Photos: Classiq Journal
“The particulars of new places grabbed me and held me,
the sweep of new coasts, cold, lovely dawns. The world
was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so much to see…
I liked surrendering to the onrush, the uncertainty, the serendipity
of the road. And I generally liked being a stranger,
an observer, often surprised.”
William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A surfing life
Viewing
Adolescence, 2025
Philip Barantini
“Do you like me?” In the course of one week, I had heard from five different persons about the mini-series Adolescence. None of them is on social media. Hmmm… This is something that reaches far. So we made a one-month subscription to Netflix (we don’t watch Netflix) just to watch this mini-series. It marked me. It affects you on so many levels. The greatest battle of our time is one: not to lose the connection with our children. This film is tough to watch as a parent. It is so important and urgent this very day. Everything in the life of these teenagers is brought down to one simple yet crucial question: “Do you like me?” A desperate quest amplified by social media and cyber bullying. The sequence shots make you not want to blink. You are afraid you are missing out on something important. In the course of an hour, you are given a slice of life, you are taken into the lives of these characters, in real time. The third episode (there are four, each approaching the subject from a different angle) shook me to the core. The last five minutes of the last episode tore me apart. And I feel like mentioning here the entire crew and cast, but I will just limit myself to the principal cast, who are all remarkable: Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper, Erin Doherty, Faye Marsay, Ashley Walters, Christine Tremarco, Amélie Plese.
This film generates conversation. So let’s do that. We all have to look at this. Everyone plays a part in it: parents, the educational system, social media, society, community. It concerns us all.
Ainda estou aqui (I’m Still Here), 2024
Walter Salles
Director Walter Salles’ (Central Station, On the Road, The Motorcycle Diaries) first feature film in 12 years, I’m Still Here is set mostly during the time of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985). Based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s eponymous memoir, it tells the story of the author’s father, Rubens Paiva, a former congressman arrested in 1971, and the resultant impact of his forced disappearance on his wife, Eunice (the magnificent Fernanda Torres), and their five children. A story of resilience, resistance, strength, of never giving up. I have already seen it twice and I am still thinking about this film, from the opening scenes bathed in light on the Rio de Janeiro beach that invite you into the heart of this happy family and then seeing how everything suddenly shifts after the dramatic events. I am looking forward to going into many more details in an up-coming interview that it’s currently in the works.
The Sandlot, 1993
A small American town in the 1960s, summertime. A group of young boys are the sandlot team. All they want to do is play baseball, during the long hot days of summer, when everything seems to stand still, except for one thing that’s constantly on their mind: play baseball. But it’s not about big games, making into the school team and so on. They play ball because they love the game and because they just want to hang out together. It’s not about winning and losing. This is not a film about success, the manic preoccupation of parents today (I have tried to read only two parenting books and one of them I highly recommend you not to read, and that’s How to Raise Successful People, by Esther Wojcicki). It allows kids to just be kids and have a childhood, and create a world of their own, with their own rules and dreams and fears they find a way to face, and make memories that will carry you through life. In the course of a summertime afternoon, everything can change, and you can make friends for life. That’s the magic of childhood and the magic of summer.
Belle et Sébastien, 2013
Nicolas Vanier
“A true ode to nature, it’s the story of an encounter between a lonely child and a wild dog. The story of Sébastien who tames Belle. The tale of a little boy searching for his mother, an old man searching for his past, a resistance fighter searching for love, a young woman in search of adventure, and a German lieutenant seeking forgiveness.” It’s the most beautiful description of the film, courtesy of director Nicolas Vanier.
Flow, 2024
Gints Zilbalodis
A captivating adventure that shows us again that cinema is image, not words.
La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), 1939
Jean Renoir
There are films I regularly revisit, with Hitchcock’s and Renoir’s always on rotation. “I learned the rules of the game from The Rules of the Game,” is how Robert Altman referred to Gosford Park (2001), inspired by Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu (1939). On the surface, Renoir’s film takes the superficial form of a country house farce resulted in an accidental death, a case of mistaken identity. It is a brilliantly constructed film, an intricate flux of movements and events, an extraordinary web of allusions, parodies and recurring motifs, where no scene is unnecessary, where every line of dialogue counts and has hidden meaning, and where the camera becomes one of the characters – it always looks like there are more scenes than one happening in one frame and the photography of The Rules of the Game is considered the precursor of the depth of field in cinematography.
It is the film in which Jean Renoir, the most humanist of directors, showed best his sense and taste of comedy that comes from his deep understanding of human nature and tragedy and his great ability of adapting his artistic sensibility to the realities of the contemporary world. La règle du jeu was made on the brink of the Second World War and it is the most advanced expression of prewar French realism, a portrayal of a corrupted, rarefied, ignorant, decadent society and of a morally defunct upper-class on the eve of the outbreak of world disaster. “When I made The Rules of the Game, I knew where I was going. I knew the evil that gnawed at my contemporaries. My instinct guided me, my awareness of the imminent danger led me to the situations and the dialogue. And my friends were like me. How worried we were! I think the film is a good one. But it is not difficult to work well when the compass of anxiety points in the true direction.”
Reading
I will always love the mountain more than the sea. It’s been part of my life more consistently from an early age, and a defining part of my childhood. There is a different kind of fascination I have with the ocean, it’s a fascination from afar. You could say I have a romantic view on it, fueled by my readings. I love to read about adventures at sea and lives inextricably connected to the ocean.
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, documenting author William Finnegan’s surfing life, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 – the author is a staff writer for The New Yorker and much of his writing career has been dedicated to conflict reporting in regions such as Mexico, Asia and the Balkans. It’s not a book about sports or about romantising the image of the surfer, it’s an exploration of a sport as a life’s passion, a story of life’s meandering ups and downs. It’s about chasing freedom, about a youthful thirst for adventure, about seeing the world by sinking deep in a place, near and far, about courage and feeling, about unpredictability and awareness, about fighting fear, revolt, reason, the waves. “Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness — a dynamic, indifferent world. At thirteen, I had mostly stopped believing in God, but that was a new development, and it had left a hole in my world, a feeling that I’d been abandoned. The ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.” It’s about a whole culture and a way of life, psychedelic at times. But it’s also about the social context of the ‘60, ‘70s and ‘80s and a literary road movie that is timeless.
Listening
The soundtrack: Ainda estou aqui (I’m Still Here)
The podcast: Soundings, Jamie Brisick in conversation with William Finnegan. They talk about life, surfing, not being on social media (and all that “branding of the self”), being a traveller before the days of the Internet, leaving safely a conflict zone and grappling with the idea of leaving so many people behind who are not safe, favourite long-form nonfiction writers, and about the good life – the meaning of that can be different for each of us, but I very much like William’s, it resonates deeply.
The album: Patti Smith, Banga
Making
Philipp and Luisa are the creative minds and makers behind the clothing brand Phil and Lui. They started in 2014, but after becoming increasingly disconnected with the traditional retail system, they wanted to start over, not just with their brand, but with their life as well. In 2020, they took a leap of faith, challenge themselves to take an unconventional path and dive into their deepest dream, when they sold their apartment in Germany and their possessions and set out travelling, driven by wanderlust and a newly found freedom. They soon arrived on a Greek island which they have come to now call home – they sleep in a tent and live and work around their outdoor kitchen. They consider fashion identity, expression and origin all in one. “Clothing that touches, accompanies you. A souvenir of your own stories and adventures…”
Exploring
Patti Smith on tour this summer and autumn.
On an end note
In her revelatory book, This One Wild and Precious Life: Our path forward in a fractured world, Sarah Wilson writes about the crucial importance of deep reading and its biological impact on us humans, meaning that “when we learned to read 6,000 years ago, particular circuits were formed”, which “sparked vital processes, such as internalised knowledge (which I take to mean ‘knowingness’), fair reasoning, the ability to be empathetic and to have insight.”
“Worryingly, the same research shows that the kind of skim reading we do now is shutting down these crucial processes. As one of the researchers noted, our inability to deep read is seeing us fail to ‘grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings, to perceive beauty, and to create thoughts of our own’. Studies show young people now struggle to be able to read university texts, as well as life-affecting contracts and information relating to their political responsibilities. In essence, skimming has made us sleepy, with all the now-familiar repercussions. As one researcher put it, ‘It incentivises a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.”
“Reading deep articles and nonfiction, as well as good literature, cultivates focus and reprograms our neurons. The stillness and time required for a long read (anything over 3,000 words) also allows our minds to formulate our moral position. This is like building a muscle.”
The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Ruthie’s Table 4 with Ruth Rogers. Fashion Neurosis, with Bella Freud. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Wachstumsversuche, with Sarah Schill. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.
