South America
Thomas H. Green
Stacey Dooley is a chirpy media personality from Luton who first created TV ripples in 2008 on a BBC Three show called Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts. She made an impression then as a high street fashion fan who bridled at the Third World labour involved in much cheap garment production.So far, so Wikipedia - I’d never heard of her and was nonplussed when she popped up like a ditsy, toothy holiday rep fronting a travelogue programme investigating Peru’s ascension to the forefront of global cocaine production. This hour-long show was the first of three Stacey Dooley Investigates specials about the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
CSS appeared riding the 2007 “nu rave” music media furore – their catsuit-wearing lead singer, Lovefoxxx, even dated one of scenester leaders The Klaxons for a while. That whole business is ancient history but, unfortunately, a host of great bands associated with the hype – notably The Klaxons and New Young Pony Club – have had a job finding purchase since their initial moment in the sun. The same applies to the Brazilian four-piece Cansei de Ser Sexy, a creative man down since the only male member of the band, Adriano Cintra, left last year. From the evidence of their fourth album, and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The show which Ute Lemper brought to the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the London Literature Festival - “Pablo Neruda: A Song Cycle of Love Poems” - is brand-new; the six-piece band (with which she has just recorded it, and which will be touring it) was performing it live for the first time. This Neruda project, a series of 12 love poems, is different from Lemper's most recent Charles Bukowski venture, which she succinctly described to Samira Ahmed this week on Women's Hour as "very garage, jazz-influenced, open, theatrical and dirty". As a continuous piece, the Neruda is also a departure Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Latin Americans are the current masters of minimalist cinema, films in which nothing much seems to be happening on the surface, but a world of emotion and meaning bubbles beneath. Such films require a little patience and investment, for sure, but offer considerable returns. And like last year’s award-winning Las acacias from Argentina, the Chilean Thursday Till Sunday signals the debut of a filmmaker with the skill to match her cinematic convictions.Both films are road movies, not in the "wham bam", eventful sense of a Hollywood road movie, but modest, small-scale, quiet journeys, involving Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With the customarily narrow perspective that informs much film distribution in the UK, we might be forgiven for assuming there is just one subject in Brazilian cinema: crime; in particular, the drug-related gang wars in the favelas. We certainly haven’t seen much to suggest otherwise, since City of God.Of course, with 100-odd movies released each year, there is a far greater breadth at play. Like their counterparts throughout Latin America, Brazilian filmmakers are adept at depicting their fluid, culturally and socially diverse societies on screen, often in films that defy genre or any such Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
There’s an episode in the first season of Mad Men in which the ad execs of Sterling Cooper brainstorm a campaign for Richard Nixon, just prior to the 1960 presidential election. Dramatic irony being what it is, it’s a rare opportunity to watch our anti-heroes working on a pitch (based chiefly around smear tactics) that is predestined to fail. By contrast, Pablo Larraín’s No chronicles how a team of ad men in 1980s Chile, led by Gael Garcia Bernal’s maverick René, put together a campaign to topple a dictator that we know will succeed against all odds.No is the third film in a loose trilogy Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Often it takes a generation or two before a country can address its dark days on films; Hitler didn’t feature in a central role in a German film until Downfall, in 2004. This timorousness was certainly the case in Chile, where in the immediate years following the end of General Pinochet’s dictatorship, in 1990, the local cinema was dominated by sex comedies.But the renaissance in the country’s film industry over the past decade has been accompanied by a willingness to look back. Andres Wood’s Machuca led the way, in 2004, with a powerful child’s-view account of the days leading to the army Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marcos Valle: Marcos Valle/Garra/Vento Sul/Previsão do TempoIn 1968, having already done time in Sérgio Mendes & Brazil 66, Marcos Valle was selling bossa nova and samba to America, appearing on The Andy Williams Show in a blazer and roll neck. By the year’s end he was back in Brazil, which at the time was ruled by a fully-fledged dictatorship. Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil would go into exile but Valle wilfully chose the opposite path. His music and appearance changed: the former moving away from popular Brazilian styles and incorporating outside influences; the latter becoming Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We got to the beach around the 10-minute mark. Or “semi-naked suburbia”, as Michael Palin called it. And started patrolling the sands for rounded Brazilian rumps (female). Apparently only adolescent boys do this sort of thing, and television cameramen. A local scholar explained the terms deployed to describe the various body types. The melon, the guitar, the ... you don’t want to know. Palin certainly didn’t look as if he did.You sort of know where you are with Brazil. It’s one of those countries you can feel you’ve visited without ever having actually got round to going. Indeed, until he was Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If you are tired of life, tired of London, or even tired of love, muster the remaining fibres of your frazzled being and do whatever it takes to get tickets for ...como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si... or any of the other performances in the Pina Bausch "World Cities" retrospective on at Sadler’s Wells and the Barbican over the next four weeks.Inspired by the sights and sounds of Santiago de Chile, which commissioned it, and also surely by youth, ...como el musguito... is a bittersweet exploration of longing and desire, frustration and futility. It features the youngest dancers in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Perhaps it’s not a strange coincidence that this week brings two films about the precious commodity that is water. (The other is The Source.) More than oil, more than land, certainly more than ideology, one day the thing mankind will fight over is access to the element without which life is unsustainable. Written by Ken Loach's sometime scriptwriter Paul Laverty, Even the Rain is an impeccably liberal study of ownership of the water supply that doubles as a parable about modern imperialism. Two morality tales for the price of one, it also wags its finger at big-budget film-makers who visit Read more ...
joe.muggs
Welcome to our second show, brought to you again from the Red Bull Studio in London where it was recorded by Brendon Harding.This time, Peter and Joe are joined live in the studio by two guests: friend of theartsdesk and musical polymath Mara Carlyle, and Arthur Jeffes of Sundog and Penguin Café. Mara discusses sharing management with J-Lo, and sings Gershwin with a ukulele, while Arthur discusses continuing the legacy of his father, Penguin Café Orchestra founder Simon Jeffes, and exclusively plays us some new material from his Sundog project, hot from the hard drive.Elsewhere you can hear Read more ...