“I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy.” These words of Patricia (Jean Seberg) – the protagonist of the film Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960) – express the elusive restlessness of director Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022), of his era and of his cinema. The film – focused on the misadventures of a car thief, wanted for the murder of a policeman – is Godard’s first revolutionary feature film and a...
Honor has played a very important role in Mediterranean cultures. As a traditional social element based on verbally established pacts, it has guaranteed respect for and fulfillment of contracted obligations. Although it is an individual who makes a pact, honor transcends the individual dimension to extend to the collective, to the family. Every person receives from birth a share of power that is closely intertwined with the honor of a family, to an extent that depends on the family hierarchy....
The Christmas we celebrate this year finds us in a state of war, on the sidelines of a dramatic situation where communities are destroyed, some people kill, and others die. Uncontrolled fury buries men and women under the rubble of their homes, hits the bewildered elderly, abandoned without support or assistance, and overwhelms children in the innocence of their daily lives. On the sidelines, but emotionally involved, we feel the dangers knocking at our door. The consequences of the conflict...
In any current Church institution with an apostolate that is even minimally open to the social context, we find people whose origins and personal, existential situations are increasingly different and distant from what could be defined as the traditional ecclesial model. As much as some people may perhaps retain a measure of prejudice against what is religious-ecclesial, or even reject it, more and more often there prevails in the general perception a remoteness, a distance, a sense of not belonging....
Africa, like the whole world, woke up on February 24, 2022, to the news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a clear violation of international law and the UN Charter. Faced with the same reality, the international community reacted in different ways. While the U.S. and its Western allies activated a series of economic and diplomatic measures against Russia and set up a support system for Ukraine, the Global South has shown rather diverse and more circumspect attitudes. Indeed, some...
It is always a stimulating experience to come across artists who are dissatisfied with their creations, because such frustration is the result of arrows pointing to a further direction. This is the case with Romanian director Andrei Ujica[1] in his encounter with Pier Paolo Pasolini. In the spring of 2000, Ujica was invited by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain to make a short film based on Pasolini’s documentary Sopraluoghi in Palestina per “Il Vangelo secondo Matteo” (Location Hunting in...
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