Whoever goes to see the exhibition Women in Revolt! at the Tate Britain in London, dedicated to feminist activism between the 70s and 90s, has an extra advantage: you will get a snack. One of the works on display is An Edible Family in a Caravan, which consists of exactly what the title says, an edible working class family, made of different types of cake. The work is a recreation of one that the artist Bobby Baker made in 1976 in a precarious house in the Stepney neighborhood, east of London, where she also lived. It consists of a baby, son, daughter, father and mother made of cookies and cake (unlike the original 1976 installation, the cake is now vegan). The public is invited to help themselves to pieces of cake and volunteers from an art school replenish cups of tea. On her day, Baker, a pioneer of so-called “edible art,” said that she wanted to make a work that was not elitist and that moved away from the patriarchal approaches of the art world.
SEMPRún, ALSO A FILMMAKER
Although he is usually thought of as a politician and writer, Jorge Semprún also intermittently kept one foot in the cinema. On the 13th and 14th, filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gavras will be in Barcelona to present two of the three films on which they both collaborated at the Filmoteca. The first will be Section Spéciale, a 1975 film with a script adapted in four hands by Semprún and Costa-Gavras, a fiction feature that tells the story of six leftists retaliated by the Vichy regime. The next day the only film that Semprún signed as director will be screened, also presented by the Greek director, a documentary titled The Two Memories in which figures such as Santiago Carrillo, María Casares, Federica Montseny, Ian Gibson, Núria Espert, Juan Goytisolo will be screened. , Dionisio Ridruejo or José María Gil Robles talking about the civil war and exile. The film, which was shot in the summer of 1972, was censored in Spain until the Transition.
FLOWER, "PERRE" REVELATION
It is difficult to leave watching Un amor, Isabel Coixet's adaptation of Sara Mesa's novel, without thinking about Sieso, the dog in the film who stars in some of the most emotionally intense scenes. The canine actor who plays Sieso is actually called Flor and, as is also mentioned in the film, he is an intersex dog, with male and female genitalia. Coixet has explained that as soon as she saw him arrive at the dog casting, with his scars on his face, she knew that this was the animal she needed for her film. And he has also reassured the many fans that he has earned in the cinema: he must have suffered a lot in life but now he lives happily with a foster family.
MUSICAL, BUT NOT NOTICED
The new version of Mean Girls, which will premiere in January 2024, is a musical. Let's go to a musical-musical. But no one could guess that from the movie's trailer, which doesn't contain a single song from the original Broadway musical it's adapting and instead uses a song by Olivia Rodrigo. The decision to market the film, disguising what it really is and perhaps trying to capture that audience that perhaps loves the original 2004 film but is not a fan of musicals, seems a bit strange, although perhaps it is understandable if you think that The musical in question was only on stage for a couple of seasons, from 2018 to 2020 and fell victim to the pandemic. Another interesting twist in the new version is that the protagonist no longer seems to be Cady Heron, Lindsay Lohan's role in the original, but the evil Regina George, the queen of the Plastics gang, played by the emerging Renée Rapp , which we saw in the series The Sexual Life of College Girls. A warning for those allergic to the musical: Wonka and The Color Purple are too.
