Front Row - Bardem in Biutiful, and Winter's Bone director

With Kirsty Lang. Javier Bardem is nominated for Best Actor in this year's Acedemy Awards for his performance in Biutiful, playing a dying man struggling with family problems and the world of illegal immigration in contemporary Barcelona. Biutiful, also nominated for the Best Foreign Langauge Film Oscar, is directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Antonia Quirke reviews. Winter's Bone is a dark tale of one young woman's search for her drug-dealing father who's disappeared in the poor rural area of the Ozark Mountains. The film was nominated for four Oscars this week, including Best Picture. Debra Granik, the film's director, discusses the making of last year's word-of-mouth hit. A Beautiful Lie is the title of a novel for young readers by Irfan Master. Set in India in 1947, it deals with the politics of partition. He joins Bali Rai, whose book City of Ghosts takes revolution in Amritsar in 1919 as its starting point, to discuss writing Indian politics in children's fiction. Hammad Khan's recent film Slakistan about westernised twenty-somethings in the Pakistani capital city of Islamabad has provoked a string of objections from the Pakistani authorities preventing its release across the country unless extensive cuts are made. The film's director Hammad Khan, who sits on the British Board of Film Classification, discusses why he thinks the Pakistan film censors are taking such a hard line. And the last of Matthew Sweet's film reports comes from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Producer Jerome Weatherald.