Cultura

The Romanian director Cristian Mungiu has won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival with Fjord, a film as uncomfortable as it is necessary, which was among the favorites in a rather uncertain 79th edition. With the audience giving a standing ovation, Mungiu went up to the stage of the grand Lumière theater to receive from Tilda Swinton an award he had already won in 2007 with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. “It is necessary to talk about relevant things in a society that has become radicalized, and this film is a message of tolerance,” he said in reference to the plot of the film starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, which narrates how the traditional and religious values of an ultra-conservative Romanian family clash with the supposed progressive values of Norwegian society. Fjord had also been awarded shortly before with the prize from the international critics (Fipresci), the Ecumenical, and the Citizenship awards.

Bad Bunny has managed to elevate the genre of urban music, the one that mixes hip-hop, reggaeton, Latin rhythms, and autotune, into a mass spectacle that no one wants to miss. Ten years ago, no one gave a dime for this music, relegated to the margins of society and nights of excess, but last night it brought together in the stands a cast of politicians led by the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, along with Mayor Jaume Collboni and no less than four consellers of the Generalitat. A tribute to popular music like Pujol strolling through the April Fair or Tierno Galván shouting “those who aren’t high, get high.”

Rosalía received this Thursday in London the Ivor Novello Award for International Composer of the Year, one of the most prestigious in the industry, which places her at the very top of the musical pantheon, on the same level as Paul McCartney, Elton John, or Adele.

The debut of Los Javis at the Cannes festival could not have been more anticipated. After El ser querido, by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, and Amarga Navidad, by Pedro Almodóvar, La bola negra is presented in the final stretch of the event, where Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo aspire to the Palme d’Or with an unfinished story by Federico García Lorca of which only four pages were preserved and which was his first work with an openly homosexual protagonist. The famous Andalusian writer began La bola negra at the beginning of 1936, but he was murdered on August 19 of that same year.

What do global artists today like Kendrick Lamar, Rosalía, C. Tangana, and Bad Bunny have in common? They connect with their identity and claim a cultural heritage, whether it be Las Grecas, George Clinton, Camarón, or the Puerto Rican Héctor Lavoe. To the point that this identity ends up being embraced by anyone from any generation, social stratum, and geographic location. This explains why among the fans of Bad Bunny who will gather at the Estadi Olímpic de Barcelona this Friday and Saturday, in his first appearance in Spain on the Debí tirar más fotos tour, you can find both fifteen-year-old Catalan girls from affluent backgrounds as well as young Latin American immigrants or professionals from Barcelona’s avant-garde cultural sector.

Every poem is an act of hope on the part of the poet, and so proclaimed Margaret Atwood, much more than the author of The Handmaid’s Tale. The 86-year-old Canadian writer received this Wednesday, from the hands of the King, the Joan Margarit poetry prize, in an event held at Victoria College of the University of Toronto, through whose campus a king and a poet were seen walking.

The actress and director from Barcelona Aina Clotet has won this Wednesday the breakthrough award of the Critics’ Week, the parallel section of the Cannes Festival dedicated to the discovery of new voices, for her performance in Viva, which is also her debut behind the camera as a director.

After years of cinematic uncertainty, announced projects that never came to fruition, and a franchise increasingly focused on the Disney+ platform, Star Wars returns this Thursday to the big screen with ‘The Mandalorian & Grogu,’ the film set to open a new chapter for the saga beyond the Skywalker universe. The film also marks the return of two of the most popular characters to emerge in the last decade within the franchise: Din Djarin (the human Mandalorian warrior) and Grogu (the alien Baby Yoda).

If there is something that writers habitually do, more or less consciously, it is to be aware of what is happening around them. It doesn’t matter if they write historical or contemporary fiction: what they see and experience in the present ends up permeating their texts. That is why it is not surprising that in recent times several books have been published in which aesthetic pressure and terms like botox, skincare, preventive aging, or wellness permeate their pages.

Barcelona has a supercomputer that not only processes billions of numbers, simulates the climate, or analyzes DNA sequences. It also puts all its potential at the disposal of artists so they can translate that entire amalgam of data and cold codes into tangible works that can be felt, seen, and heard. But also, and unlike other technological centers, so that artists humanize technology and contribute to science through their work. This is made possible thanks to the Creative Intelligence Lab, a space created by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), where the Marenostrum 5 is located, one of the most powerful computers in the world.