Spanish cinema is moving.  Last month, Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, director and scriptwriter of movies like “Dark blue almost Black”  (“AzulOscuroCasiNegro”) visited DC to present “Cousinhood” (“Primos”) at the Filmest DC. He really knows the States. He started his career as a director after being awarded with a Fulbright scholarship to do his masters at Columbia University (New York)....

“My name is Francisco Sánchez Gómez, alias Paco de Lucía, and I’m a guitarist.”  That’s the way the Gaditan guitarist introduces himself on his website. In his concert in Strathmore, Washington DC, a roar of 1600 applauses sounded without an introduction. And it has been a long time since the first time he came to the States. He was only 14 when he performed as the third guitarist of José Greco...

The writer César Antonio Molina has just launched in Washington DC “Selected Poems”, a bilingual selection of poems written between 1974 and 2005, where the absence and metaphorical journeys appear as major literary landscapes. The first stop was The University of Maryland. In front of more than one hundred students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Molina spoke about...

The Spanish independent music scene has hit American roads and created a peculiar map that future generations will look back on. The platform Sounds From Spain was the perfect ambassador for the new rhythms in today’s multifaceted U.S. festival South By Southwest (SXSW) based in Austin (Texas). There, seven of the most notable Spanish indie bands: Bigott, Furguson, LA,  Za!, Guadalupe Plata,...

Francis Ford Coppola sprawls in a wicker chair. Roman Polanski looks defiantly at the camera. A young Penélope Cruz is pensive, perhaps worried about her future as an actress. Or perhaps, she is simply tired.  These are some of the situations portrayed by the Spanish photographer Jordi Socías for the Maremágnum exhibit at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington DC Most of the characters do...

“Do you want a real depiction of a cruel war….?! Then sit down, sheathe the thread and sew without a pause!”. This could be the advice from an editor in chief to his/her colleagues to get a true depiction of a cruel war.  This could also be the advice in the XV century when the only way they had to capture the cruelty of a war was in the form of a painting or a tapestry.  “The Invention of...

Did you know that the restaurants were created during the French Revolution? In these days most of the chefs worked for the court of Louis XVI in France. When the court dissolved during the struggle all these cooks became unemployed. To earn their living they began to cook for other people: restaurants were born. This was one of the stories the Spanish culinary legend Ferrán Adrià shared with...

Are you interested in the environment?  Do you feel restless when pictures try to communicate a complaint? If so, then visit E•CO the photographic exhibition at the Instituto Cervantes Chicago (through January 12th, 2012). When the Spanish Ministry of Culture asked curator Claudi Carreras  to identify a group of collectives from Europe and Latin America to make a visual essay about the...

The Embassy of Spain in Washington is pleased to present the Fall/Winter Cultural Program of SPAIN arts & culture. From September to January 2012, the program will offer the most innovative selection of the artistic and cultural Spanish landscape to the American public, through an extensive program in 15 different cities in the USA. SPAIN arts & culture is an ambitious program jointly...