With 16 nominations, Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) will probably sweep the board on Sunday February 19, when Spain’s Film Academy announces the winners in the 26th annual Goya Awards. Bringing up second place will likely be Enrique Urbizu's thriller No Rest for the Wicked, which has 14 nominations, followed by Kike Maillo's directorial debut Eva with 12. Sunday night looks set to be a very public kiss and make up between Oscar-winning Almodóvar and the Academy, bringing to an end a frosty few years. The 16 nominations end a period of chilly relations between Almodóvar and the Spanish academy, which the director quit five years ago over changes to the … [Read more...] about It’s gonna be a love fest at the Goya awards
IberoArts
Spain’s literary giants are lost in English translation
An indisputable criterion of success for any novelist is when Penguin Modern Classics signs up your backlist, especially when it’s for a five-figure sum. Which is what has happened to Javier Marías. The 60-year-old Spanish writer, whose latest title, The Infatuations (Los enamoramientos), will be published in English in early 2013, joins an exclusive group of Spanish writers in Penguin’s catalogue: Cervantes, Quevedo, Jacinto Benavente, and Lorca. Yes, that’s it. Four writers: the first two of whom died in the 17th century, the next in 1954; although he stopped writing long before that. For Penguin, and most US and UK publishers, it seems that, until now, Spanish literature ended with the … [Read more...] about Spain’s literary giants are lost in English translation
Art not Bombs
It is remarkable how a small nation can fill such giant shoes in the world of contemporary sculpture as the Basque Country does through artists like Chillida, Oteiza and a dozen others. On first arriving in Spain one is struck by their oversized creations in public places, giving airs of freshness and modernity to a country no longer dark. It is later that we realise these are the same grand masters from that minuscule province whose work we find in Berlin, Paris and many other places of infinitely larger import. And these two men are contemporaries, though I have no idea if they were friends or foes but most certainly having had to be rivals, at times coming very close to magically … [Read more...] about Art not Bombs
The Outsiders!
Music doesn’t generally create history, but accompanies it for better or for worse. Same tides, same flow: rising with human comeuppance, or descending alongside a collective human crash. And the human race itself is like water: slowly flowing to the lowest point, changing its composition to rise to the top, only to fall down again. So that music is like water, we can’t live without it but it also celebrates our funerals. Horace Silver and Paul Gonsalves were two Portuguese Cape Verdeans, who made an enormous contribution to American Jazz by creating beautiful rhythmic flow, just ask Duke Ellington. I’m not a Fadista so I don’t know if there were any outside influences on the … [Read more...] about The Outsiders!
Wilco’s Spanish honeymoon
Has a rock band ever been as consistently lauded for its live performances as Wilco has by the Spanish press? “At times they seemed more adventurous than Radiohead, at others, as legendary as Bob Dylan and The Band; as fast and powerful as The E Street Band….” gushed Pablo Gil of El Mundo after the Chicago band’s November 1 concert at Madrid’s Circo Price. And Gil’s not the only gusher. In El País, Fernando Neira reported that “right now, one can’t imagine a more intense performance on a stage, no magic spell is as superlative as this.” Last year, a colleague of Neira’s on the same paper had told us: “It’s official: no one sounds better than Wilco.” And state broadcaster RTVE was at … [Read more...] about Wilco’s Spanish honeymoon
Spain’s Civil War film canon needs new urgency
It’s a terrible thing to have to say, but maybe the time has come for a moratorium on films about the Spanish Civil War. Last week saw the release of The Sleeping Voice (La voz dormida), an adaptation of Dulce Chacón’s novelised account of the vengeance exacted upon Republican women in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War by the Franco regime. In late 1939 in Ventas prison in Madrid, a group of women await the firing squad for having supported the Republican cause, or for having husbands, brothers and fathers who did. Among them are Hortensia, who fought with the militia and is pregnant by her husband Felipe – still at large – and who has been told she will be shot after she gives … [Read more...] about Spain’s Civil War film canon needs new urgency
Balagueró hits top horror form with ‘Mientras duermes’
Fear, panic and sympathy are emotions that Rec director Jaume Balagueró puts the spectator through in his new film Mientras duermes (Sleep Tight). We follow the twists and turns of the plot through the eyes of César, a disturbed doorman whose only pleasure in life comes from making others suffer. César knows everyone in the building and controls their every move. He isn’t your run-of-the-mill psycho-killer though; he’s more like a blue-collar villain who happens to vent his frustration on his unsuspecting neighbours. Luis Tosar, Marta Etura and Alberto San Juan breathe life into the characters that Alberto Marini has developed for this story, based on the book of the same name. Luis Tosar … [Read more...] about Balagueró hits top horror form with ‘Mientras duermes’
Gibson’s undimmed passion for Lorca
I first met Ian Gibson in 2004. While walking through the Madrid barrio of Lavapiés, I had spotted a face that I remembered from the book flap of his biography of Federico García Lorca. Like a weak-kneed groupie, I followed him into a bar and confessed I was a fan of the biography as well as his exploration of the events that led up to Lorca’s death, El asesinato de García Lorca. Gibson, who lived in the area, graciously invited me to sit down and have a drink and I spent 10 hurried minutes with him. Seven years on, I meet Gibson at the same bar (his choice), but this time the interview has been arranged by phone and it coincides with a new edition of his Lorca biography in Spanish, … [Read more...] about Gibson’s undimmed passion for Lorca
‘The Skin I Live In’: another Almodóvar masterpiece?
The international press has been fulsome in its praise of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest movie, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito), with some reviewers hailing it as a masterpiece, the work of a maestro confidently taking risks, pushing the boundaries of cinema while at the same time entertaining us. With the exception of El País’s Carlos Boyero — whose loathing for Almodóvar is long-standing — the Spanish press has been equally gushing, using that peculiarly empty and baroque language employed when the writer can’t think of anything genuinely meaningful to say, but has to fill the columns: or perhaps in this case it’s simply a way to avoid spoiling the plot. Because that is where the … [Read more...] about ‘The Skin I Live In’: another Almodóvar masterpiece?
Revisiting Laurie Lee’s Spain
The vista below me spread from Ronda to the Rif, a classical arrangement of sea and rock, with the mouth of the Mediterranean pierced by the wash of ships tracing a course as old as Homer. Kites and kestrels swung silently overhead, smouldering in the evening sun; and twilight approached, the pillars of Hercules turned purple and the sea poured between them in a flush of lavender. Alone, with my back to a sun-warmed rock, I finished the last of my food, gazing where Africa and Europe touched fingertips in this merging of day and night. It is over three-quarters of a century since a young Laurie Lee disembarked at the Galician city of Vigo, having crossed the Bay of Biscay, with a violin … [Read more...] about Revisiting Laurie Lee’s Spain