Front Row - 06/02/2009

Presented by Kirsty Lang. Kirsty talks to the director Terry Gilliam as he receives a BAFTA fellowship for his outstanding contribution to film. He explains how his name has become synonymous with disastrous film shoots and what he thinks of the film industry today. Art critic and writer Louisa Buck visits a new exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art, which features a new commission, Kinderzimmer, from the German artist Gregor Schneider. Kirsty talks to harpist Catrin Finch about playing by Royal appointment, collaborating with a Venezuelan joropo band, and what she thought when another harpist released his own version of Bach's masterpiece just as her record hit the record shop shelves. UFO in Her Eyes, a novel by Xiaolu Guo, is set in 2012 and tells the story of a Chinese peasant woman who sees a UFO flying through her village. Xiaolu Guo discusses her ongoing fascination with alienation and identity, and how a childhood spent in the peasant heartland of communist China informs her perspective on Western art.