For a lot of people, there’s nothing better than a piece of candy. Sweets go back to the ancient Egyptians, who ate honey with sesame seeds. In the United States, candy has a fascinating history that can be traced back centuries at the True Treats Historic Candy store in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. The shop sells an abundance of sweets that were popular during different time periods. VOA’s Deborah Block shows us the unusual assortment, ranging from classic chocolate kisses to edible bugs.
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Dozens of designers from Haiti and around the world showcased their spring-summer collections against a lush tropical background during the recent Haiti Fashion Week.

The January 28-31 event in Petionville focused on the theme “Innovation” and “haute couture” this year. Event founder Maguy Durce said her main goal was to show Haiti in a positive light, as opposed to negative images usually portrayed by the international media.

“Haiti Fashion Week is a cultural event. But we want to use it to respond to President [Donald] Trump — to his negative comments [about Haiti] — because we think if he saw what was happening this week at El Rancho [hotel], he would say, ‘Hey, I lied,’ or, ‘Hey, I was wrong,’ or, ‘I was misinformed,’ ” Durce said.

Trump’s reported use of a vulgar term to describe Haiti and African nations angered the Haitian-American community and sparked rallies in Port-au-Prince, New York, Palm Beach and Boston to denounce racism. Haiti’s ambassador to the United States said the comments about Haiti “hurt the country.”

The fifth edition of Haiti Fashion Week had been scheduled for November 2017, but was rescheduled after some of the designers said their collections would not be ready in time.

Young fashion designer Maille Timothee, whose fashion line is called MAE, presented her designs for the first time this year. She won applause for her colorful dresses made with unconventional textiles.

“I wanted to do something unconventional. Something unexpected. So I mixed different fabrics that people would not expect, and even what I’m wearing is an example of that,” she explained.

Timothee is the daughter of seasoned Haitian designer Immacula Pericles, who runs a highly acclaimed fashion school called Academie Verona. She also participated in Haiti Fashion Week, showcasing a collection of dresses made in the colors of the national flag and representing the natural beauty of the Caribbean country. Her collection wowed the audience.

“Well, I’ve been doing these designs for a long time now, so it’s new to some people, but we’ve been around a while,” Pericles noted. “The theme of our fashion school is Haiti will survive – so my goal is first to incorporate sustainable materials and second to make the clothing using the same international standards the big fashion houses use so that we can sell our line anywhere in the world.”

Pericles said Haiti has huge potential to excel in the fashion world.

French designer Marie-Caroline Behue flew from Paris to Port-au-Prince and went straight to work on her collection. A first-time participant in the event, she admitted to being awed by the quality and intricacy of the designs.

“I knew nothing about Haiti Fashion Week and I was amazed by the level of detail in the designs,” she admitted. “I’ve worked in the French haute couture design houses and I can tell you the designs I saw here meet the bar – and to be honest, what really piqued my interest was the men’s haute couture, because when one thinks of haute couture, they naturally think of women’s fashion, but here in Haiti, I was like, ‘Wow! They’re got couture men’s clothing.’”

Haitian-American designer Marcia Roseme, whose collection features bright colored separates matched with muted tones, traveled from New York to show her first collection at Haiti Fashion Week.

“It was a great event; there were a lot of different styles that represented many markets. There was a lot of innovation, a lot of creativity and unique styles – I really like that,” she told VOA.

Organizer Durce, who put in many long hours to pull off a culturally rich and diverse showcase of Haitian and international artistry, was pleased with the turnout and the positive reviews from the national and international press.

“Africa Fashion TV has been here all four days, broadcasting our fashion shows live, so what we’re doing here in Haiti is being seen in 29 African countries and all over the world. Each time a person tweets or posts something about Fashion Week to Facebook, it raises Haiti’s image to a higher level.”

Durce said she’s looking forward to the sixth edition of Haiti Fashion Week – to be held in 2019.

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A provocative film that chronicles racism and brutality in the 1920s has been released in Australia. Set in the red dust of the outback, “Sweet Country” is the story of an Aboriginal herder who goes on the run after killing a white landowner in self-defense.

The film is a historical, Western-style epic that has at its heart racist aggression between white colonialists and Australia’s indigenous population they displaced. The movie is directed by celebrated Aboriginal filmmaker Warwick Thornton, whose first film was the highly acclaimed feature “Samson and Delilah,” which was released in 2009.

Thornton says “Sweet Country” shows the brutality of Australia in the 1920s.

“It is a bit of history you will not find in your everyday high school curriculum, even though it is all based on true stories. It is important for us as a country to learn more about our history so we can make better choices about our future, I guess.  You know, it has got a lot of connotations today. Racism is still around today. It is just that people are not allowed to openly say what they feel, but they are still racist,” Thornton said.

The cast includes veteran Australian actor Bryan Brown, who came to prominence in “Gorillas in the Mist” and “Cocktail,” alongside U.S. actor Tom Cruise.

“Sweet Country” also features the New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who starred in “The Piano” and “Jurassic Park.”

Hamilton Morris plays the character of Sam Kelly, the indigenous farm worker who goes on the run with his wife after killing a white landowner. Morris had no film experience before landing the role as Kelly, although he did have a role in an Australian TV series about a remote radio station. There was also a large cast of Aboriginal extras.

Many of the reviews of “Sweet Country” have been positive with the newspaper The Australian saying it was “Australian filmmaking at its best.”

Indigenous Australians make up about 3 percent of the population and are, by far, the most disadvantaged group in the country, suffering high rates of poverty, ill health and imprisonment.

Warwick’s “Sweet Country” already was awarded a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last September at an early screening.
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Super Bowl LII is almost here. In the week leading up to the biggest sporting event in the United States, the National Football League kicked-off the Super Bowl Experience at the Minnesota Convention Center.

It’s a family-friendly, interactive theme park where fans of all ages can run some of the same football drills as the pros. They kick, pass, catch and run … albeit badly when compared to the players who buckle their chinstraps and put the NFL’s multibillion-dollar-a-year product on the field every week of the season.

This year’s Super Bowl host city is Minneapolis, Minnesota. Its home team – the Vikings – came within one win of playing in the big game.

That’s still a fresh wound for Vikings fans like Drake Jackson.

“My heart aches a little bit once I see Patriots and Eagles (instead of Patriots and Vikings), but you know, it is what it is … maybe next season.”

Thirty-two teams started the season in September, but now only the Philadelphia Eagles and New England Patriots remain. The teams take the field at U.S. Bank Stadium to decide the winner of this year’s Vince Lombardi Trophy; the iconic prize awarded to the winner of the NFL’s championship game.

Kickoff is scheduled for 2330 UTC Sunday
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After a season that started in early September, the NFL’s final game is just around the corner. Minneapolis, Minnesota, is hosting the single biggest event in American sports, despite local disappointment that the home team came one win short of a Super Bowl appearance. But that didn’t stop fans from braving brutally cold weather to check out the NFL’s Super Bowl Experience. Arash Arabasadi reports from Minneapolis.
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After a season that started in early September, the NFL’s final game is just around the corner. Minneapolis, Minnesota, is hosting the single biggest event in American sports, despite local disappointment that the home team came one win short of a Super Bowl appearance. But that didn’t stop fans from braving brutally cold weather to check out the NFL’s Super Bowl Experience. Arash Arabasadi reports from Minneapolis.
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James Ivory didn’t see “Call Me By Your Name” with an audience until the week before he was nominated for its screenplay. He caught it at a New York theater with a good audience, he says, that applauded at the end. It was his first tangible taste of the adulation for the film he wrote, about first love in Northern Italy, since it began its celebrated run at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. 

“I’ve just been thinking: What is it about the film that people respond to so much?” Ivory says in a recent phone interview from his upstate New York home in Claverack. “And I think it’s a story about a happy love in a beautiful place. I think that just appeals to people. It ought to.”

The pure and glittering romance of “Call Me By Your Name” has taken on an almost escapist quality in an awards season consumed with sexual harassment revelations throughout Hollywood. But if “Call Me by Your Name,” about the sun-dappled relationship between 17-year-old Elio (Timothee Chalamet) and a visiting grad student (Armie Hammer), radiates with the tumultuous emotions of youth, it’s also composed with the insight of age. 

Expected to win

Ivory is 89, and should he win the Oscar for adapting Andre Aciman’s 2007 novel — as Ivory is widely expected to — he’ll become the oldest Oscar winner ever. (That is, unless the 89-year-old French filmmaker Agnes Varda, born a week before Ivory, also wins at the March 4 ceremony. Her “Faces Places” is up for best documentary.)

But regardless of the outcome, “Call Me By Your Name” has proven an unlikely yet altogether fitting encore for a master filmmaker whose films have already pocketed 31 Oscar nominations and six wins. For some 50 years, Ivory was half of perhaps the most long-running and illustrious independent filmmaking duo in film history. With Ismail Merchant, his partner and producer, they made up Merchant Ivory Productions, a name virtually synonymous with literate, refined period dramas. 

Together, with their regular screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, they more or less wrote the book on literary adaptations with films such as “Remains of the Day,” “Howard’s End,” “Maurice,” “A Room With a View” and “The Golden Bowl.” Though sometimes superficially seen as stuffy portraits of upper-class life, the recent and ongoing 4K restorations of their work by Cohen Media Group has only enhanced the films’ intimacy of character and pristine economy of storytelling. 

“A lot of directors don’t bother to go back and look at their films, but I do,” says Ivory. “If I hear that a film of mine is going to be shown on a big screen somewhere and I haven’t seen it in a while, I make a point to get to see it. I just want to see it up on the big screen. My feelings don’t usually change much about it. I happen to like all our movies.”

‘Three-headed monster’

For filmmakers known for tales about British aristocracy, they were an unusual trio: Ivory, the Oregon son of a sawmill owner; Merchant, the son of a Bombay textile dealer whose family protested the 1947 partitioning of India; and Jhabvala, a German Jew who fled Britain during World War II. Merchant called them “a three-headed monster.” 

Merchant died in 2015, Jhabvala in 2013 and Ivory’s last film was 2009’s “The City of Your Final Destination,” which he prepped with Merchant and which Jhabvala wrote from Peter Cameron’s novel. The losses were profound, but Ivory never wanted to retire. 

“No! I still don’t,” Ivory says. “In fact, I’m working on a new screenplay. Maybe it’s absurd to imagine that I would actually get to direct it at my age. But I don’t know why. I’m much healthier than other people who are doing movies. And I’m in great shape. It’s always a matter of convincing the insurance people. They seem to think that after a certain age, you’re just going to fall over or something.”

For the past several years, Ivory has been trying to mount a “Richard II” film, with a script penned by Chris Terrio (“Argo,” “Justice League”) and potentially Tom Hiddleston and Damian Lewis starring. “A Shakespeare film does not grab the hearts of financiers, I can tell you,” he says. 

Concerns over Ivory’s age also fed into his experience on “Call Me By Your Name.” The rights to Aciman’s novel were acquired by Ivory’s neighbors, Peter Spears and Howard Rosenman. They asked Ivory to be an executive producer, and Ivory accepted.

Script takes a year

After some difficulty finding a director or financing, the producers met with Luca Guadagnino, who suggested he co-direct with Ivory. Ivory again accepted but he wanted to write the screenplay. Ivory spent a year on the script but the co-directing framework was less appealing to investors. 

“We wanted to make it with him as the director, but we were disappointed by the market,” says Guadagnino. “When we realized that could have been made was a teenie, teenie tiny movie in a very small amount of time, and that there was some interest in me doing it, we said, ‘OK.’ He was very generous. He said, ‘I bless this project if you do it.’”

“James is at the peak of his career,” added Guadagnino. “I can’t explain how full of life is James. It’s extraordinary. His wonderment and love of discovery. I am 46 and he’s almost 90, and the energy in his body is really more than mine.”

Ivory’s script, which he typed on a typewriter, begins with a description of the villa owned by Ellio’s family and an atmosphere “of upper-middle class comfort but nothing princely, or run-down aristocratic.” As is commonplace, there were changes along the way. To save money, the film was uprooted from Sicily and re-set around Guadagnino’s town of Crema. The film’s beloved final close-up — which even Aciman has praised as superior to his ending — was originally located not by a fire but while Elio was hanging a candle on a Christmas tree. 

A few issues to be settled

The collaboration wasn’t without issues. Ivory went to arbitration with the Writers Guild over whether Guadagnino deserved a co-writer credit. The WGA ruled he didn’t. Ivory has also previously suggested disappointment that the film didn’t feature more of the nudity in the script. (Both Chalamet and Hammer had contract clauses against frontal nudity.) But Ivory has walked back those comments. 

“I think it has to do with nationalities,” he says. “In ‘A Room With a View,’ you have three young Englishmen running around naked and laughing and whooping and jumping in the water. It’s something the English don’t apparently find troublesome. They like that. But you would never get three American actors to do that. It’s just not in our nature, somehow, to expose ourselves like that. It’s a cultural thing.”

“Call Me By Your Name” is a kind of bookend to Ivory’s 1987 film “Maurice,” a restoration of which was released last summer. Now regarded as a landmark in gay cinema, Ivory’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s posthumously published novel is about two Cambridge students (James Wilby, Hugh Grant) who fall in love in Edwardian England. Released at the height of the AIDS epidemic, it dared something groundbreaking: a happy ending. 

In “Maurice,” their love is tortured and strained by the times. But in “Call Me By Your Name,” any hurdles to romance are entirely interior. It’s about, Ivory says, “young love that doesn’t know how to trust itself.” Having both films in theaters a few months apart, Ivory grants, has been gratifying.

“It’s been a really interesting year, I have to say.”  
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All five former members of the Spice Girls have met up amid rumors of a plan to reunite the girl-power group.

Photos posted by several group members on social media showed Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham, Melanie “Sporty Spice” Chisholm, Emma “Baby Spice” Bunton, Melanie “Scary Spice” Brown and Geri “Ginger Spice” Horner.

They had been seen earlier Friday arriving at Horner’s home north of London, along with former manager Simon Fuller.

The Sun newspaper reported the quintet is considering several projects, including a TV talent show, though not a live tour.

The Spice Girls were a 1990s phenomenon, with hits including “Wannabe.” They split in 2000 and last reunited at the 2012 London Olympics.

Now the group’s highest-profile member is Beckham, a fashion designer married to former soccer star David Beckham.
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Britain’s Prince Andrew says an Oct. 12 wedding date has been set for his daughter, Princess Eugenie.

Andrew, the third child of Queen Elizabeth II, announced the date Friday on his official Twitter account.

Eugenie, the 27-year-old daughter of Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, will marry Jack Brooksbank at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor.

Eugenie’s cousin Prince Harry and his American fiancée, Meghan Markle, will marry at the same chapel on May 19.

Eugenie, one of the queen’s granddaughters, is eighth in line to the British throne.
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February in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is cold — the kind of cold that stings your face and burns your lungs as soon as you walk outside. Today’s temperature is minus 10 degrees Celsius, and local business owner Brad Rohles is getting ready for work.

Boots? Check.

Heavy jacket? Check.

Gloves? Check.

Bomber hat? Check.

“We are in Minnesota,” Rohles said, “so when it’s really cold outside sometimes, it can hit minus 20 degrees. And for a lot of people, that’s a little too cold to be walking around in the elements.”

 

WATCH: World’s Longest Skyway Gives Minneapolis Residents a Break From Harsh Winter

Built for winter

Luckily for locals, Minneapolis is a city built to handle the worst that winter dishes out.

Snow plows patrol roads and highways while smaller Bobcat bulldozers remove slushy buildup as fast as it hits the ground. The city can easily get more than 130 centimeters of snow a year, and it is quickly removed from local roads with an almost ruthless efficiency. That only leaves the temperatures and wind chill to deal with.

“Bright, sunny days in the winter are always the worst,” Rohles said. “They are always the coldest.”

​The Skyway

While minus 10 degrees Celsius is about average for this time of year in Minneapolis, the city has its way of handling that: the Skyway. Here, the majority of downtown buildings are connected by elevated and enclosed pedestrian footbridges — the longest continuous system of skywalks in the world. The Skyway allows residents to walk in climate-controlled comfort for more than 18 kilometers across 80 full city blocks.

“All in all, I think I step outside for about 30 seconds in any given day, if I have to,” Rohles said.

The Minneapolis Skyway is more than just a way for residents to get to work; it’s a city within a city and, importantly, it allows locals to deal with the weather in their own way. It has shops and bars, restaurants and hotels. It connects business and sports arenas, stores and apartment buildings. There are a thousand different things you can do within the Skyway without actually having to step foot outside.

Sharri Murphy is another Minneapolis resident who is downtown volunteering for this week’s Super Bowl festivities.

“It makes it convenient for everybody to get to places,” Murphy explained. “I used the light rail to get downtown today, and then to the Skyway, so I’ve only been outside for about a block and a half. It’s an easy way to do it, to enjoy the city, and get to everything.”

Fittest American city

But Rohles is quick to add that just because he has the luxury of remaining indoors almost all day long, that doesn’t mean he does.

“We are one of the most active places in the country, and it doesn’t matter what the weather is,” he said. “It could be minus 20 degrees outside and you’re driving down the road, and you’re going to see more bicycles than cars on the street. People are running and training for marathons in the middle of January.”

This is key to understanding the mindset of Minneapolis. The city was named the fittest in America by the American College of Sports Medicine in 2017, a remarkable achievement considering the weather residents have to deal with. Minnesota is known as “the land of 10,000 lakes,” which means locals have an abundance of possible outdoor activities regardless of the season; swimming in the summer becomes ice fishing in the winter.

But for now, Rohles is happy to make the famous Minneapolis Skyway his second home.

VOA’s Arash Arabasadi contributed to this report.
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Minneapolis is known for being cold — extremely cold. But when the temperatures drop and the wind chill bites, how do local residents cope and still carry on with their day-to-day lives? VOA’s Brian Allen will take you up into the sky, or more specifically, up into the Skyway to find out.
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Investigators in the unsolved 1981 drowning death of actress Natalie Wood have named her husband, actor Robert Wagner, as a “person of interest” in a case that stunned the nation.

Wood’s body was found floating off Santa Catalina Island the morning after she disappeared from a yachting party with Wagner, actor Christopher Walken and the boat’s captain. All had been drinking heavily.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lieutenant John Corina tells CBS-TV’s 48 Hours, to be broadcast Saturday, “We know now that he [Wagner] was the last person to be with Natalie before she disappeared.”

Corina also said Wagner’s story of what happened that night has shifted over the years and “his version of events just don’t add up.”

The capitan told investigators he heard Wood and Wagner arguing that night. Wagner had written that it was he and Walken who argued and that he did not notice his wife was missing until he saw a small boat hooked onto the yacht was also gone.

Investigators originally ruled Wood’s death an accident, but reopened the case in 2011. The coroner has since amended Wood’s death certificate to read the cause of death as “drowning and other undetermined factors.”

Investigators say the 87-year-old Wagner is not a suspect, but just a person of interest, meaning he may have more information that he has yet to disclose. He has always denied responsibility for his wife’s death.

Wood, 43 when she died, started her career as a child actress and became a Hollywood icon, starring in such classics as Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story, The Great Race, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
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Haiti’s teen women’s soccer team made history this week when it qualified for the country’s first FIFA Women’s Under-20 World Cup berth.

Star midfielder Sherly Jeudy scored the winning goal to lead the team to a 1-0 victory over Canada in the third-place game Sunday at the CONCACAF Women’s Under-20 Championship, held in Couva, Trinidad and Tobago.

“I’m very happy I was able to score the goal, but I’m even happier for Haiti as a country,” Jeudy said in a postgame interview. “I was just so very happy because we were able to qualify.”

Haiti has not qualified for the World Cup since 1973, which led to the men’s national team’s only appearance in the FIFA championship series, in 1974. The team was eliminated in the first round.

Both inside Haiti and in the diaspora, Haitians reacted happily to the news on social media, posting photos and videos of the team on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook with congratulatory messages.

“Bravo, ladies, we respect the sacrifices you made [to win] because soccer in Haiti is not easy,” Ansitho Pierre Louis posted in Creole on the Haitian Soccer Federation’s Facebook page. “I congratulate you, hang in there, keep working so we can shine at the World Cup. Much respect.”

VOA Creole reporter Pierre Nazon Beauliere caught up with the players during a stop in Miami before they returned to Haiti. Goalie Kerby Theus discussed their strategy heading into the match against Canada.

“We were very motivated and focused [going into the game],” Theus told VOA. “We weren’t worried about the loss to the United States [in the semifinals] . … We set qualifying for World Cup as our goal. We never entertained the thought of losing. It was important to us to achieve this goal for Haiti.”

Team physical therapist Aldride Joseph talked about the significance of the win for Haitians. 

“The win means so many things to us, not just socially but also politically,” she told VOA. “Despite our country’s problems, you can see everyone is sending the girls congratulatory messages and expressing their joy — that means so much to us — and we’re going to keep working for the win [at the World Cup competition].”

Joseph said it was more than luck that helped Haiti clinch the berth. “We worked hard for this,” she said, adding that the women train twice a day to perfect their game.

Haitian Football Federation (FHF) President Dr. Yves Jean Bart said he was extremely proud of the athletes’ performances.

Jean Bart launched Haiti’s women’s soccer effort before the devastating Janurary 2010 earthquake that left hundreds of thousands dead. He said after the disaster that many countries stepped forward to help the federation get back on its feet.

He said the FHF’s goal now is to train the girls just like the boys and to also provide academic support in addition to the rigorous athletic training.

“We’re not going to France just to look around — we are aiming to win,” Jean Bart told VOA Creole. France will host the 2018 event. “I hope we will get to a point where we can face any team from any nation.”

The U-20 team’s return to Haiti was full of pomp and circumstance. Haitian President Jovenel Moise and Prime Minister Jacques Guy Lafontant met the team at the airport in Port-au-Prince with flowers, handshakes and praise for a job well done.

With an eye toward France in August, goalie Kerby Theus had this message for the fans: “Keep encouraging us, keep rooting for us and you’ll see — we’ll do even greater things in the future.”

Pierre Nazon Beauliere contributed to this report.
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