This month of November is full of family plans and it is very difficult for us to choose. As always, we have prepared a selection of plans for you to do with your children on November 13th, 14th, and 15th, such as playing board games at Fabra i Coats with DAU Barcelona, enjoying chocolate and sweet arts at the Xoco Fusió in Camarles, and running together as a family at La Milla, the inclusive race open to all ages, genders, and conditions.

A teenager considering entering a convent, a father crossing the desert in search of his missing daughter, or a community attempting to rebuild after a tragedy. These are some of the stories proposed by the 23rd Spiritual Film Festival of Catalonia, which from November 15th to 30th invites the audience to look beyond the screen and reflect on issues such as faith, freedom, solidarity, and the meaning of life. With more than 150 screenings in dozens of Catalan municipalities, the event brings cinema back to theaters and cultural spaces across the country.

Two years ago she climbed aboard El 47 and since then she has not stopped circulating through cinema. Her debut journey was also that of her consecration. The vocation came from afar and the projection now seems infinite. She is premiering Ruega por nosotras, the film by Daniel Monzón that denounces a new shame of Francoism: the Patronato de Protección de la Mujer, an institution where women considered conflicting or rebellious were locked up and mistreated. Solid social cinema with the luminous face of this 22-year-old woman, who is empathetic, analytical, and combative.

The afternoons are getting shorter and it's cold, but the weekends are full of plans to do as a family. As always, we have prepared a selection of plans for you to do with your children on November 6th, 7th and 8th, such as enjoying the first screenings of My First Film Festival; being amazed by the light installations of Lluèrnia, the Fire and Light Festival of Olot, and tracking small mammals at the Ivars and Vila-sana pond, in Urgell.

When he was a boy, he was gifted a Super-8 camera and made his first short film at just 13 years old. Born in Rosario (Argentina), Claudio Lauria was a “precocious” filmmaker, who learned very early on the mobilizing power of a good documentary, at a time when the Argentine dictatorship banned any form of cultural expression. Years later, once settled in Catalonia, he became a pioneer again when he founded the Environmental Film Festival, today called Suncine and considered the oldest of its kind in the world. Lauria defines himself as a “militant of culture, cinema, and life,” and it is largely thanks to his activism that Suncine—which will celebrate its 33rd edition from November 4th to 22nd—has just been declared by the Catalan Parliament as a "strategic cultural event for Catalonia".

One of the most awaited dates of the year is here: the Castanyada and now also Halloween. That is why the activities for these days revolve around the theme of chestnuts, scary stories, and pumpkins. As always, we have prepared a selection of plans for you to do with your children on October 30th, 31st, and November 1st, such as getting scared at the Espantanens parade in Puigcerdà, eating chestnuts and panellets at the Operació Castaween at Món Sant Benet, and seeing giant pumpkins at the Calaf Pumpkin Fair.

Getting lost in the labyrinthine corridors of Laika studios, located on the outskirts of Portland, the cultural and gastronomic capital of Oregon, in the United States, is like taking a walk through the history of cinema. During an exclusive visit by the newspaper ARA this summer, we were struck by a total silence. Wildwood, their latest film, the sixth and most ambitious of them all, is in the final phase of post-production and the sets are perfectly lit but without a soul in sight. All the rooms are closed off by a curtain accompanied by a rudimentary sign with the name of a color that identifies each of the spaces so that the animators do not get lost. They started with the basic colors: blue, green, black. As the locations multiplied, they ran short and had to add blue 2, green 2, and black 2. On our tour, we find much more specific ones like salmon and turquoise, which complete the more than 100 locations and 130 sets used in total. Quite a feat.

When Diego Luna (Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico, 1979) was just two years old, his mother, the artist and set designer Fiona Alexander, died in a car accident. Upon reading Brenda Navarro's novel Ceniza en la boca (Sexto Piso, 2022), the actor and director recognized the echo of his own experience in a character as different from him as Lucila, the Mexican teenager who migrates with her younger brother to Spain –first to Madrid, then to Barcelona– to reunite with the mother who abandoned them eight years earlier. But above all, he was fascinated by the clash of perspectives: “The daughter sees her mother's departure as an act of abandonment, but the mother feels she is making a great sacrifice for her children. As a father, I cannot stop thinking about how painful it must be to live away from one's children and start from scratch in another place. But I am also a son, and the absence of the maternal figure is a subject that has occupied my thoughts every day of my life”.

The film La bola negra, directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, will represent Spain in the Best International Feature Film category at the Oscars, as announced today by the Film Academy. The film prevailed over the other two proposals, El ser querido, by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, and Los domingos, by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa.

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 landscape was bleak. 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 solo 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 life odyssey of a woman who tries to rebuild her life in Denmark after the Second World War, when the Nordic nation was trying to clean up its image by brutally persecuting those who had collaborated with the Nazi regime.

The Venice Film Festival dressed up this Saturday and enthusiastically applauded the return of Nanni Moretti, one of the great Italian filmmakers of the last few decades. It had been thirty-seven years since the director of Caro diario had stepped onto the historic stage, since 1989 when his film Palombella rossa –which offered an acidic portrait of the bewilderment of the Italian left– was excluded from the Official Selection supposedly for political reasons; the film ended up being presented in a secondary section of the festival, the Critics' Week. However, Moretti has not shown any resentment during the presentation of Succederà questa notte, which is competing for the Golden Lion this year. In fact, the filmmaker wanted to downplay his almost four-decade distancing from the festival: “It is not true that I had anything against Venice; simply, in all this time, my films were never ready in the summer, which is when the festival is held. This time, instead of filming in the spring, I did it in the autumn and, therefore, it seemed natural to present the film there”.

Last week I went to see Sorogoyen's new film, El ser querido, starring Javier Bardem and Vicky Luengo, which is about a renowned and controversial film director who calls his daughter, an actress with a stalled career who earns her living working as a waitress and with whom he has no contact, to offer her a role in the new film he wants to shoot in the Sahara. It seems that when Valor sentimental, by Joachim Trier, was released last year, Sorogoyen's blood ran cold: the film, winner of the Cannes Jury Grand Prix, is about a renowned film director, Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, who offers a role to his daughter Nora, with whom he has no relationship, for his new film project. I understand the fear.I will not write an article comparing both films, nor will I try to critique them; I just want to reflect on the fact that unites both titles in a more meaningful way. And forgive the spoiler, because one must start at the end: both Sorogoyen and Trier redeem the absent father. I mean: at the end of both films, repentant, sentimental, moved, and even shocked fathers appear to see their daughters there, acting so well, having turned that crazy project of filming together into a second chance that life has offered them. Both fathers are saved.Leaving the cinema, the first thing I thought about was what would have happened if instead of fathers they had been mothers. This was already explained very well by Begoña Gómez Urzaiz in Las abandonadoras: while an absent father who sees his children a couple of times a year and pays child support more or less regularly can come to be seen as a good parent, a mother who does the same is almost a criminal. How could a woman want to abandon her child? What kind of monstrosity is this? Maria Montessori, Joni Mitchell, Ingrid Bergman and so many others. The most interesting thing is that Gómez Urzaiz also reviews fictional mothers, such as Anna Karenina, Nora from A Doll's House or Carol by Patricia Highsmith, tracing a cultural archive of how we have imagined the mother who disappears. There is no redemption for Karenina, with her tragic suicide at the end. And as for Nora, with that final slam of the door, we applaud her for freeing herself without stopping ourselves from judging her. And faced with Carol, Gómez Urzaiz asks herself, with sincerity, how a mother can do that to her children.

One of the great names in Catalan cinema and theater, Francesc Garrido, died this Sunday night at the age of 56, as confirmed by the actor's circle to ARA. Garrido was known for his roles in films such as Smoking room, Mar adentro and Balandrau, vent salvatge, and series such as La sala, Vida privada and Jaguar. He also had a solid theater career, with notable performances in productions such as Àlex Rigola's a propòsit d'The Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov; The Video Nobody Sees, by Martin Crimp, under the direction of Carme Portaceli; The Alchemist, the adaptation that Michael De Cock made of Opus nigrum by Marguerite Yourcenar, as well as participating in different works by Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Ibsen.

There are many movies I haven't seen. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the tragedy, until the lockdown I hadn't seen Dirty dancing (what a marvel) nor Pretty woman. I have wanted to take advantage of this series of articles to efficiently fill some of my cinematic gaps. In an era of massive audiovisual supply and absolute channel atomization, I cure my FOMO retrospectively. And after seeing for the first timeBen-hur, Blade runner,E.T.,A very legal redhead,Terminator,Dancing with Wolves and Alien (and alsoThe Odyssey of Nolan, bonus track of current events), I close this series with a classic of the proportions of Smiles and tears, a fresh movie from 1965:

There are many movies I haven't seen. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the tragedy, until confinement I hadn't seen Dirty dancing (what a marvel) nor Pretty woman. I wanted to take advantage of this series of articles to effectively fill some of my cinematic gaps. In an era of massive audiovisual supply and absolute atomization of channels, I cure my FOMO in deferment. This week I saw Alien for the first time and these are my notes:

There are many movies that I haven't seen. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the tragedy, until the lockdown I hadn't seen Dirty Dancing (what a marvel) nor Pretty Woman. I wanted to take advantage of this series of articles to efficiently fill some of my cinematic gaps. In an era of massive audiovisual offering and absolute atomization of channels, I cure my FOMO in deferred. This week I saw Dances with Wolves for the first time and these are my notes:

There are many movies I haven't seen. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the tragedy, until confinement I hadn't seen Dirty dancing (what a marvel) nor Pretty woman. I wanted to take advantage of this series of articles to efficiently fill some of my cinematic gaps. In an era of massive audiovisual supply and absolute atomization of channels, I cure my FOMO on deferral. This week I saw Terminator for the first time and these are my notes:

There are many movies I haven't seen. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the tragedy, until the lockdown I hadn't seen Dirty dancing (what a marvel) or Pretty woman. I wanted to take advantage of this series of articles to effectively fill some of my cinematic gaps. In an era of massive audiovisual supply and absolute atomization of channels, I cure my FOMO with a delay. Ben-hur, Blade runner or E.T. Let's follow my summer journey to fill my cinematic gaps. I saw Legally Blonde for the first time and here are my notes (taken with a pen with a pompom):

There are many movies I haven't seen. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the tragedy, until confinement I hadn't seen Dirty dancing (what a marvel) nor Pretty woman. I wanted to take advantage of this series of articles to effectively fill some of my cinematic gaps. In an era of massive audiovisual supply and absolute atomization of channels, I cure my FOMO in deferred. This week I saw E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the first time and these are my notes:

In the last edition of the Oscars, the award for best documentary film was won by Mr. Nobody against Putin. The impact of the story of this high school teacher in deep Russia overshadowed another splendid documentary, nominated in the same category, which Movistar+ has just premiered: Cutting through rocks, directed by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni. You must get to know its protagonist, Sara Shahverdi. She will fascinate you with her personality and drive. Sara becomes the first woman elected councilor in her rural village in northwestern Iran. She is a midwife, an activist for women's rights, and a tireless worker. The documentary begins by showing how, all by herself, she fixes a large iron door using an angle grinder. She also uses the trunk of a tree to level the doorframe and make the lock fit. The determination with which she will solve this problem will be maintained throughout the film. Shahverdi never stops: she advises women to claim their inheritance rights, coordinates village improvement works, gives talks at schools to encourage girls to continue studying, cares for her mother, fixes breakdowns, repairs her motorcycle... Even the viewer perceives a certain sensation of physical exhaustion just by seeing the energy she puts into improving the lives of others. The documentary is imbued with her strength.