Some snippets from recent festivals

The end of August and the beginning of September are full of news revolving around film festivals. It is a beautiful way of saying farewell to the summertime as well as welcoming the new season, which is supposed to be gloomier and full of daily tasks that all of us must accomplish. As the sun still shines, lots of people find shelter in the dark rooms of a cinema, in search of peace and quiet, in search of a new experience, that of living the lives of other people, with their good and their bad moments, in short, the experience of  leading a new life, at least,  for a while. The Venice Film Festival and the San Sebastian Film Festival are some of the most important festivals which help us to begin or end September in a light mood and here are some of those memorable moments that we have enjoyed over the last weeks.

The Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar was presented with a Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement for a long and illustrious career in the 76^th edition of the Venice Film Festival. Almodóvar, whose last work is Pain and Glory, was nominated for the festival´s top Golden Lion prize in 1988 for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, a film that brought him international recognition.

As Almodóvar explained in a recent interview, films play a very part in our society from a cultural point of view because, regardless of whether a film is good or bad, a film is always a good reflection of the cultural times when it was made.

 

The Spanish actress Marta Nieto was the winner of the Orizzonti award as best actress for her role in Mother, the film by Rodrigo Sorogoyen which is a sequel to his short film also called Mother.

Penélope Cruz, probably the most international Spanish actress these days, received the Donostia Award at the 67^th edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival last week. 

 

               The actress has also had the honour of being the image of this year´s festival.

This year Donald Sutherland has has also had the honour of receiving the Donostia Award, a life-time achievement award.

The relevance of "The Green Bicycle"

I suppose that you have realised that in the summertime there is a lack of interesting news and perhaps we should feel happy abou it because according to the English saying, “no news is good news”. When an important news item hits the headlines, very often, we can but shudder at it. This summer , among the different types of articles a very relevant piece of of news caught my attention in The Guardian. Under the headline: “ Saudi Arabia allows women to travel without male guardian´s approval”, the journalist – Emma Graham-Harrison – went  on to explain that “women in Saudi Arabia will no longer need the permisssion of a male guardian to travel”, according to laws published during this summer, “in a key step towards dismantling controls that have made women second-class citizens in their own country”. The article draws a very clear picture of the situation of women in this country by stating that women can be considered as second-class citizens. Reading a news item and reflecting on it is a very good exercise and sometimes it is even more effective than watching that piece of news on TVor on the social media because it helps you to make use of your imagination so that you can picture yourself in the shoes of those people you read about. In this sense, cinema also plays a very important role as it also helps us to understand other realities which are far away from us. Therefore, if you wish to learn about how a Saudi Arabian woman must feel like  and how hard life can get for her when she is deprived of the posssibility of moving freely on her own, I advise you to watch The Green Bicycle (“Wadjda”), a film directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour. I wrote about it some time ago and I thought that I should write about it once more because of its relevance and how useful it is to understand a very up-to-date issue, an issue which affects women and helps to reflect on how different your daily life is depending on whether you are born or you live in a Western country or not.

 If you are interested in learning a bit more about the story of Wadjda, have a look at the post  “In the summertime …” (18^th August 2013) where I already paid attention to this touching and REALISTIC story.