The journalist Xavier Grasset, who currently presents La Selva on TV3, recommends The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (Dublin, 1854 - Paris, 1900). The novel's plot premise is brilliant and perverse at the same time: since Dorian Gray does not want to grow old, nor does he want to be disfigured by the mark of the experiences that living entails, he manages to preserve himself as he is – beautiful, young, and attractive – while his portrait becomes deformed and repainted with all the moral corruption and all the abjections that his soul accumulates.

The drawback of literary classics that have become universal cultural icons is that we already know them by heart. The virtue of literary classics that have become universal cultural icons is that they are so significant and fascinating that you never tire of them and can return to them again and again, which transforms the inconvenience of knowing them by heart into a blessing, an incentive, and an advantage.

The Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi considered fashion and death to be sisters because they shared a common nature and task: to continually renew the world.

Elegant and exquisitely kind, Atom Egoyan is also one of the great Canadian directors – born in Cairo in 1960 – of recent decades, responsible for fascinating works such as Exotic (1994), The sweet future (1997) and Ararat (2002). With Seven veils, which will premiere on the Filmin platform on July 11, Egoyan signs his most complete film of the last decade, a meditation on the turbulent process of creating a work of art in which Amanda Seyfried plays the director of the new version of a production of the opera Salome which she herself worked on as a young woman. Inherited from her mentor, the project is a poisoned gift that stirs up family traumas and collides with the new sensibility of a post-Me Too society.