During the opening ceremony of the 2011 Berlinale, the first covered by ARA, the most notable absentee was Iranian Jafar Panahi, a jury member who had been banned from traveling to the festival by his country's authorities. His empty chair on the stage became a symbol of indignation and solidarity with the oppressed filmmaker. In 2023, the festival went a step further, announcing a ban on companies and media outlets with ties to the governments of Iran and Russia, which had just invaded Ukraine. That same year, the protagonist of the opening gala was another absent figure: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. who performed a ten-minute teleconference interventionThese are some examples of the character of a festival known for its commitment to political and social causes, always ready to take a stand and raise its voice, except for its refusal to condemn the genocide in Palestine, in line with the position of the German government, the festival's main source of funding. This contradiction became visible and was unfortunately amplified this Thursday when Wim Wenders, the president of this year's jury, justified the Berlinale's lack of a political stance. "We shouldn't get involved in politics," he said, gesturing with his hands. "If we make politically engaged films, we enter the realm of politics. But we must be a counterweight to politics (...) and do the work of the people, not the politicians." That a director who has almost never been interested in politics, like Wenders, would express himself in these terms is perfectly legitimate, but to do so as president of the jury of the Berlinale, the quintessential political festival, borders on cynicism.

At 36, she burst onto the world stage with the beautiful novel The god of small things, which won the Booker Prize. This happened in 1997. How did he reach the literary heights? that daughter of an eccentric teacher Without a husband and a member of a Christian minority in a small provincial town, Kottayam, in the state of Kerala? What has happened to her since then, what has she done with her life, what has she done with the baskets of money she never imagined earning and that make her so uncomfortable? This is what he tells us in his memoir. My refuge and my storm (Now Llibres, translated by Imma Falcó). A hypnotic, devastating text about a strong woman straddling dreams and nightmares, in constant struggle against her family ghosts, who has built herself up through writing—fiction and essays—and has become a scourge of Hindu ultranationalism—placing President Modi at its peak—and an eco-activist. She has had to spend time in prison (a single, symbolic day) and frequently receives death threats. And yet, in her wandering labyrinth, she has found inner peace.

On the day of his mother's funeral, Writer Arundhati Roy was devastated. Not surprising, until she explains that she was also bewildered and somewhat embarrassed to find herself in that state. Her brother, LKC, told her, "I don't understand your reaction. You're the person I treated the worst." Roy writes, "Perhaps he was right, but it seems to me that the one who got the credit was him." She explains all this in the first chapter of'My refuge and my storm (Ara Llibres, translated by Imma Falcó), a kind of memoir that she recommends reading like a novel, as there is a constant mix of fiction and reality, filtered through memories.

Arundhati Roy (Shillong, 1961) says that if she didn't constantly live in a mixture of feelings and sensations, she couldn't be a writer. It's the same constant contradiction that characterized her relationship with her mother – a relationship that was "dark, brilliant, and brave" all at the same time – since she was the one who encouraged her to write and at the same time got angry at how she wrote. The Indian author, world-renowned for The god of small things, the novel with which he won the Booker Prize in 1997, has been published Mother Mary comes to me, a book of memoirs that the publishing house Ara Llibres has translated into Catalan as My refuge and my storm.