It has become common knowledge, with the exception of a few obstinate oil magnates, that there’s a limit to the planet’s natural resources. If the consumption model of industrialized countries were to be adopted globally, the price of petrol or water would no longer be a priority. In all probability, the main concern would be a shortage of oxygen.
In times of crisis a new way of living is being developed, cohousing. It means leaving together while still having one’s own individual spaces, rediscovering the true value of neighbourhood that urban forms of existence have quashed.
The Transylvania International Film Festival, or TIFF, which takes place every year in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca in the Carpathians, was founded in 2001, when the first edition was won by a local film, Occident, from rookie director Cristian Mungiu.
Who would have ever thought that cave art dating back more than 8,000 years could be treated like an ‘infidel’ and found guilty of religious offence to such an extent that they have to be obliterated? That’s what happened in the fall of 2012 in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, when a group of Salafi Muslims destroyed a number of prehistoric stone carvings at an archaeological site.
In his manga book Onward Towards Our Noble Death, renowned Japanese artist and cartoonist Shigeru Mizuki sets to paper Japan’s New Guinea campaign during the Second World War, which he personally lived through and documented.
A British crowdsourcing project brings the everyday heroes of the First World War back to life by Tom Highway Everyone was at that ‘party’. Paul Klee, a leading figure of Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism, as well as of the Bauhaus movement, painted camouflage on German fighter planes. Maurice Ravel, the composer of Bolero, was a volunteer truck driver near Verdun. Basil Rathbone, cinema’s Sherlock Holmes, slipped behind enemy lines disguised as a tree, freeing hostages and sussing out military secrets.
Spoils, treasures and our artistic heritage. Many war movies are about the personal dramas of a handful of soldiers, who often stand in for the wartime experiences of armies and people at large. Films about the more strategic or abstract aspects of war are few and far between – a famous, Oscarwinning example being the biopic Patton, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and cowritten by a young Francis Ford Coppola – because viewers like to be able to relate to the characters. A tiny subset of war films has looked at the complex fate of art during armed conflicts, a rich subject matter only a few features have explored, including John Frankenheimer’s 1964 classic The Train, with Burt Lancaster.
