Geopolitics: some orange lessons

Even if it's against the message in that brilliant Orange anti-Orange turn-off-your-mobile-phone Gulliver-based commercial starred by Jack Black running on film theatres these days (I saw it last night), I'm attaching this Orange ad I saw at Nairobi airport on my way out for you don't get to see this things around in Western countries.



Don't mean we should - we have more than our fair share of anxieties already as to have posts on the walls to remind we're no longer what we used to be (don't think the average person should care too much about it either).

It's just so unusual to get your geopolitics lessons from ads rather than, say, at school!

First flag from the left is by the way Uganda's - there for closeness with Kenya I guess, rather than matching India or China as emerging powers (though you never really know these days...)

Airports and smoking (II): Dubai International Airport, Dubai, UAE

While in trasit from Nairobi at Dubai International Airport, I figured out it would be a good chance to have a cigarrette between two six-hour flights. Dubai airport being so really luxurious, it seemed it should offer equally attractive facilities to smokers in need. However, it was not the case. After a long walk through several terminals where departures gradully changed from LHR to Jaffa, you reached a small, incredibly packed and smoky room where poor addicts somehow managed to get their dose in. The “Keep door closed at all times” sign posted at the room entrance was literally impossible to respect under serious risk of suffocation.



This gave me the idea of sarting a series of photographs on smoking rooms in airports worldwide. Not than I’m too much of a traveller anyway, but I’m around every now and then. For instance, it’s widely accepted the best smoking facilities inside an airport are those ones at Barajas airport Terminal 4 in Madrid – Spain currently remaining smoker-friendly territory (not for that long though).



So this is Dubai International Airport, where a rather numerous group of rebel smokers chose to have their cigarrettes outside a specific smoking room which lied quite distant from crowded passenger traffic areas (well it was actually 5 am so crowded is a just a way of speaking).

Airports and smoking (I): Gatwick airport, London, UK

From a strictly mathematical point of view –set theory basics– a smoke ban “either within or outside a building” does actually imply a global ban – as either you are inside or outside the building.



So I was trying to locate the border between inside and outside areas, for it should be the only site where smoking is implicitly allowed. I noticed however fellow passengers weren’t being so literal about it...

La gloria del barroco

Magnífica exposición sobre el barroco de los ss. XVII y XVIII en Valencia. Gran acierto la distribución de la muestra entre cuatro maravillosos edificios - tres iglesias y un edificio civil, el Almudín. Singular simetría en las iglesias barrocas valencianas: interiores que estallan en asombroso despliegue polícromo de figuras, volutas, capiteles, púlpitos y recargadas ornamentaciones quedan ocultos tras sobrios exteriores de ladrillo que no permiten imaginar lo que hay en su interior (herencia árabe? todos estos edificios eran de hecho árabes - toda la ciudad probablemente).

Espléndido despliegue también de obras de arte seleccionadas para el evento - una
estupenda ocasión para conocer los nombres de notables escultores o pintores de los que uno nunca oyó hablar anteriormente. Hay piezas muy destacadas - la que más, probablemente el soberbio Sant Andreu de lo Spagnoletto trabajando en claroscuro à la Caravaggio.



Y tan importante como las obras expuestas es un aspecto que queda un poco en segundo plano ante el despliegue artístico: la hercúlea labor de restauración llevada a cabo por el proyecto La Llum de les Imatges, premiado con el Europa Nostra en 2006. La magnitud del trabajo de restauración y divulgación efectuado es digno del premio Príncipe de Asturias como ejemplo de cómo se afronta la recuperación de un patrimonio artístico severamente dañado. Con independencia de la opinión personal que cada uno tenga en el ámbito político, una actuación de esta naturaleza trasciende dicho ámbito para constituir en suma un trabajo muy bien hecho.

Refraining...

As he gently took part in a talk with the audience after his film was screened, I was about to ask Vahid Vakilifar, screenwriter and first-time director of Iranian film Gesher on his opinion on the difficult relations of Iranian filmmakers with their government, specially after Ahmadineyad is portrayed in the film while announcing the "pious, young Iranian scientists" having made it towards uranium centrifugation.

After listening it took him and his team three days to get to San Sebastian Film Festival "through all possible transportation means except maybe a camel" I thought it twice and decided not to be rude on a first-timer who politely explained technical challenges for video-shooting his independent film at the highly-surveilled PSEEZ petrochemical industry location (Asaluyeh, southern Iran). But I will indeed ask him if I meet him along remaining days at the venue.

Is cinema dying?

I was gathering new entries a few days ago for this 'dictionary of our times' I want to put together at some point. Along with some other issues that shoudn't really belong here such as 'Fame, Industry thereof', 'Greed' (not precisely Von Stroheim's), 'Marketing mayhem', 'Print on the crack and related fears', etc, one of the entries was as a matter of fact the one in the title of this post. Well Donostia Film Festival should be the right place to find out.



Don't know about the town you live in, but in mine cinemas are currently under siege. Plenty of then have closed down, others seem to be running on automatic pilot with an ever decreasing audience and some of them have already started to screen opera performances or Champions League football games instead of films. Only those which were never particularly successful do actually survive in a rather healthy fashion: small arthouses relying on their faithful alternative audiences (joined by a growing number of say non-alternative moviegoers these days as well - the whole point of attracting spectators is indeed about imagination).

So here we are at the film factory exit door - watching brand new models as they come out, paint still wet on them. And know what? They're as good as they ever were. Take yesterday's survey for example: a fine new outcome from the Eastern Europe film powerhouse (from Bulgaria this time, but there's another Rumanian film everyone's talking about which I still didn't have the chance of see) and yet another rock solid Danish film from Zentropa factories. Many others on the go by the way, only it was just my first day and it was such a sunny one too!

So it's crystal clear now the problem lies not at production stage. The films are there as always were, or even more for the sake of globalisation, which will allow stories from virtually any part of the world to reach mainstream events such as this one. Filmmakers and producers keep the flame alive with whatever budget they manage to make up (TV networks often providing required scaffold). But difficulties do come up somewhere down the road, presumably both at distribution and exhibition phases. I wouldn't say the situation is critical, but its evolution is indeed very worrying and the issue is not easy to tackle (incidentally: it's not all about film piracy on the web).

So the San Sebastian Festival hosted this EFP all-morning meeting yesterday under title "European Film Promotion: Promotion and Marketing of European Films Worldwide" for discussing the reasons why "the majority of European films still do not find their way into the cinemas outside of their home territories". Ten independent distributors from ten different European countries were expected to discuss the potential of new technical formats, social community platforms and business models. I wasn't there, shame on me, but exclusive interviews with selected distributors will be published at cineuropa.org some time in the near future. We should keep an eye on those ones for the meeting outcomes and good ideas on film distribution.

From queues at Victoria Eugenia to Kutxa.net: a sentimental journey

I’ve been attending this Film Festival for over 20 years now and I’ve seen it change (read ‘Jack Lemmon did never dine here’ by former Festival manager Diego Galan for an amusing story of a decade of celebrities, political violence and lots, lots of fun). And to me no change compares to the establishing of the online system for selling tickets by local Kutxa a few years ago. In the old times one would have to queue up at the Festival facilities or at the designated Kutxa office for getting tickets along the established timetable. All of that vanished the day tickets started being sold through the internet on a typical 24/7 basis.


The results were predictable: lots of sessions were sold out even before the Festival started. Non-adjusting oldtimers suddenly risked missing most expected titles because of the digital fever (the Ryanair model, I’d call it), so there was a pressing need to know what the most expected titles actually were just as they were announced by the Festival organisation. Webpages became therefore some kind of a treasure. I’d bet (though don’t know for sure) the rate of ticket sales rose through the roof as well – it’s so amazingly simple to get yours now.

But Donostia cares about its oldtimers, and wouldn’t turn its back on them by preventing them to enjoy the quiet walk towards the Festival HQs in order to buy a ticket from a human being. A given percentage of tickets shall always be available for direct sale before any film. So everyone happy (the bank above all, for it will charge a little extra expense for the online service) and free way to cinephilia for everyone.