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The best received of Spanish series at last month’s Málaga Festival, “Nights in Tefía” (“Las Noches de Tefía”) hit the festival with already strong buzz. The latest from Spain’s Buendía Estudios and SVOD service Atresplayer Premium whose titles also include “Veneno” and “Cardo,” “Nights in Tefía” proved a critics’ favourite. Written and directed by Miguel del Arco, a distinguished Spanish playwright and theater director, it turns on Airam Betancor who, living in Tenerife in 2004, recognises an old man shuffling down the street: Robles.

He’s the same man who, 42 years before, as a prison guard at the euphemistically named Tefía Penitentiary Agricultural Colony on Fuerteventura, another Canary Island, had beaten and tortured Airam as a teen inmate of the Francoist labor camp designed as a dumping ground for undesirables, from political dissidents to the socially unruly and homosexuals.

The sight of Robles, who has moved into Airam’s...

It may well be an unconscious impulse but the writers are directly or indirectly influenced by their socio-political millieu, even when opposing it, and you don’t need to be a Marxist to acknowledge that.

As Edward Said showed in his examination of ‘Orientalism’, or recent works showcasing the overt or covert politics of such literary figures as William Wordsworth (Jonathan Bate’s "Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World") and Jane Austen, politics can intrude into the poetic realm or comedies of manners — or other forms of fiction, too. And this can span the entire gamut from literary classics to pulp fiction.

The Cold War is a fitting example. As two contrasting systems of social and political organisation vied for global influence, the conflict for influencing hearts and minds underpinned the diplomatic and military manoeuvres.

Duncan White’s "Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War" (2019) offers...

Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.Ivana Miloš, Weeping Willow Meets Andriesh (2021), nature print, monotype and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cm.The soul of a tree is my soul; the heart of a tree is my heart; the sap of the willow is my life. —The Story of Aoyagi, Lafcadio HearnWhenever you turn on the news these days, you are likely to see a burning forest. These images of fires across the world bring with them the unbearable sound of screaming tree spirits. They may only be audible to some of us, but once you finally hear them weep, you can’t sleep any longer.

A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Jean-Marie Straub's Communists (2014) is showing on Mubi from October 8 – November 6, 2019.The souls of all my dears have flown to the stars.Thank God there’s no one left for me to lose–so I am free to cry. This air is madefor the echoing of songs.—Excerpt from Anna Akhmatova's The Return (1944)In the final shot of Jean-Marie Straub's Communists (2014), Danièle Huillet sits alone on in the dirt, high up on Mount Etna in Sicily and all but static, as Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16—his last major work before his death from alcohol cirrhosis—swells around her. She is strikingly still, staring off ahead as if stupefied by the living world. After a long pause, she says two words: "neue Welt"—new world.This reanimation of Huillet,...

Hating the Oscars. Hardly an original pursuit—the act itself has a storied history—though certainly an irresistible one. No less a figure than George C. Scott, Academy Award winner for the title role in Patton (1970), memorably dubbed it “the two-hour meat parade.”At that special time each year, having reliably tuned out that months-long drone of speculation from the movie pundits, again one must ask: can I summon up the wherewithal to engage with the scandals du jour, the snubs, the demographic shifts, the sneering wit of the hosts, or, even worse, to ignore it all completely? Raymond Chandler, as true a cynic as did ever put pen to paper, hated them well and hated them early in his report from the 1948 ceremony:“If you can go past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of the human intelligence; if...

Redmayne lauded for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.

Belgian director Gust van den Berghe’s Lucifer was presented with the Grand Prix – including a €10,000 grant from the City of Tallinn - at the 18th edition of the Black Nights Film Festival (Nov 14-30) at the weekend.

This is the first year that Tallinn’s International Competition was held with Black Nights now operating as a Fiapf-designated non-specialised competitive festival.

Van den Berghe’s third feature had its world premiere in Rome’s Cinema d’Oggi competition at the Rome Film Festival in October and is being handled internationally by the Paris/Mexico-based sales company Ndm.

The International Jury including Finnish actress Kati Outinen and film-makers Andrei Proshkin (Russia) and Tomasz Wasilewski (Poland) awarded the prize for Best Cinematographer to Erik Põllumaa for his work on Estonian film-maker Martti Helde’s In The Crosswind and for Best Director to Kyrgyzstan’s Marat Sarulu for Move...

Other prizes included a Best Actor prize for Eddie Redmayne for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.

Belgian director Gust van den Berghe’s Lucifer was presented with the Grand Prix – including a €10,000 grant from the City of Tallinn - at the 18th edition of the Black Nights Film Festival (Nov 14-30) at the weekend.

This is the first year that Tallinn’s International Competition was held with Black Nights now operating as a Fiapf-designated non-specialised competitive festival.

Van den Berghe’s third feature had its world premiere in Rome’s Cinema d’Oggi competition at the Rome Film Festival in October and is being handled internationally by the Paris/Mexico-based sales company Ndm.

The International Jury including Finnish actress Kati Outinen and film-makers Andrei Proshkin (Russia) and Tomasz Wasilewski (Poland) awarded the prize for Best Cinematographer to Erik Põllumaa for his work on Estonian film-maker Martti Helde’s In The Crosswind and for...

What has the Leveson inquiry revealed about Jeremy Hunt's taste in art? Did he get to Take That? And how big an N-Dubz fan is he?

On Monday, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt tweeted "With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come (Gratiano, Merchant of Venice)", a celebratory quote for Shakespeare's birthday. On Tuesday, "Is this a dagger which I see before me?" might have seemed more appropriate.

Perhaps surprisingly, only two of the emails released by the Leveson inquiry this week indicated that Hunt had an interest in the arts beyond the Murdochs' BSkyB takeover bid. One, from News Corp's public affairs executive Frédéric Michel to James Murdoch, reported grabbing the culture secretary "before he went in to see Swan Lake" to discuss the bid. In another, sent later that year, Michel plaintively asked Hunt's special adviser Adam Smith whether Ed Vaizey's refusal to meet News Corp while the...