Cultura

“Welcome to Cannes!” said the head of the prestigious French festival, Thierry Frémaux, yesterday to Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo as they climbed the steps of the Palais. Shortly after, Los Javis excitedly took the stage to receive the award for best direction for La bola negra, a distinction they shared with the Polish Pawel Pawlikowski, author of Fatherland, a beautiful and harsh black-and-white portrait of Germany after World War II through the figure of the writer Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika.

Few things are more Barcelonan than kicking off the most gluttonous intellectual-social week of, perhaps, all time with an explosion of Central European gravity and full-blown melancholy. How about a Mahler? A First Symphony for the penultimate Monday of May while the city…

Singer: Bad Bunny

Tourists and foreign residents (the famous expats, expatriates) are in the spotlight of many people in a Barcelona that, like other cities, lives with regret its dizzying loss of identity. A linguistic acrobatic has turned the initial use of…

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.