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.

Lights, camera, action!

I just happened to be in the right place where a film was being shot yesterday. To my surprise, I discovered that an American film-maker has chosen a well-known city on the northern coast of Spain as the settting for his new romantic comedy. Why should this director choose this city to shoot his film on location? Perhaps because this city can boast some amazing, even breathtaking views, have a look at the photos that I have taken and decide if he has made the right decision:

Can you guess which city I´m writing about? What about the director? Have you guessed who I´m referring to? If you need more clues, I´ll tell you that this director seems to be besotted with Spanish settings as he already made it clear in Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona.

This photo is just an example of what lies behind the scenes: an iron gate which doesn´t belong to the premises has been placed here just for the sake of the story. As we all know, cinema is about making believe, that´s where one of its main powers lies.

 I didn´t bump into any Hollywood star so you may think that there wasn´t anything memorable about it, however, I´m looking forward to seeing the places which are familiar to me depicted on the big screen: watching our reality from the point of view of a director, watching it in cinematic terms is usually a new and enriching way of learning about it.