Globetrotting
London
A Shakespeare festival is scheduled to take place in the British capital next year to coincide with the Olympics, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the British Council announced last week. More than a million tickets are expected to sell for dozens of Shakespeare-related events, including exhibitions, television documentaries, and four plays.
Venice
The 68th Venice Film Festival wrapped last weekend, with Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's Faust taking the top prize, the Golden Lion. The top acting awards went to Irish actor Michael Fassbender (as a sex addict in British film Shame) and Hong Kong's Deanie Ip Tak-han (pictured), who portrays a servant in Ann Hui On-wah's A Simple Life.
Tokyo
Greek sculpture the Discobolus - the naked discus-thrower - is one of more than 130 sculptures and paintings on display at the National Museum of Western Art's The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece exhibition. Most of the works go as far back as the 5th century BC, when Greek art focused on depicting beauty through the human body. The exhibition is in its final week in the Japanese capital before returning to the British Museum.
Toronto
The Toronto International Film Festival wraps today. Alexander Payne's The Descendants, which stars George Clooney (pictured) as a soul-searching father following a life-altering injury, received the most acclaim. Hong Kong director Johnnie To Kei-fung - whose film Life Without Principle debuted at the festival - said he would film the third chapter of his critically acclaimed triad series, Election.
Paris
French electro DJ and producer Mehdi was killed in an accident in Paris last Tuesday. The 34-year-old DJ was standing on a plexiglass mezzanine with three friends when it collapsed. Mehdi, whose real name was Mehdi Faveris-Essadi, began his career in the underground Parisian hip hop scene and was most recently part of the Ed Banger Records roster. The three other victims survived, but their conditions were not known as of press time.
Taipei
More than 40 paintings, sculptures, photographs and video works by 18 contemporary Japanese artists, including Takashi Murakami (pictured), are on their final week of display at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. The 'Trans-Cool Tokyo' exhibition, which features everything from a life-sized deer made out of light bulbs to manga-inspired portraits, shows the effects of globalisation on Japanese artists.
