Hi all!
I hope you had a nice September :-) Mine had a real back-to-school feeling to it because I was doing so many workshops. One of them was with the students at ESAD Matosinhos and Sofia Meira, who is in charge of the printing department there. They wrote and illustrated fake news and Sofia risoprinted a very cute newspaper:
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It was a bit of a race to get it all done in four days but thankfully we did it! The newspaper is called Ask the Audience (like the lifeline in "Who wants to be a millionaire?") because me and Sofia were often unsure on how to print this and would decide to ask the audience (aka the students) for a vote!
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Meanwhile, in Porto: this weekend there's MICAR (Porto's Anti Racist Film Festival) happening at Rivoli. They published a book of essays alongside the festival and invited a few artists to contribute, and I was one of them!
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I made a comic based on a quote by Edouard Glissant in the documentary "One World in Relation", which will be shown in the festival.
You can check out the programme here and the book is available in SOS Racismo's website.
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and finally:
I'm bringing Escrivaninha back!
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It's a writing session I hosted a couple of times this year. The idea is that this is not a workshop, but a space for writing. I facilitate the session and will bring some exercises, and the goal is just for all of us to write together, with no pressure for it to be any good. The sessions are in English (unless everyone is Portuguese!) but you are free to write in whatever language you want.
You can sign up here. Participation is free but I will be asking for donations, if anything to pay the zoom account costs :-)
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So, now that I got all work announcements out of the way. I wanted to share with you some of the things I've been watching and reading lately, but honestly, I've only watched one film this whole month so it's not like I did a lot of picking to give you this suggestion:
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The film was Dona Flor e seus Dois Maridos (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands), by Bruno Barreto. It's based on the novel by Jorge Amado and scored by Chico Buarque. I knew the song from this film and had never realized that it had different versions, that Buarque wrote 3 versions that play in different parts of the film to match the story. Both the songs and film manage to be sexual, mournful and funny at the same time and it's a beautiful mix.
After watching the film I researched the director and was very surprised to find he is the same person who, many decades later, directed View from the Top, a Gwyneth Paltrow romantic comedy from the early 2000s. This is a film almost no one has heard of, but I happen to be reading a book completely dedicated to it!
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Richard Ayoade (you may know him from the IT Crowd) at some point watched View from the Top and thought "What would it look like, if someone took this film very seriously, as if it was a classic of cinema, and wrote a whole book about it?" And so he did. (It's really funny to watch him try to explain this project in interviews.)
Anyway, I have no conclusion for this, just amazed at the coincidence that Barreto made these two polar opposite films and somehow I'm an audience for both.
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That's all for now, hope to see you around in the cinema, or in Escrivaninha, or somewhere else!
Best,
Joana
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