19/12/2025

LYFE FRIDAY | DEC 19, 2025

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Giving voice to invisible folk

Fallout TV series to explore New Vegas lore in second season GET ready to head back to the wasteland of the Mojave Desert. Fallout star Walton Goggins is teasing that the show’s second season will heavily channel the spirit of Fallout: New Vegas , the video game’s beloved spin-off. Goggins, who plays the radiation-mutated gunslinger the Ghoul, revealed that the show’s creative team plans to tap into the classic video game by introducing a fresh batch of characters, monsters and storylines when it arrives on Amazon Prime Video. “It’s (season 2) honouring the game and the threats that they (the game creators) bring into this experience,” said Goggins. However, the team is not just copying the game’s blueprint. For writer and co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet, who is known for co-writing the screenplay for Marvel Studios’ Captain Marvel , it was important to “get it right” when it came to taking elements from the game. She replayed Fallout: New Vegas to find fun details to include for seasoned gamers. “It’s funny when you play, just random details like, ‘Oh, it would be fun to use this particular weapon or to encounter this particular creature’,” she said. However, Robertson-Dworet chose not to bring in too many elements from the game into the series. “We wanna always make sure that we’re holding the hands of non-gamers and not overwhelming them with too much lore and too much canon and too much new tech,” she said. This approach impressed the cast, including co-star Frances Turner who plays Barb Howard, Cooper’s wife and a high-ranking executive for a nefarious megacorporation called Vault-Tec. “I really look at it (the storyline) as a mystery,”Turner said. The second season of Fallout continues in the wasteland of post-nuclear America. The Ghoul and Lucy MacLean, an optimistic Vault dweller played by actor Ella Purnell, continue searching for Lucy’s father Hank MacLean, played by Kyle MacLachlan. Meanwhile, Maximus, a knight of the Brotherhood of Steel, played by Aaron Moten, must navigate a new set of obstacles within his faction.

population and the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. “I saw big potential in speaking about a lot of things that contemporary India is shying away from showing in mainstream spaces, especially the marginalised community people, who are often looked at only in statistics,” Neeraj said. Depicting the social issues and the discrimination the two friends face made the project personal for Neeraj, who included his own experiences of growing up as a Dalit in the film. “I masqueraded myself as an upper caste member for a very long time and it created a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety inside me. I worked through that shame for a very long time and then put it behind me when I publicly came out with my identity,” Neeraj, 45, said. Ahead of filming, actors Ishaan Khatter (Shoaib) and Vishal Jethwa (Chandan) spent time in northern India’s Barabanki, with locals inviting them into their homes and sharing their meals. “This film, in many ways, is the story of millions of Shoaibs and millions of Chandans and that is what we try to stay true to,” Ishaan said. It was selected as India’s contender for best

A decade after making his feature film debut with acclaimed drama Masaan , Indian director Neeraj Ghaywan returns with a second movie that seeks to give a voice to people who feel invisible. Based on true events, Homebound tells the story of two childhood friends from a northern Indian village whose sights are set on police officer jobs they believe will improve their standing in the world. Shoaib, a Muslim, and Chandan, a Dalit, once called “untouchables”, are among the 2.5 million applicants competing for 3,500 jobs in the police. Their bond gets tested during the wait for the entrance exam results, as each weighs his prospects, under pressure to support their families. Inspired by Basharat Peer’s 2020 New York Times article Taking Amrit home , the film also looks at the plight of the country’s large migrant o India’s Oscar entry Homebound tells true story of hardships, hopes

The film is personal for Neeraj, including his experiences of growing up as a Dalit.

international feature film at the 98th Academy Awards – a country by country list that gets whittled down to the five Oscar nominees. Homebound , which is executive produced by Martin Scorsese, is streaming on Netflix. – Reuters

The series is based on the 1997 role playing video game developed by Interplay Productions, which eventually spawned nine main games in the Fallout franchise, including Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 , along with spin-offs such as Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3 . – Reuters The Alabama Solution finds ‘unlimited murder, mayhem’ in US prisons Director Neeraj (centre) and cast members Ishaan, Vishal, Janhvi Kapoor and producer Karan Johar pose during a photocall for the film Homebound at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. – ALL PICS FROM REUTERS

WHEN filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited an Alabama prison in 2019 to capture footage of a revival meeting, inmates began approaching them about the “terrible things” they said were taking place within its walls. Jarecki and Kaufman were soon told to stop filming, but their quest to find out more led to a six-year investigation into the US state’s prison system and the documentary The Alabama Solution . The film combines video secretly shot by inmates and interviews. It also follows Alabama mother Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers about the events leading to the death of her son Steven Davis, in prison. The film states that Alabama’s 14 prisons, which house around 20,000 inmates, are operating at nearly 200% of intended capacity, with a third of required staff and the highest drug overdose, murder and suicide rates in

the nation. The Alabama Department of Corrections did not reply to a request for comment. The US Department of Justice launched an investigation into Alabama’s prisons in 2016, deeming conditions “unconstitutional” and filing a federal lawsuit in 2020. “I think we felt what was sort of a sacred obligation. Once people are showing you these kinds of atrocities, you have a responsibility to not look away. “We could have had an unlimited amount of murder and mayhem. We could have shown corruption time and time again. We were trying to be judicious about how much the audience could handle, but also letting them know how serious it is,” Jarecki said in an interview. At the film’s centre are Robert Earl Council and Melvin Ray, leaders of a non-violent protest movement inside the prisons, who provide first-hand accounts of the events and their

living conditions. “You don’t have to agree with them on everything, but you do have to recognise that this is happening in our names. “Crime is important and taxes are important, and people have strong feelings about these things. They should understand and know what their money’s going toward. So I think we can learn a lot from these men who are sort of unlikely heroes,” said Jarecki. Streaming on HBO Max, The Alabama Solution has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics and received a Producers Guild Awards nomination. “It’s either the best time to put out a film like this because there’s the authoritarian slide happening in the world or it’s the worst because maybe nobody cares,” Jarecki said. It was important for viewers globally to see “another side of that equation .... especially if you’re allowing leaders to imprison more

Jarecki is known for directing the Emmy-winning documentary series The Jinx . people for their views, their thoughts or their religious observances”. “The question really is who we want to be as a society. If we believe that we need to have a safer environment, is this going to do it?”he said. – Reuters