Every year, the D’A festival invites a filmmaker linked to the contest to make a small miniature, more than a short, a micro, that connects with the sensitivity of the event. Other years have done Carla Simón, Albert Serra or Luis López Carrasco. This year the person in charge has been Carlos Marqués-Marcet, who has sent a very personal one-minute piece in which he is accredited, playing himself, Dr. Alberto Lennie, ultrasound technician. Marqués-Marcet, by the way, is working on a script about euthanasia in Switzerland with Clara Roquet, also a writer and director. The festival, which takes place in Barcelona until April 2, has a program this year that is as exhaustive as it is ambitious, with highly anticipated milestones such as the masterclass that Celine Sciamma will give next Tuesday or the cycle dedicated to the filmmaker Joanna Hogg.
ATTACK IN THE CYCLADES
Relations between archaeologists and tour agents are never friendly anywhere, but in Greece they have been approaching catastrophe for decades. Last week Greek archaeologists who belong to the civil service corps went on strike to protest against the brutal attack on a colleague that occurred a few days ago on the island of Mykonos. Some unknown persons approached Manolis Pssarros, 53, when he was about to get into his car, beat him up and broke several ribs. As head of the Cyclades’ heritage protection service, Pssarros has the thankless job of directing tourist businesses to respect the historic stones, even if it means losing money on an island that can be crowded in summer. To make matters worse, the Minister of Culture, Lina Mendoni, although she is an archaeologist by training, has been calling her former colleagues “fans of the past” (which seems like a no-brainer) and regressionists, and tends to always side with the businessmen.
TARANTINO LOVES THE CRITIC
Ever since news broke that Quentin Tarantino is shooting what he says will be his last film about a leading film critic, all fingers have been pointing to Pauline Kael, the legendary reviewer for The New Yorker. Self-taught, passionate, as brilliant as it is poisonous, with little desire to make friends and decidedly bigger than life, Kael’s life is certainly one for a Tarantino script. The filmmaker does not come from the world of criticism, like François Truffaut, but since he was a child, when he obsessively read texts on cinema and knew all the signatures, he has had a reverential respect for those who practice the trade. In Inglourious Basterds she made the character of Sergeant Hilcox, the dapper action man played by Michael Fassbender, also a film critic. And, in both her book, Film Meditations (Reservoir Books) and her podcast, she devotes a lot of time and space to those who are judging the films.
MALIA OBAMA, SCREENWRITER
The series Swarm, the new and very dark creation of Donald Glover and Janine Nabers, managers of Atlanta, has just premiered on Amazon Prime. As they already demonstrated in that one, the format is variable and elastic, but part of Dre’s character, a fan of a Beyoncé-based singer who spends her days defending her on the internet and loses track of reality. One of the most intriguing things about the series is that it has Malia Obama, the daughter of the former US president, among its main writers. “Some of her ideas were very wild and very cool and fun,” Nabers said of Malia Obama in an interview. The former first daughter, who already did an internship on Girls when she was barely a teenager, is credited as the main author of one of the episodes of the series, which has already been sold as “the wildest”.
ROUTE THROUGH CANNABIS DESIGN
Marijuana shops are the new fashion boutiques. What happened a decade and a half ago, when fashion firms began to hire renowned architects to design headquarters that were themselves a temple worth visiting (and at the same time the brand’s most expensive advertisement), with illustrious collaborations such as Prada’s with Rem Koolhas, is now being replicated in California with new cannabis dispensaries. Since the recreational use of marijuana was legalized in 2016, California has cemented its long-standing reputation as a cannabis enthusiast’s paradise, and cannabis-related stores generate millions in renovation investments. The most instagrammable is Wyllow, a neon and pink dispensary designed by the Space Objekt firm, but you can take a route through other stores designed to look like a Genius Bar (the space in Apple stores where help is requested when something breaks). retrofuturist, a spa in the 70s or an Asian supermarket.