A character
created by Ernest Hemingway in Fiesta.
The Sun Also Rises said that “you can´t run away from yourself” and I guess
that that´s true but I also suppose that, at least, you can run away
from your everyday reality because sometimes, it is good and necessary to do
so. How can you do that? Just by being engrossed in a good story depicted by a
book or a film: walking into a library or walking into a cinema enables you to
travel to faraway places or to different ages or just to present-day but different
realities. Thanks to the stories that we read in books and thanks to the
stories that we watch on the big screen – a screen which is getting smaller each
day for lots of people – we learn about other people, we suffer with other people,
we cry and we laugh with other people and by doing so we also learn about
ourselves. Today, we mark “World Book and Copyright Day 2019” and therefore,
we can´t forget that many of the films that we usually watch are based on
books, books whose stories were first read by readers, books who appealed to
film-directors and turned into new stories, so what would the art of cinema do without the valuable help of literature?
Today, even if
it is not like me to do so, I feel like making a recommendation: The Aftermath, a film which has been
recently released and whose plot is based on a novel by the Welsh writer
Rhidian Brook. The story is set in post-war Germany and tells us about the heavy
toll that war takes on people, irrespective of who the “winners” might be. Even
if life goes on, the consequences of the war are devastating and the people
involved in that war conflict find it really difficult to come to terms with
their new lives. The Aftermath focuses on those consequences and on the lives of the
people in 1946 Hamburg and at the same time, it makes us reflect on the ideas
of forgiveness and remorse and the redeeming effect of love.
This year, "World Book and Copyright Day" will celebrate literature and reading while focusing particularly on the importance of enhancing and protecting Indigenous languages.
