The 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival opened with some juicy statements in which American director Maggie Gyllenhaal – in charge of presiding over the Official Section jury – expressed her discomfort at the scarce presence of films directed by women in the competition for the Golden Lion. "We have finally discovered that women simply make worse films than men," quipped the director of The Bride! and The Lost Daughter with irony at the opening press conference. And it must be said that, before the start of the Festival, the outlook was bleak. Out of the twenty-two films in the Official Competition, only two had a woman at the helm, and Kvinde ukendt (Woman unknown), by Danish filmmaker May el-Toukhy, was the only one directed solely by a woman – the other case was the documentary Naza, co-directed by Israeli Rachel Szor alongside Yuval Abraham–. Well, what began as a fair complaint has ended in a full-blown vindication, since the jury presided over by Gyllenhaal decided to award the Golden Lion to Kvinde ukendt, a film that portrays the harsh vital odyssey of a woman trying to rebuild her life in Denmark after the Second World War, when the Nordic nation was trying to cleanse its image by brutally persecuting those who had collaborated with the Nazi regime.

The journalist Albert Om (Taradell, 1966) returns to immerse himself in the memories of a time, of a country, in the memoir book Què dirà la gent (Univers). If in El dia que vaig marxar he explained the end of his parents, now he goes to the beginning of the story: to his repressed republican grandparents; to his parents' marriage, which renounced politics but achieved well-being, and to a childhood forming his national spirit with Llach, Serrat and La Trinca. The result is a political-emotional portrait of an entire generation, and an approach to Catalan identity made with the language as genuine as the one he suckled, of course, in Taradell.

Writing with a mobile phone is a pain. Writing anything at all, but especially texts of a certain length, be they books, articles, or whatsapps long enough to function as modern-day epistles. Surely someone will tell me that to write books you don't need anything digital, that paper and pencil are enough; it should be like that, but that is not the case for someone like me, for whom the computer is an indispensable appendix to my work. Once I tried writing a story by hand and it was a fiasco: I am too used to deleting, changing, reordering. The thing is that this summer I had to write with my mobile phone; I was away and hadn't brought my laptop (I didn't want to lug it around for weeks for just a couple of articles: space in a cabin-sized suitcase is too precious), so I used a wireless keyboard that is a marvel: it weighs little, takes up little space, and is comfortable enough to write with. However, the mobile phone screen is tiny and my presbyopic eyesight doesn't help, so despite the keyboard, the whole thing was a bit annoying. I was thinking about all this the other day when I saw one of those foldable phones with a spaceship name –Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra– which has a huge eight-inch screen. Wow. Having one would be like carrying a laptop in your pocket at all times, ready to be drawn. Bam. I fantasized for a while (not long) about the idea: it would be great for writing on the go, and also for reading, which is another thing we writers do to a somewhat pathological degree (I have read entire books on the tiny mobile screen); it would be ideal for writing and illustrating with photos the travel diary that I have been thinking about doing for years. I fantasized until I saw the price: more than two thousand euros. What a chimera. But fantasy has no stopping point and, just as water always finds a path to flow down if its way is blocked, illusions also drag whatever is necessary to keep moving forward. And what if they gave it to me? I am not a influencer, of course, I already know; my celebrity is like that of a breadcrumb embedded in the sole of Lamine Yamal's shoe. Like an atom of shit stuck to the anus of the Taylor Swift. Or not even that, because the fans would kill for an atom of Swiftian excrement. Why would anyone gift a phone to a writer, and even more so, to a Catalan writer who doesn't even write bestsellers? Mobile phones are gifted to people who matter and who have things to say: to tiktokers who scratch their ass with both hands, at youtubers that talk about soccer or any other topic the further away from culture the better, at instagrammers and gamers and company. I read that Bill Gates has been gifted a few, and also one to Alexia Putellas, who look, with her I am actually happy because she is a hell of a woman and she has guts. They give them away, of course, only to people who could easily afford them; the gift is, in fact, a plea: please use it, so they see you with my gadget and thus I bring prestige to the brand, etc. And this is the crux of the matter: prestige.The growing marginality of written culture

Written culture no longer provides any kind of prestige. It is like that. To me, coming from another century and having seen things you wouldn't believe –ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate–, it feels strange. I perfectly understand that there is a lighter popular culture; a culture that must be there, and that it is good that it is; a culture in which I also participate at times, because there must be moments for everything; a culture, however, that cannot be everything.That written culture is becoming a marginal thing is also evidenced in mobile phone advertising, as well as in that of the spaceship; only its audiovisual capabilities are praised: it is used to watch (poorly) movies, to scroll listlessly, to play video games (how many hours devoted to Candy Crush, my God!), to take photos and videos and upload them to social networks. If I had one I would also do all of this, of course, because I am human and I live in the year 2026, but I would also get the most out of it to write and read, I would give real utility to the eight-inch screen. However, the use the user gives it is secondary to the manufacturer: what matters is that it is a status symbol.I know they won't give me one. The truth is that it might be a bit strange to have a mobile phone that is worth a third of what my second-hand car cost. And now that I mention a car, I think of the thousands of kilometers I travel every year for work: reading clubs, conferences, talks, presentations. They could give me a Peugeot 2008 with large logos on the doors communicating that Peugeot supports culture, and I would commit to pronouncing the brand name with a radiant and sincere smile (it would be) at every event, interview, or presentation I did; and since I am a writer, I would explain the excellence of the product with beautiful words. But who cares about beautiful written words anymore?

]]>

Dutch businessman Joop van Caldenborgh (The Hague, 1940), when he was sixteen, bought his first piece of art, an engraving that cost him about 25 guilders he had saved by delivering newspapers. Over the years, as the founder of the chemical company Caldic, he has become one of the most important private collectors of modern and contemporary art in Europe. As can be seen in the museum he opened in 2016 in the city of Wassenaar, the Voorlinden Museum, Van Caldenborgh has brought together thousands of works, including those by many of the most renowned artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Damien Hirst, Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, James Turrell (who has a permanent installation there), Maurizio Cattelan, Pipilotti Rist, Anselm Kiefer, and Yayoi Kusama.

]]>

"I felt the need to explain my life to someone, to review it for myself, to value it and to share it," writes Monika Zgustova (Prague, 1957) in her latest novel, The Translator of Haikus (Galàxia Gutenberg, 2026). The writer and translator attributes the phrase to the protagonist, Jana, a woman born in Prague in 1939 who leaves her country to start a new life in the United States. Jana is the alter ego of her mother, lives under a communist regime and faces a profound dilemma: what should come first, ethical principles or the safety of her children? Through her, Zgustova fictionalizes the story of the exile of her parents, herself, and her brother with a novel that faces a harsh reality head-on and, at the same time, seeks reconciliation.

]]>

Ian McEwan is approaching 80 years old with no intention of slowing down his creative pace. Born in 1948 in Aldershot (England), the author of Atonement (2001) and Saturday (2005) –both available in English at Anagrama– has recently experienced the loss of some of his generational peers, such as Martin Amis, who passed away in 2023, and has also witnessed other novelists announce that they were stopping their writing, as in the case of Julian Barnes. "For some time now, I have had to attend a few funerals of people I knew, and I have realized the amount of things that I did not know about them. The dead observe us with a touch of shame and another of pride for all that we do not know about them," explains McEwan from his home, on the occasion of the presentation of his new novel.

]]>

Last year the Venice Film Festival was impacted by the striking The Voice of Hind, which mixed fictional scenes and the real voice of a Palestinian girl to denounce the genocide in Gaza. Kaouther Ben Hania's film ended up winning the Grand Jury Prize, and it wouldn't be surprising if history repeated itself this year with Naza, the documentary in which Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor expose the war crimes committed by their country's army during the Gaza War. Although it must be said that, beyond the rigorous exploration of the methods employed by the Israel Defense Forces, Naza manages to transcend the denunciation of war barbarism, and offers a lucid and terrifying portrait of the most sinister face of the contemporary world, marked by the threat that artificial intelligence poses to the most basic notions of empathy, democracy and humanity.

]]>

The architect Carmen Torres (Barcelona, 1986) –founder of the studio Sarquella Torres together with Pau Sarquella– does justice to the idea expressed by Josep Pla that in the ultra-local lies the universal. Specifically, Torres began with the international part: she started her studies at the Barcelona School of Architecture (Etsab), and continued her training at the ENSA-Paris Malaquais school. Thus, her professional career began in the French capital, as a collaborator in various studios on public equipment and housing projects. And from the French capital, Torres and Sarquella moved to Bangkok to work as professors in the International Program in Design and Architecture (INDA) at Chulalongkorn University.

]]>

Soprano Sara Blanch has a toothbrush in three different places: Bologna, Barcelona, and her parents' house in Darmós, the town in the Ribera d'Ebre region where she was born in 1989. "I have a base in Barcelona and another in Bologna, which is where my partner is. When I have work in Italy and Central Europe, I stay more in Bologna, because there is a good connection. And if I work in France or Spain, I stay in Barcelona and I am closer to my village and my parents' house," she explains. And she has plenty of work. Sara Blanch is living the best moment of an artistic career that has long been gathering praise.

]]>

The robust, flexible, and young voice of Irene Solà (Malla, 1990) has won over thousands of readers around the world in less than a decade, and is currently one of the most translated and beloved authors in Catalan literature. The meteoric and still rising trajectory of the writer from Osona might lead the most malicious minds to think of a pact with the devil to gain such unusual repercussions. Solà has managed to have When I Sing and the Mountain Dances (Anagrama, 2019) translated into 23 languages and has garnered awards such as the Anagrama Novel Prize, the European Union Prize for Literature, and the Nota Bene Prize. Before this great success, which included a theatrical adaptation and even a symphonic work, Solà had already received the Documenta Prize for The Dikes (L'Altra, 2017) and the Amadeu Oller Prize for Beast (Galerada, 2012), her only collection of poems, which Anagrama has just reissued.

]]>

"You are an ungrateful bitch. I don't want to know anything about you, no messages, and let's not meet again." This is the blunt message that reaches Rita eight years after meeting Ramon at a town festival in the Ebro Lands. They have an intermittent relationship that lasts for years and destroys them. They are fully aware of it, but they go back to it time and time again. This is the core of All the points and aside (Empúries), the latest novel by Marta Sans (Alcanar, 1988).

]]>

All Cirque du Soleil shows are similar, but some have something that makes them special. Kurios. Cabinet of Curiosities is one of them. An imaginative show like a story without a plot, populated by very surprising and curious characters, such as the accordion man, the bathyscaphe man, the machine man, the robot insects, and the inventor scientist with an air of the Franz de Copenhague from TBO. A fantasy with magical touches that invites you to enter this scientist's laboratory and discover that, like E.T., you can fly with a bicycle, even upside down (as the French acrobat Anne Weissbecker does); that you can see an invisible lion, or you can cheer on the non-existent tightrope walker Giuseppe to jump from the trapeze into the water basin in the Invisible Circus of the fantastic Argentine clown Facundo Gimenez, who in the second act offers a very funny animal mime act.

]]>

The success of the first edition of the Catalunya Triomfant festival, on September 11, 2025, spurred the promoters Hello Cleveland and Blood Fire Death to provide continuity to a historic event for Catalan metal music. And like last year, the Paral·lel 62 venue in Barcelona will host half a dozen bands on the evening of the National Day starting at 5:30 p.m. This Friday's edition, moreover, features the draw of the return of the Barcelona quartet Foscor after a few years away from the stage. "We will recover songs that we have not played live for a long time from our first three albums," they explain. The purpose of their concert (at 9:10 p.m.) is to celebrate the group's 25th anniversary by conveying "the intensity, the density, and that tragic music" and with a repertoire sung exclusively in Catalan.

]]>

The Badalona City Council has initiated the procedures to expropriate the monastery of Sant Jeroni de la Murtra, one of the great jewels of Catalan Gothic architecture, founded in 1416. The goal of the municipal government led by Xavier García Albiol is to integrate this historic site into the city's public heritage and turn it into a thematic and museum center dedicated to the "discovery" of America.The decision comes following news of an attempted purchase by a private company. Currently, this jewel of Catalan Gothic architecture is owned by the heirs of the Güell family. Approximately a year and a half ago, the Badalona City Council already held talks with the owners to try to reach an agreement that would allow for the acquisition of the monastery. "Those negotiations did not culminate in an agreement, but the municipal government has maintained since then the desire for this monumental complex to become part of Badalona's heritage. The appearance now of a firm buyer and the communication received by the City Council have led the municipal government to take a step forward and initiate the expropriation procedure," the council explains in a statement.

]]>

The British girl pop group Spice Girls has set off all the alarms for a possible return to the stage or for the release of new musical material. They have done so through a mysterious video on social media.

]]>

Perhaps almost all Hollywood romantic comedies are fantasy films, but a point of interest in the good-witch tragicomedy Practical Magic was the use of purely fantastical elements to metaphorically address traumas such as the fear of the death of a loved one. The late sequel Practical Magic 2 is one of those works that make no sense on their own. And it falls into dynamics similar to those observed in The Devil Wears Prada 2: the characters have not evolved and, furthermore, they relive the dilemmas of the previous work as if they were new. In parallel, the protagonists carry out a fairly generic mission. Their first adventure, a bit strange, included a criminal plot that complicated (and enriched, or made less predictable) the narrative journey. This time everything is more comfortable and timid.

]]>

The best photographs by Miquel Varderi only had family and a few friends as a loyal audience. The slide projections in the dining room at home were a strict liturgy that included technical comments with mentions of ISO or aperture. They were the result of a hobby he had cultivated with almost professional rigor and aesthetic criteria by which only images that were up to the mark deserved to survive. "My father took photographs all his life, everywhere and of everyone. Then he would make a meticulous selection and keep the ones he liked the most," explains his daughter, Mònica Varderi. The chosen slides remained jealously guarded in an untouchable drawer, cataloged in boxes with labels with names such as "Girona", "Costa Brava", "Bullfighting", "Rugby" or "Types".

]]>

The modern habit of chewing areca nut is practiced by approximately one in ten people worldwide. It is usually chewed with betel leaf and other ingredients such as calcium hydroxide, some spices, and tobacco, and it leaves the mouth a deep red color. It resembles nutmeg in shape and color, but it has a very different taste, slightly bitter and intense. It is a drug used primarily in tropical Asia and the Pacific, and it is considered the fourth most popular psychoactive substance on the planet, only behind alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine. Deeply rooted in some cultures, its history has a much older origin than previously thought.

]]>

The influence of the Beatles is notable in all areas, including science. More than three thousand scientific articles reference the songs and lyrics of the Beatles, according to a study by the digital scientific journal Plos One, which has found a total of 2,237 exact references and about 963 adaptations based on wordplay from the Liverpool quartet's songs. The work shows that the Beatles' songs appear in 1,584 scientific articles, a figure that surpasses other artists like Michael Jackson (65) and Elvis Presley (196).

]]>

The Vallès Symphony Orchestra (OSV) celebrates 40 years of music with a new season of the 'Simfònics al Palau' series at the Palau de la Música, which combines great classics, soundtracks, and contemporary creation. The 2026-2027 season will open on Saturday, September 19, with Beethoven's Emperor under the baton of Andrés Salado, the orchestra's principal conductor, and with pianist Alba Ventura as soloist. In total, the program will offer 30 concerts, including three absolute premieres.

]]>