rock band. The past and the present sort of coexist together.”

That era of rapid transition that forms the film’s backdrop was a turning point for Konyak society. For decades, Christianity had been reshaping not just religious belief, but deeply rooted customs, rituals and daily life. Dr B Amo Konyak, a leading scholar of Konyak culture, notes that many traditional practices were lost entirely, while others “survived in fragments” preserved in the memories of elders and family heirlooms, shifting from everyday life to formal cultural heritage. But he emphasizes that culture did not disappear—it adapted, as communities carried pieces of their tradition into new religious and social structures, altering meaning as they changed form.

It is exactly that nuance of transition that Rio set out to capture. “The past 50 or 60 years have brought extraordinary churn, widening the distance between generations,” Rio said. The film explores this rift through the quiet, loving bond between Anghba and his son, who “intimately love and care about each other very deeply, even as their worlds begin to pull apart.”

Film critic Siddhant Adlakha, who has praised *Angh* extensively, highlighted the film’s refusal to lean into simplistic tropes. “Progress and tradition can be nonlinear, even entwined, rather than strictly opposing forces,” he noted, praising the gentle ambiguity Rio brings to the story. While the film has not yet been released to wide audiences, its trailer hints at the immersive, atmospheric world Rio has built: mist-shrouded green mountain slopes, quiet paths winding through dense forests, faces lit by firelight in the dark. The landscape is not just a scenic backdrop; it is a small, tight-knit world held together by ritual and family, as outside forces press in from its edges.

Most notably, *Angh* upends the long history of outsider portrayals of Konyak and Naga communities. For centuries, outside observers from colonial explorers to foreign filmmakers have framed Konyak people as exotic curiosities, fixating on their traditional facial tattoos, historical headhunting practices and cultural artifacts while ignoring their full, complex humanity. Rio set out to reverse that gaze. “There have been several films and documentaries made about Nagaland, but these sort of films tend to follow the gaze of the explorer rather than the subject,” he explained. With *Angh*, he aimed to invite viewers to “step inside the shoes of these characters.”

That commitment to authenticity guided every step of production. Konyak cultural advisors consulted on dialogue, costume, and set design, nearly all local cast members were first-time performers from the community, and Rio and cinematographer Adam Pietkiewicz even made the deliberate choice to shoot on 16mm film. Drawing inspiration from 1950s and 1960s archival footage of missionaries and Naga communities, they sought to recreate the grainy, textured atmosphere of those mid-century images—while shifting the point of view from outsider observer to community insider. The choice created extraordinary logistical challenges: unlike digital film, 16mm could not be reviewed on set, so every four to five days, unprocessed reels had to be flown thousands of kilometers to Mumbai for development, leaving the crew shooting blind for days. Even smaller shoots went awry: during one night scene with Henshall, a vintage World War II Jeep that ran perfectly in rehearsal stalled as soon as cameras rolled, forcing the crew to capture the entire shot in a single take.

The unexpected success of *Angh* also highlights the growing diversity of contemporary Indian cinema, with more regional filmmakers from underrepresented parts of the country gaining international acclaim. Adlakha points to other northeastern Indian filmmakers such as Assam’s Rima Das and Meghalaya’s Dominic Sangma, whose work has expanded global understandings of what Indian cinema can be. Rio notes that Nagaland’s film industry remains “at a very nascent stage,” far from the resources and reach of established Indian filmmaking hubs like Mumbai. But he hopes his film’s win will shine a spotlight on the many untold stories waiting to be told from his home region.

For now, though, after the chaos of back-to-back interviews and cross-continental travel following his TIFF win, Rio just wants to return to normalcy: “I want to go back to Nagaland and play football with my friends.”

Long before Saddam Hussein’s brutal 24-year reign over Iraq came to a brutal end with the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the Iraqi dictator had already established an unusual hold on the country’s cultural output: he operated as a state-backed film producer, crafting on-screen narratives to cement his cult of personality and legitimize his authoritarian rule.

Within months of seizing the Iraqi presidency in 1979, production wrapped on Saddam’s first propaganda project: *The Long Days*, a biographical drama that cast his cousin in the lead role to glorify his participation in a 1959 failed assassination attempt against then-Prime Minister Abdul-Karim Qasim. The film framed Saddam as a fearless nationalist hero, even including a dramatic scene where a young Saddam cuts a bullet out of his own leg using a fire-sterilized razor blade. But this heroic depiction was later exposed as a fabrication: in his 2000 biography of Saddam, journalist Said Aburish—who once served as a consultant to Iraq’s Ministry of Information—dismissed the sequence as a massive exaggeration, citing Saddam’s own personal physician who confirmed the dictator only suffered a superficial wound from the attempt. Aburish also revealed that Saddam personally leveraged his connections through the journalist to hire British director Terence Young, famous for helming early James Bond classics *Dr. No* and *From Russia with Love*, to edit the propaganda production.

Saddam’s second major state-funded film arrived in 1983: *Clash of Loyalties*, a lavish big-budget historical epic centered on the 1920 Iraqi revolt against British colonial rule. The project was explicitly designed to tie Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath Party to the legacy of anti-colonial resistance, boosting his domestic credibility. The high budget attracted well-known British actor Oliver Reed, who took the role of a British intelligence officer. But Reed’s unruly behavior nearly got him deported mid-production: during an outing at a Baghdad restaurant, he sparked a public brawl after urinating into a wine bottle and ordering a waiter to deliver it to another table “with my compliments.” Co-producer Lateif Jorephani famously dubbed Saddam’s ambitious state film project “Bollywood on Tigris,” with plans to build a full state-run film industry that would produce at least six large-scale patriotic blockbusters targeted at international audiences.

This tight control extended far beyond feature films to all forms of domestic media. Before the 2003 invasion that toppled his regime, Iraq’s entire media ecosystem consisted of just five state-controlled newspapers, four radio stations, and three television channels—all of which operated as mouthpieces for Saddam’s government. Many Iraqis who grew up under this system carry vivid, uncomfortable memories of state-mandated propaganda woven into everyday entertainment. Malik, an interpreter who accompanied author Matthew Alford on a recent trip to Iraq, recalled being forced to sit through graphic *Lest We Forget* propaganda segments about the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War to watch the following half-hour of children’s cartoons, including *Tom and Jerry*.

The fall of Saddam’s regime triggered a seismic shift in Iraq’s media landscape. Within 12 months of the dictator’s ousting, roughly 80 new radio stations, 20 private television channels, and more than 200 independent newspapers and magazines launched across the country. While fewer than half of these early outlets survived their first year of operation, the old state media monopoly never returned. Today, Iraq boasts more than 100 television channels broadcasting in four languages: Arabic, Kurdish, Turkmen, and Syriac. Control of media has dispersed across the country’s fragmented centers of power: major political parties, influential religious institutions including Shia holy shrines, and numerous armed factions all operate their own independent media outlets.

During a visit to the annual Arbaeen pilgrimage in Karbala in August—an event that draws more than 20 million Shia Muslim worshippers annually, making it the world’s largest regular peaceful gathering—Alford gained behind-the-scenes access to the substantial media operations run by major Shia religious institutions. At the Al-Abbas Holy Shrine’s media department, reporters were shown an expansive, free digital archive containing feature films, documentaries, talk shows, and religious programming, including an Iraqi adaptation of the classic university quiz show format centered on Quranic studies. The shrine distributes this content for free online and via live broadcast, with more than 80 domestic and international television channels using its official Arbaeen pilgrimage coverage every year.

This post-2003 era of abundant media choice stands in stark contrast to the limited, state-controlled options of the Saddam era. But greater quantity of media outlets has not translated to greater press freedom or more accurate, independent reporting. As of 2024, Iraq ranks 162nd out of 180 countries on the global Press Freedom Index, placing it between Sudan and Turkey.

The most profound shift has been the dispersal of media power across competing factions, mirroring the broader fragmentation of political and military power in modern Iraq. Today, 10 Iran-aligned armed factions control an estimated 50,000 fighters across the country, and the central Iraqi government in Baghdad has struggled to bring these groups under formal state control—tensions that have escalated into open military action in recent months, with U.S. and Saudi forces striking faction targets inside Iraqi borders. Many of these armed groups now operate their own media outlets: for example, Al-Ahad TV is controlled by Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, one of the largest Iran-aligned armed factions.

Where Saddam once held an iron-clad monopoly over every narrative and image coming out of Iraq—even if he could not control the unruly behavior of British star Oliver Reed—his authoritarian system of state propaganda is gone for good. In its place, Iraq now hosts a crowded ecosystem of competing voices, from political parties and religious institutions to armed factions and independent journalists fighting for space. Yet even with this unprecedented media abundance, true press freedom remains out of reach for the country. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, written by Matthew Alford, a lecturer in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath.