The Atlàntida Film Fest is the mother of all online festivals. Organized as always by Filmin, it has not lost the spirit with which it was born fifteen years ago: to discover unreleased auteur cinema programmed at major international festivals – and from our own country – and to recover the work of established filmmakers. Since 2016, it has combined the online edition with a face-to-face version in Palma, the Atlàntida Mallorca Film Fest, which this year will receive such illustrious visitors as David Lowery, Alexander Desplat, Gael García Bernal, Javier Bardem, and Victoria Luengo. Both editions kick off this Friday, but while the in-person festival lasts a week, the online version allows you to see the 91 films in the program – 65 of which are new to the State – until August 24.

Lina, a fashion professional who has just collected an award in Geneva, shrugs off the trophy as if it were a nuisance and begins to wander through the city's solitary streets until, suddenly, she throws herself into the icy waters of the Rhône. That's how magnetic and powerful the opening sequence of Las corrientes is, the third film by Milagros Mumenthaler (Abrir puertas y ventanas, La idea de un lago), which the Argentine director conceived precisely from this first image of a woman throwing herself into the river. “It came to mind right there, in Geneva, where I grew up and have family – she explains–. The image provoked many questions in me, and I tried to follow them in an intuitive way”.

The writer and journalist Ramon Solsona (Barcelona, 1950) has always defined himself as a "worker" of Catalan letters; a profession that the author compares to that of a miner:

What motivates you to keep playing when you are Van Morrison and you are already 80 years old? If we are to believe yesterday's concert at the Auditori del Fòrum, it seems that the Lion of Belfast's engine is the blues, which was already one of the fundamental colors of Morrison's music since the days of Them. In his debut at the Barcelona Jazz Festival, the Northern Irish musician's repertoire was tinged with electric Chicago blues and rhythm & blues, in line with his latest album, Somebody tried to sell me a bridge (2026).

As the neoliberal monsters they are, the scoring websites Toy Story 5, which premieres this Wednesday, is the worst installment in the saga, the least inspired of all, even when compared to the usually undervalued – and, however, stupendous – Toy Story 4. Despite everything, Toy Story 5 is many other things, and all of them magnificent: a delightful entertainment, a demonstration of narrative talent, a (nuanced) critique of the influence of screens on children, and, above all, an almost existential reflection on our own obsolescence as human beings, toys in need of affection who pass through life, amuse ourselves for a while, love, and fall into oblivion.

The singer and composer from Seville, Beret, who livened up the wait on Tuesday for Beret was one of the artists who performed on Tuesday during the massive vigil held at the Olympic Stadium to celebrate the arrival of Leo XIV in Barcelona, which also included performances by Conchita, Siloé, Álvaro Soler, Alfred García, and Sergio Dalma. Beret performed two of his best-known songs, Lo siento

In one of the most celebrated and viral moments of the interview program for cinema personalities Inside the Actors Studio, host James Lipton speaks with Steven Spielberg about how the divorce of the director's parents when he was young inspired some of his films. “Steven, your father was a computer specialist and your mother was a pianist. And in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), when the spaceship lands, humans and aliens communicate by making music with computers,” Lipton points out. Spielberg listens and smiles, between surprised and moved: “I would like to say I wanted it to be a metaphor for my parents' relationship, but I hadn't realized it until now”.

On June 21, 2021, Vinyetari (Norma) arrived in bookstores, an anthology that collected the best stories presented at the first edition of the Premi ARA de Còmic. Since then, neither the award promoted by this newspaper with the support of Language Policy nor the volume that compiles the best works of each edition has missed the annual appointment. This week, Vinyetari 6 (Finestres) has arrived in bookstores, the sixth installment of a project offered to readers as a great mosaic and showcase of the new Catalan comic, which has served as a debut for many of the authors called to renew the landscape.

What do we do with monuments, especially unjust ones? This was the question being asked this Tuesday in the last session of the season of the Pedralbes Dialogues, organized at the Pedralbes Monastery with the collaboration of ARA, moderated by Antoni Bassas, and under the intellectual direction of the philosopher Daniel Gamper. To answer the question, a historian with a torrential discourse and forceful affirmations, Daniel Rico, professor of art history at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and author of an essay on the subject: ¿Quién teme a Francisco Franco? (Anagrama, 2024). For Rico, the issue is not simple: "Hiding monuments in a warehouse or leaving them as they are without doing anything are, in fact, two extreme expressions of the same problem: not wanting to settle accounts with the past. Removing them means getting rid of the past; and doing nothing is turning your back on it. But if you have a trauma, what you need to do is analyze it and confront it."

The Honorary Grand Prize of Comic Barcelona that he received last year –at only 56 years old– was the last recognition missing for Paco Roca (Valencia, 1969), the most important Spanish comic author of the 21st century, who despite his success continues to strive to offer vibrant and restless works, whether it is the journalistic comic strip the journalistic comic strip La vida en espera that he created together with Rodrigo Terrasa for the Diari del Còmic of ARA or his new long comic, El viaje (Astiberri), a story with evident autobiographical touches about a recently separated writer who is forced to spend a few days in a hotel in Patagonia when his flight is cancelled. But El viaje is not just the story of a breakup –in fact, it begins where many stories of heartbreak end, with the separation consummated–, but an immersion into the pain and emotional tribulations that follow the end of a relationship. A moving and honest work by an author in full command of his narrative faculties.

The dark side of Mallorca's sun and beach tourism. This is what Mallorcan producer Luis Ortas wanted to explore when he launched the project Mallorca Confidential, the criminal thriller directed by David Ilundain, which premieres this Friday with a superb Lolita playing the matriarch of a clan of drug traffickers from a gypsy settlement in Mallorca. Around this multi-layered character, who establishes herself as the leader of the settlement but has her own agenda of interests, the film depicts the ecosystem of police, business, and political corruption that sustains drug trafficking, but above all, a family story of sacrifice and betrayal in which a young gypsy woman (Asia Ortega), the matriarch's niece, must decide her loyalties.

Cristian Mungiu joins the exclusive list of filmmakers with two Palme d'Or awards. Nineteen years after winning the first with Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, the Romanian filmmaker has once again triumphed at the Cannes Film Festival with Fjord, where he leaves his native Romania to travel to Norway and recount the drama of an evangelical and ultra-conservative Romanian family whose children are taken away by the progressive Norwegian social services when they discover that the father –Sebastian Stan, who recovers his native Romanian here– physically punishes them.

Undoubtedly, one of the trends of this edition of the Cannes Film Festival is the prominence of LGBTI relationships, present in eight titles in the official competition. The film where the theme is most central has been, of course, La bola negra by the Javis, but also La vie d’une femme, with a superb Léa Drucker as a surgeon who falls in love for the first time with another woman, and, above all, Coward, where Lukas Dhont explores the trenches of the First World War as a space where dissident sexualities find cracks to exist.

A Viva, the film with which Aina Clotet has won the revelation award at the Critics' Week in Cannes, the protagonist is a biologist who studies how to extend life to 120 years. And, almost as if it were a sequel to this film, in the other opera prima by a Catalan director premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, The end of it by a Catalan director premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, The end of it begins with the protagonist's birthday, an artist who reluctantly celebrates reaching 250 years old because she is tired of the perennial joy that surrounds her, of her friends, and of living forever. So her new artistic project, which will also be her last, will consist of dying, an announcement that shocks the entire society. For the director, we live in a world that “denies and tries to hide death” and in which youth is idealized as if it were the only desirable state of life. “It is absurd to think of youth as the peak of life, because in reality it passes very quickly –points out Martínez Bayona–. Organizing life like this doesn't help much to continue valuing what you do and who you are.”

In the last poem of the Sonetos del amor oscuro, Federico García Lorca wrote: “Tú nunca entenderás lo que te quiero / porque duermes en mí y estás dormido”. To Javier Calvo, the upper half of the artistic duo known as els Javis, the letter o at the end of dormido particularly caught his attention. “I read it as an adolescent and thought it was a typo, but no, it said dormido, not dormida, and it referred to a man –he explains–. But in school textbooks, it was omitted that Lorca was gay, as if it were a shame or as if it were not important to explain who he was. And we must remember that he was murdered, among other things, for being homosexual. It has not been sufficiently explained that the second most important author in Spanish literature is gay, nor from what pain and what wound his work came from”.

Cannes definitely brings luck to Aina Clotet. When she presented the series Això no és Suècia at the Canneseries festival, she won the award for best actress, and three years later she has won the Revelation Award at the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes for her first film as a director, Viva, which she also stars in. "Thank you for believing in our film and for opening doors to the world for us," said Clotet as she took the stage at the Miramar space this Wednesday to receive the award, which the Semaine de la Critique presents together with the Louis Roederer Foundation and which last year was won by the film Nino by the French Pauline Loquès.

One year after premiering Romería there, Carla Simón has returned to the Cannes Film Festival with a freshly baked short film: Flamenco, produced by Icex, the public body that promotes the internationalization of Spanish companies. Starring choreographer and bailaora Rocío Molina and with musical direction by Niño de Elche, the work, which can now be seen on Icex's website, serves as a rehearsal for the director's next feature film, for which she is preparing a flamenco musical.

In an edition of the Cannes Film Festival where, despite rumors, we finally haven't had a new film by Lars von Trier, the quota of extreme cinema that infuriates a good part of the press has been well covered by another Danish director who usually provokes as much indignation as enthusiasm: Nicolas Winding Refn has presented outside of competition the magnificent Her private hell, a further step in the path that increasingly distances him from conventional narrative cinema and from directing another Drive. The film is a freefall that takes to the extreme the aesthetic approach to the horror tale from the previous the previous The neon demon, with an even thinner plot and hieratic to operatic performances. After seeing what will surely be one of the most radical films of the festival, it is better understood why Thierry Frémaux did not feel he had the courage to program it in the official competition.

There were many expectations placed on the second film that Léa Seydoux is premiering in the official competition of this edition of Cannes, Léa Seydoux in the official competition of this edition of Cannes, L’inconnue. Partly, it is due to the presence of the French actress, who at 40 years old is already a festival legend: she has presented sixteen films here since 2010 – almost one per year – and won a Palme d'Or for Blue is the Warmest Colour alongside Adèle Exarchopoulos, whom Seydoux applauded on Sunday at the end of the gala screening of the gala screening of Garance. But there was also anticipation to see L’inconnue because it is Arthur Harari's first film after the Oscar for the screenplay of Anatomy of a Fall, the 2023 Palme d'Or that he co-wrote with Justine Triet.

Someone wrote on Twitter –it was still called that then– a few hours after the first screening of La vida de Adèle,, at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, that Adèle Exarchopoulos was, quite simply, the best actress in the world. And that impression was conveyed by the young debutante in that torrential and wonderful film, that year's Palme d'Or winner, exceptionally shared by the director (Abdellatif Kechiche) and the two leads, Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux.