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Loving a pet is usually accompanied by a sombre and unavoidable truth: unless you’ve bought a puppy to accompany you through your final days or are providing excellent care to your tortoise, your dear animal companion will likely precede you in death. However, if you’re a dog owner who happens to have $100,000 to spare, the wonders of modern medical technology do offer a potential loophole. Co-starring the Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari, her beloved 16-year-old Shih Tzu Norman and the US singer and dog-cloning proponent Barbra Streisand, Norman, Norman follows Romvari as she falls into a YouTube hole on the promises, perils and prohibitive cost of pet cloning. Bittersweet and inflected with understated humour, this offbeat short debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2018.
Director: Sophy Romvari
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Stories and literature
Robert Frost’s poetic reflection on youth, as read in his unforgettable baritone
5 minutes
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Sex and sexuality
After a sextortion scam, Eugene conducts an unblushing survey of masturbation
14 minutes
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Film and visual culture
‘Bags here are rarely innocent’ – how filmmakers work around censorship in Iran
8 minutes
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Language and linguistics
Closed captions suck. Here’s one artist’s inventive project to make them better
8 minutes
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Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
5 minutes
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Architecture
The celebrated architect who took inspiration from sitting, waiting and contemplating
29 minutes
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Anthropology
Why are witchcraft accusations so common across human societies?
4 minutes
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Subcultures
Drop into London’s eclectic skate scene, where newbies and old-timers find community
5 minutes
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Technology and the self
A deepfake porn victim confronts the pain of having her likeness stolen and vandalised
19 minutes