calatrava strikes again

A friend’s visit to Valencia made me look up one of its sonss, and one of my very favourite architects, Santiago Calatrava, to see what he is up to these days. Mr. Snow and I had discovered him by accident when we chanced upon his soaring bridge in Bilbao. I’d never seen nor walked on anything quite like it before and became a fan immediately. After that, his work seemed to pop up all over places I happened to be, like Seville, Lisbon and even in cosmopolitan and trendy Haarlemmermeer!

I’d heard he was designing the new World Trade Centre Tansportation Hub, but an astonishing structure caught my eye: the new high-speed train station for Liege in Belgium. The critics are already up in arms about how the station doesn’t fit into its surroundings, but I can’t wait to see it for myself once it’s open at the end of this year. What do you think?

what is the what reviewed

Several other books got in the way, but finally I got to read Dave Eggers’ ‘What is the What‘, his version of Valentino Achak Deng’s story of how war transported him from his village in Southern Sudan through a several refugee camps finally to his struggle to build a new life in America, with several thousand other young men collectively known as The Lost Boys of Sudan.

The book is written in the first person and jumps back and forth between America and Deng’s life story in more or less chronological order. The style was simple and concise, but variously also funny and disturbing. Most importantly for me, it gave a voice and a history to one of the many faces that stare out of photos of war zones and refugee camps. I don’t know if you’ve ever wondered how refugees get to where they are and what life there means to them. This book told me how for one person.

cannes 2008

A quite different competition was going on last weekend. It wasn’t broadcast live to Europe and beyond, but film lovers are surely keen to see the winner of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. An unruly Parisian classroom film called Entre Les Murs (or The Class in English) won the Palme d’Or this year but promises to be a completely different kettle of fish than another recent feel-good French classroom film, Être et avoir. The Guardian today meets the director to find out the story behind the film, check it out if you are curious.

Top of the class

Tuesday May 27th, 2008

Lanie Goodman, The Guardian

When the French director Laurent Cantet put up posters in Dolto College, a secondary school in a rough, working-class neighbourhood of Paris, to advertise castings for his film Entre les Murs (The Class), little did he imagine that the 25 adolescents who made the cut would later be standing beside him, grinning dazedly under the glaring stage lights as he accepted the 2008 Palme d’Or award. Sunday night’s ceremony marked the first time in 21 years that a French film has won the Cannes festival’s most coveted prize. In the spirit of jury president Sean Penn’s professed desire to make Cannes “the opposite of the Oscars”, Cantet’s film is the perfect win. It’s two hours of docu-fiction packed with rapid-fire, slangy dialogue, chronicling life in a Paris classroom where silence is anything but golden. How could Penn – who made his name as a class troublemaker in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High – possibly resist?