The Italian Toni Servillo, with Le voci di Dante, and the Argentine Romina Paula, with a version ofThe Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, opened the first edition of Flash de Otoño this week. These are two very good shows for this small performing arts festival organized by Bitò—the same company that programs the Temporada Alta in Girona—with the support of the City Council and the Generalitat (Catalan government) and the collaboration of several theaters. Flash de Otoño is exploring the possibility of a broader theatrical showcase of international shows to open the season in Barcelona. For the moment, it is inspired by series such as the Regàs Memorial, which for six editions (from 1981 to 1987) brought quality international theater to Barcelona and which disappeared due to a lack of institutional support.

"My God! My God!"Suddenly, the extraordinary actor Toni Servillo (Afragola, 1959) appears on screen. He's flustered because the plane that was supposed to take him to Barcelona has been canceled, and tomorrow, Tuesday, he's performing at the Teatro Goya. 'I still don't have my boarding pass, I'm worried,' he confesses during a press conference. 'We'd be talking about him via mobile phone from London to Barcelona; this man has traveled to the future!' he exclaims. In the show that has sold out at the Goya, The voices of DanteThe actor proposes precisely a contemporary approach to the great work of the Italian poet, the Divine Comedy. "Classics only make sense if they are revisited, if we give them a new reading through our concerns and emotions," he argues.

When the vast majority of the press and critics accredited at the Venice Film Festival expected the Golden Lion to go to Kaouther Ben Hania –The Tunisian director who shook the Mostra with her denunciation of the genocide in Gaza Voice of Hind Rajab–, the jury chaired by American Alexander Payne has decided to award the gold prize to fellow American Jim Jarmusch, a living legend of American independent cinema who presented in Venice Father mother sister brother, the best film seen on the Mostra screens during the eleven days of the festival.

One of the main objectives of the 82nd Venice Film Festival is to establish itself as a privileged showcase for the best Italian cinema. Accustomed to seeing the country's great filmmakers, such as Nanni Moretti and Alice Rohrwacher, present their works at Cannes, this year the veteran Italian festival is betting on local talent, starting with Paolo Sorrentino. Despite being a regular presence at the French event, the director of The great beauty has opened this year's Mostra with The grace, a film that broadens Sorrentino's approach to the universe of politics, a territory he already satirized in Il divo (2008) and in Silvio (and the others) (2018), two parody portraits of Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi. At the press conference for the presentation of The grace In Venice, Sorrentino has expressed his interest in making a political film "at a historical moment in which ethics seems optional, elusive, opaque, or invoked only for instrumental reasons."