Mark KIDEL is a filmmaker, writer and critic specialising in the arts and music. He works mainly in France and the UK. He has also made a number of films on African music, personal film essays on melancholia, the experience of death and loss in Paris’s Hopital Laennec, and a groundbreaking series on architecture and symbolism (BBC2). He has written widely about music for most of the leading newspapers in the UK. He is the co-founder of WOMAD, the world music festival.