Thursday, September 14, 2006

Mario Benedetti’s Anniversary

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Uruguayan writer; one of Latin America's best known writers
Born September 14, 1920
Paso de los Toros, Uruguay
Mario Benedetti (born September 14, 1920) is an Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet.

Benedetti was born in Paso de los Toros, Tacuarembó;, Uruguay. He is not well known in the English-speaking world, but in the Spanish-speaking world he is considered one of Latin America's most important living writers. In 1946 he married Luz López Alegre.

From 1973 to 1985, when a military dictatorship ruled Uruguay, Benedetti lived in exile in Buenos Aires, Lima, Havana, and Spain. He currently divides his time between Montevideo and Madrid. He has been granted Honoris Causa doctorates by the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, and the Universidad de Alicante, Spain. On June 7 2005 he was named as the recipient of the Premio Menéndez Pelayo.


You can find the review here
Please visit SPLALit aStore

Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles has signed on to direct Blindness

Oscar-nominated director Fernando Meirelles has signed on to direct an ambitious film based on Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago's novel Blindness. And he's partnering with two of Canada's most avant-garde and prodigious cinematic talents, Don McKellar and Rhombus Media's Niv Fichman.

The film, based on the 1995 novel by the renowned Portuguese writer that remorselessly rubs readers' faces in the apocalypse, will have a budget north of $25-million (U.S.) and is slated to begin production this summer.


You can find the article here
Please visit SPLALit aStore

Federico Garcia Lorca - Biographical note

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the brutal assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca, widely proclaimed to be Spain’s finest writer. He was murdered at the age of 38 by a fascist militia and thrown into an unmarked grave.

It is unsurprising that Lorca died at the hands of General Franco’s supporters. He stood in defiance of everything that Spain’s fascist dictator represented.

Lorca was gay. He was a celebrated poet and playwright, as well as a noted artist, pianist and composer.

He used his artistic ability to explore modernity, what it meant to be human, and to desire, and he raged against the injustices inflicted on ordinary people by wealth and power.


You can find the article here

Interview with Leonardo Padura

Mario Conde is Cuba's best-known cop. A hard-boiled, hard-drinking, rule-breaking, loose-living police lieutenant who views the world around him through a hungover haze of cynicism and rum, he is no revolutionary role model. The Havana he inhabits, with its nervous transvestites, corrupt ex-officials and moralising newsreaders, is a rough old place. But the cop and his city have no shortage of admirers.
Leonardo Padura, a 50-year-old journalist-turned-author, has recently won his third Premio Hammett (the International Association of Crime Writers award) for his latest Mario Conde novel. And yet, he says, what he is writing now, with its references to misbehaviour and unconventional sexuality, would never have been published in the stricter Cuba in which he grew up.


You can find the review here

Mike Newell has begun filming Love in the Time of Cholera

British director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) has begun filming Love in the Time of Cholera, based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 1985 novel, in Cartagena.

Newell, also known for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Donnie Brasco, filmed scenes this weekend in the walled colonial Caribbean city's Factoria street, according to members of the crew.

The film's cast includes Spaniard Javier Bardem and Italian Giovanna Mezzogiorno, as well as Colombian actress Catalina Sandino, nominated in 2005 for an Oscar as best actress in a leading role for her performance in Maria, Full of Grace.


You can find the review here