The fourth edition of the talent discovery program “The Voice Kids” has reached the final stage, awaiting the “audience’s decision” for the winner of the new season’s title, among 3 promising talents who underwent intense training over a period of months with the program’s three coaches: Saudi Dalia Mubarak, Egyptian Rami Sabry, and Syrian Abdel Rahman Fawaz (Al-Shami).
Al-Sharq Al-Awsat confirmed that the episode was filmed at Olivewood Studios in the Jordanian capital, Amman, which witnessed the recording of all episodes of the new season, with multiple equipment to deal with the children participating in the program in a way that suits their needs, and families accompanying them to attend training and even cheering in the designated places before they go on stage.
The recording atmosphere witnessed a number of situations that brought the contestants together with their families backstage, with them taking breaks before going on stage in the area facing the recording studio, and returning shortly before going on stage, with places allocated to the contestants of each team.
The Lebanese artist Andrea Taya presented a season in which she was keen during the episodes to interact with the children and encourage them behind the scenes, and to stand by them and support them, especially when they left the program, as she motivated them with enthusiastic words that emphasized the importance of them reaching this crucial stage of the program.
The episode witnessed a huge “Second Chance” surprise, after the coaches decided to break the accepted rules of the game and inject new blood, while bringing back a talent excluded from each team, which ignited the atmosphere inside the studio and turned the calculations upside down, putting everyone before a breathtaking challenge in the final meters of the race for the title.
Behind the scenes, there was no traditional group competition, but rather a state of isolation and intense concentration. Each talent ascended to the stage individually and independently of the rest, in an atmosphere that was not devoid of anticipation until the last moments, while the program’s social media platforms began promoting the role of voting in deciding the title immediately after the episode ended.
Preparation for the penultimate episode was not only in the theater at the time of recording, but also outside it, as artist Dalia Mubarak preferred to break the psychological tension and dread by taking her team on a night camping trip under the stars. While Lama Qais snatched the team's ticket to qualify for the final, Sari Al-Salibi was able to win in the final confrontation with his teammates in the Al-Shami team, and Mohamed Adel from Rami Sabry's team also reached the finals, so that the intense competition between the trio was not only to win the title with the public's vote, but also for an educational scholarship worth 20 thousand dollars that was announced by "The Dream".
Announcing the contestants who will reach the final qualifier, the team’s coach was neutralized from among the jury members, so the other two members chose the brilliant talent for the final, amid interaction and enthusiasm from the audience in the theater, while the coaches praised the talent’s development during the program’s episodes, and their ability to present different singing colors during the journey.
Behind the scenes of the filming, the atmosphere was enthusiastic between musicians preparing to play “Live” behind the young talents, and film cameras taking advantage of the short pauses in the breaks in order to record with the trainers or talents, and between the presenter of the program, Andrea Taya, who stood reviewing the next stage, focusing on the movement on the stage and dealing precisely with every step.
Although the program episode was recorded before it was broadcast, the discipline in the studio was meticulous, as if the episode was being broadcast live without any interruption, with extensive rehearsals that preceded reaching the recording stage, while the three trainers did not stop having continuous discussions between them behind the camera during the breaks.
The audience's enthusiasm for the talents did not stop while they were presenting the songs, while the families were watching the reactions from the spectators' seats with anticipation, amid praise for choosing songs appropriate to the abilities of the participants, which increased the difficulty of the judges' decision despite their praise of all the talents.
The presenter of the program, Andrea Taya, expressed to Asharq Al-Awsat her happiness with the experience as she reached the penultimate stage, and the reactions she received to the program, noting that despite it being her first time experiencing acting, she was happy with the experience she gained, and with the talents she got to know and witnessed their development, episode after episode.
The program's director, Wassim Sukkar, confirmed to Asharq Al-Awsat that "the development witnessed in the new season of the program required a change in the method of work, taking into account the way of dealing with the participating children upon their exit, in addition to providing and preparing the stage for them to sing without fear with a professional musical band of musicians," noting that the arrangements that preceded filming, the rehearsals that took place, and ensuring that the theater was fully prepared played a role in the filming coming out in the way the audience saw it.
Less than a year after its international debut at the Venice Film Festival, the Kenyan film “One Woman... One Bra” continued its international journey by being shown for the first time in North America during the current session of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, winning a special mention from the jury of the prominent American festival after it was shown in the “Perspectives” program.
The film, signed by Kenyan director Vinsho Ntshogo, is her first feature-length work. It tells the story of a woman who lives on the margins of her rural society and embarks on an arduous journey in search of her roots and identity, but at the same time it opens the door to broader questions related to belonging, the legacy of colonialism, and the position of women within contemporary African societies.
The Kenyan director told Asharq Al-Awsat, in an interview via Zoom, that the idea of the film was born from a long preoccupation with questions of African identity and what the continent has become after decades of colonialism and successive political and social transformations, pointing out that she did not want to present a direct political film or an ideological discourse, but rather preferred to approach these issues through a simple human story that appears on its face to be very personal, before gradually revealing broader dimensions related to society, history, and collective memory.
She added that the character of “Star” came as an example of a person searching for his place within a world that does not give him clear answers. The heroine, a thirty-eight-year-old woman, knows almost nothing about her parents or her family roots, which makes her a stranger within a rural society based primarily on family and tribal ties.
She explained that through this character, she wanted to raise questions about the meaning of belonging, who has the right to land, and how an individual can prove his or her existence in a society that links rights to lineage and family relationships, pointing out that the film does not deal with colonialism as a historical event that has ended, but rather attempts to monitor its continuing effects on the daily lives of Africans.
She pointed out that many of the crises facing local communities today are linked, in one way or another, to a long legacy of political, economic and cultural domination, stressing that cinema is more capable of discussing these issues through poignant human stories than it is able to do so through direct speeches.
She added that many of the viewers who watched the film at the festivals in which it was shown found themselves inside the story even though they did not belong to Africa or knew much about Kenyan society, pointing out that many women spoke to her after the screenings about how they felt close to the heroine’s experience, which she considered evidence that the issues discussed in the film transcend geographical and cultural boundaries and touch on common human questions.
Ntshogo stressed that her relationship with Africa was not affected by her residence in the United States because the bulk of her professional career was linked to the African continent, stressing that she worked for years as a producer of cinematic and media projects in Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi and Tanzania. She also participated in training and developing a number of young producers within Africa, which made her connection with the African reality exist on a daily and continuous basis.
She added that she views herself as the daughter of two different worlds. On the one hand, she grew up in a small Kenyan village and carries within it many details of the local culture, and on the other hand, she lived for many years in the United States and gained various experiences from working and studying there, considering that this intersection between the two cultures gave her a special angle of view that was clearly reflected in her style of filmmaking.
Regarding the film’s production journey, Ntshogo explained that the project received important support from the “College College Biennale” program of the Venice Film Festival, which is a program that selects a limited number of independent projects and provides them with development and financing opportunities. She stressed that the film’s receipt of this support gave the team a great morale boost, but it was not enough alone to complete the project in the way it aspires.
She pointed out that the real challenge was to build a team capable of carrying out the work with limited capabilities, so she resorted to convincing a number of professionals to participate in the project based on their belief in the same idea, pointing out that some of the team members had previously worked on huge international projects, but they agreed to join the film because they saw in it a different voice that deserved support.
The director spoke at length about the difficulties of filming in rural areas far from the capital, Nairobi, stressing that reaching the filming locations required long hours of travel over bumpy roads and in harsh climatic conditions. She explained that the team faced unexpected challenges from the first days, including floods that cut off the road leading to the filming location, and forced the crew members to spend the night inside a local health clinic.
Despite these difficulties, Ntshogo explained that the village residents played a pivotal role in the success of the project, because the people treated the film as a project that belonged to them as well. The local community provided great support to the team and contributed to solving many of the logistical problems they faced during filming.
Ntshogo touched on the choice of actress Sarah Carey to embody the character “Star,” stressing that this step was one of the most difficult decisions she faced while preparing for the film, because she was looking for an actress capable of carrying the entire work, given that the main character appears in most of the film’s scenes and constitutes its main focus.
She stressed that the future of African cinema should not remain exclusively linked to traditional markets in Europe and North America, with broad opportunities for cooperation with the Arab world and Asia, noting that the experience she lived during the screening of the film in China convinced her that honest local stories are able to reach any audience, regardless of their cultural background.
She added that the more she traveled with the film to a new place, the more convinced she became that people were searching for the same human feelings. Languages and cultures may differ, but the desire to belong, the search for identity, and the defense of dignity remain issues that everyone understands, confirming her conviction that African cinema still has a lot to offer the world.
Astronomers led by Northwestern University have discovered a salty sky surrounding what is known as the famous “pink planet,” which is one of the unique astronomical objects of its kind in the universe. For more than a decade, this rare, fuzzy pink object has kept astronomers scratching their heads.
This object, which is considered one of the coldest known objects with a planetary mass that has been directly imaged, is so faint that astronomers cannot analyze its light coming to Earth. But new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal an atmosphere full of strange chemical compositions and unprecedented salt clouds.
According to the study published Thursday in the Astronomical Journal, these observations provide some of the first direct evidence of the presence of salt clouds in the atmosphere of a cold object, a phenomenon that scientists hypothesized theoretically more than 15 years ago. This discovery also represents an important step towards studying increasingly cold objects.
“The pink planet is the coldest celestial body ever discovered using ground-based instruments,” says Anish Baburaj of Northwestern University, who led the study. Many teams around the world conducted subsequent observations to study its light, but it was too faint to be detected by ground instruments.
He added in a statement on Thursday: “This is what made it an ideal target for the James Webb Space Telescope.” When we finally got his hands on his spectrum, he looked immediately interesting. “But once we started analyzing the data in depth, we realized it was unlike anything we had analyzed before.”
The pink planet, called GJ504b, was discovered in 2013 and orbits a sun-like star located 57 light-years from Earth. Despite its name, astronomers are still not sure whether it is a planet or not.
According to the results, the mass of GJ504b is about 25 times the mass of Jupiter, which makes it located near the border between giant planets and brown dwarfs. That's why astronomers refer to it as a "planetary-mass companion," meaning a planet-sized object orbiting a star.
What makes the matter more complicated is that repeated attempts to study it using ground-based telescopes have failed. While most directly imaged exoplanets have temperatures between 1,000 and 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, GJ504b has a temperature of only 550 degrees Fahrenheit (290 degrees Celsius), roughly the temperature of a baking oven.
Baburaj explained that the age of the companion planet is responsible for the decrease in its temperature. Although giant planets are born very hot, they cool as they age. The new study indicates that GJ504b is between 2.5 and 4 billion years old.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, Baburaj and his team captured the planet's faint light, then used advanced data processing techniques to remove the glare from its brighter host star. This combination finally revealed the companion planet's spectrum, a graph that breaks down scattered light into its component colors. Each color represents a different element. Thus, by analyzing the spectrum of any object, scientists can detect the presence of specific elements and molecules.
The data revealed a rich mixture of chemicals, including water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and other molecules.
“We ran simulations with clouds, and the results were consistent with what we know about cold planets,” Baburaj said. He continued: “We tried three different types of clouds, and salt clouds were the most suitable.”
The spectrum also indicated that GJ504b is unusually rich in heavy elements, or metals. However, the mystery of the formation of this body still remains, as current data indicate that it may have formed as a planet or a small star, stressing that the techniques used in the study may help uncover other mysteries.
