Cultura

Amos Gitai manages at the Venice Film Festival to make the reflection on the unsustainable Israeli situation resonate deeply, in that space of consciousness to which only art has access. The Road to Jericho, a hybrid documentary that was rushed to be made – “my friend Alberto Barbera encouraged me to speed it up to make it in time for the Biennale” – and that unusually mixes the present, the past, archival material, and the landscapes where all this geographically takes place, resulting in a powerful audiovisual poem about the destinies of humanity.

The wait has been longer than expected, but on September 18th Barcelona will bring back JazzSí for music under new ownership, led by the former managers of the Milano Jazz Club. The venue on Requesens Street where Rosalía made her first live appearances, and where Enrique Morente or Mayte Martín have been seen, will reopen three years after its closure – hampered by the economic hardships of covid – continuing more than three decades of live music in a city sorely lacking these spaces.

Just a year ago Aitana gathered more than 45,000 people at the Estadi Olímpic, and this Friday she already began to surpass that record with the first of her four Sant Jordis. “It’s crazy,” said the artist herself, who admitted the nerves caused by singing “at home.” And although Professor John Keating from Dead Poets Society already warned of the dangers of translating emotions into numbers, there is no doubt that something exciting happened this Friday inside the Blue Room.

It’s been a few minutes already waiting seated. The fault is not with the organization responsible for making everything run smoothly for the premiere of Cronos at the Liceu. The problem lies with those of us who have been sitting in the seat for quite a while because we are excessively punctual. And for the excessively and nervously unfortunate punctual ones, it happens that they even have to wait for those who are serenely punctual, those who are punctual as they should be, the ones who arrive just one minute before the appointed time. So until the film about the Mossos d’Esquadra’s device to confront the jihadists who attacked on August 17 and 18, 2017, in La Rambla of Barcelona and in Cambrils is shown, either you daydream or you have to find distractions.

While George Clooney grabbed the cameras with his bow tie and received the Golden Lion at the Palazzo del Cinema, in the adjacent Darsena room a film was born that needs more qualifiers than just auteur cinema. Werner Herzog’s wild imagination brought two Hollywood sisters, Kate and Rooney Mara, to work together for the first time. And to do so mimetically, interpreting the text and gestures in unison and as a single being. Something very disturbing and in pursuit of one of Herzog’s “essential” films. And there are only a couple that “reach very, very deeply to the core of who I am,” warns the German director.

Nine years after the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, Cronos delves into the 124 hours following August 17, 2017, to reconstruct one of the largest police operations in the recent history of Catalonia. But its director, Fernando González Molina, insists that the film is not born from the desire to revisit the horror, but to understand how those who had to face it experienced it.

At a highly politicized Venice Film Festival that this year has experienced a notable boycott by Hollywood studios unwilling to be exposed to uncomfortable questions, the news this Thursday is the presence of an intelligent and poetic film that could well win the Oscar and that, with John Malkovich’s performance, sets the bar very high at the Lido. It is Wild Horse Nine, a satire that goes beyond what would be a simple denunciation of the CIA’s modus operandi in its decades-long effort to destabilize governments in Latin America to, through an agent at the exit doors (Malkovich), lead the audience to a scenario of existential beauty.

If there was one thing the Peruvian-Barcelona writer Santiago Roncagliolo (Lima, 1975) was clear about when, a few years ago, he began researching for the book El pastor y los lobos – which Seix Barral has just published – it was that the American priest Robert Francis Prevost did not go to the Peruvian town of Chulucanas in 1985 “to prosper, nor to be important within the Church, nor to live well.” The author of this very personal biography about the Pope, in which echoes of Carrère and Cercas resonate, intersperses painful episodes from his own life – such as the abuse he suffered from a priest at his school – others from the life of Saint Augustine, investigates the meaning of faith in today’s world, and makes revelations about Prevost’s relentless fight against mafias and abusers, even bringing to light some secrets of the conclave that chose Leo XIV as Francis’s successor.

The Film Academy announced this Thursday the three Spanish films that begin the race towards the Oscar. Los domingos, by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa; El ser querido, by Rodrigo Sorogoyen; and La bola negra, by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, are the three preselected films for the major film awards given in Hollywood. Pedro Almodóvar, who released Amarga Navidad this year, has been left out.

There have been many occasions when Barcelona has debated whether to recognize the work and creativity of Salvador Dalí, either by dedicating a street or square to him, or some sculptural work. All have failed. The last time was in 2021. Political motivations aside, the long bureaucracy, the urban complexity of the city, and the prioritization of other criteria in the nomenclature have stopped it.