Sunday 15 February 2009

Cultural Sunday

It's been a while since we had a cultural Sunday post, so here we go:

Peruvian film La teta asustada (The Milk of Sorrow)* has carried off the Golden Bear award at the Berlin film festival, which means we'll almost certainly be hearing more of it in the future. It deals with the aftermath of the political violence in 1980s Peru as well, so I'm certainly interested in seeing it.

Colombian magazine Cambio has an article about art projects designed to draw attention to human rights issues, including the silhouettes which represent the disappeared in Buenos Aires. It warns that such works may be "well-intentioned" but can quickly lose their meaning and end up explaining little about the atrocities they refer to. I wouldn't be as pessimistic as all that, but I do agree it's a point worth making.
Obras de arte sobre conflictos recientes contribuyen al duelo colectivo, pero tambian lo banalizan

Finally, Petrona Rivas has won first prize in the Daily Life category of the World Press Photo competition, for her image of a victim of gang violence in El Salvador.

*I noticed one English-language source, apparently from Cuba, translated the film's title as The Frightened Tit. Thankfully the translators of movie titles don't need to be quite that literal.

3 comments:

mattheil said...

Ouch, hey, Lillie. Better don't quote Bloomberg for pieces on culture, cinema etc...as they managed to put a pic of "The Messenger" to the article (Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson in the pic).

(But Forster btw deserves credit. He was the only one with a political statement at the presentation and the later press conference).

Lillie Langtry said...

Ha! Yes, that is unclear but to be fair, the article does mention The Messenger further down. It's more like the pic is just poorly placed, and I very much doubt that was done by the author. I picked this article because it had the most detail (in English) from the brief search I did.

Barbara Drake said...

What a powerful, horrific image captured by Rivas. Heartbreaking. Thanks for drawing attention to this.

--An American in Lima