OCTOBER 3-5. LVIV BOOK FORUM / LVIV, UKRAINE
The festival that reopens during war
In an in-depth analysis on the Chytomo media outlet, Iryna Baturevych takes stock of the Ukrainian publishing system at a difficult time. Russia systematically destroys publishing and cultural infrastructure: from publishing houses to printing presses and warehouses, to the physical and intangible heritage of libraries and cultural centers. Then there’s the increase in production costs, continuous blackouts, population decline – more than 5 million refugees – reduced print runs and more limited resources. The publishing system (and the country) resists (and prospers) almost solely thanks to people’s moral resources, who always need to meet and live. Proof of this is that numerous literary festivals are being born and reborn throughout Ukraine, including the Lviv Book Forum, which returns to the Palace of Arts, after online editions due first to the pandemic, then to the Russian invasion. Despite this, the Book Forum has managed to reopen, rebuild a space (improving the structure) for reflection and the search for meaning, and to offer a physical and symbolic place where people can meet, embrace again, and talk about literature. The central theme is precisely literature’s salvific role, which “helps preserve balance, give new meaning to things, stay attached to reality and reimagine it.”
SEPTEMBER 24-OCTOBER 10. AGAINST ERASURE-PHOTOGRAPHS FROM GAZA / LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Continuing to look at Gaza’s humanity
On August 25th, Israel struck the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip, with a double tap bombing (meaning a double strike, with the second launched just minutes after the first, when first responders and journalists had arrived on the scene). It killed at least 20 people, including at least five Palestinian journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, since the beginning of the conflict in Gaza, at least 197 journalists have been killed, of whom 189 were Palestinian. The work of Palestinian reporters is the only existing testimony, given that international press has no access to the Strip, and it is constantly threatened by violence. Photographs by some of them make up the collective exhibition “Against Erasure – Photographs from Gaza” at the P21 Gallery in London. Their work is not just documentation of suffering, but serves as a lens to collectively process a horrific reality and free the population from the crushing role of absolute victim. The journalists experience firsthand everything they report on, working daily under conditions of deprivation, danger, and threat. Many reporters are young and self-taught, like Fatima Alzahra Shbair, already awarded at Perpignan and at World Press Photo, or Jehad Alshrafi, an Associated Press photographer, recently published in the New York Times with his account of the daily life of displaced Gazans. Street vendors at the market, chatter on the shoreline, fishermen at the port: all the humanity and dignity of Gaza.
SEPTEMBER 11-14. BASILAR FESTIVAL / FAFE, PORTUGAL
Dancing techno in the shade of an oak tree
In The Pills collective’s video “Il piano perfetto – Fenomenologia del sabato sera” (a milestone of late millennial education), Matteo, Luca, and Luigi plan the perfect Roman evening, which after endless worldly adventures should have concluded at Goa, with a techno night (and then an after-party). In the video’s epilogue, the three’s intentions founder on a joint that strands them on the couch; today they probably would have been stranded anyway facing the immeasurable offering of techno nights and festivals of every taste and size that proliferate throughout Europe. One of these is the Basilar Festival in northern Portugal, with a very refined and niche musical selection. It’s an intimate event, in an oak forest that embraces a river bend. On the small beach, organizers chose to bring a single stage, so that the community, audience and selectors, are immersed in the same music. The sets are long, dreamlike, refined. The intimate space of the dancefloor invites a sense of intimacy, to share the present moment and abandon oneself to freedom, wonder, and a bit of mystery. At this point, one can’t resist quoting Luigi’s response to Matteo who in the short film pleaded “not techno, not techno.” Well, “yes techno.”
MARCH 11-SEPTEMBER 21. liSTEN – A MUSICAL JOURNEY AROUND THE WORLD / BUDAPEST, HUNGARY
Stop and listen to the world’s music
For ten years, American director Garry Bassin and Japanese actress and producer Tomoko Yamaguchi traveled the world and met musicians of every genre and place, to demonstrate – but first and foremost discover – that what most unites human beings across time and space is music. They listened to and recorded more than a hundred artists and musicians in thirty countries, resulting in the documentary series “The Listen Project.” In 2025, the project expanded and also became an immersive exhibition at the House of Music in Budapest, visitable until September. Starting from the documentary episodes, one travels a multimedia musical journey through contemporary musical traditions from across the planet, to tell how music accompanies every aspect of life. From gatherings of a large Roma family in Hungary, to Georgian polyphonic songs, to the Rebeliko of Greeks and Turks who emigrated to the United States, to Gandharva, played in the Himalayan valleys of Nepal, to Puerto Rico’s Bomba, music constructs the ritual passages of collective and personal life, moments of celebration. Joy, sorrow, the relationship with the transcendent. It is expression of the spirit, or the very language of the spirit, Gibran had written. Stopping to listen is a way to grow, as well as a tremendous pleasure.
SEPTEMBER 13. MEET THE WRITER: ANNE CARSON / BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Poetry to escape boredom
Canadian poet, essayist, and classicist Anne Carson would do anything to avoid boredom. Her poems often overflow into other genres, hybridizing with theater, prose, essays. As in the sonnet cycle “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture on Pronouns,” which Carson will bring to Brussels at the Bozar gallery. In the work, she interrogates the notion of possession, and the relationship between pronouns, language, and identity. It begins thus: “Consider your saliva as something you own, that you could sell?” The reading will be enriched by video, dance, and music. Artist James Merry embroiders, the amplified sound of the needle composing the sonic fabric of the performance; a screen projects dancing feet, while Aðalheiður Halldórsdóttir and other dancers move on stage and among the audience. Carson reads, at the center of this choreography.
SEPTEMBER 6-OCTOBER 11. NINA CHANEL ABNEY / PARIS, FRANCE
How do we keep going
The visual language of African American artist Nina Chanel Abney is bold, entertaining, and perfectly recognizable. She’s known for her enormous paintings, sculptures, murals in which stratified compositions come to life – she creates numerous collages – with brilliant colors and atmospheres. The scenes are fragmented and the free and frenetic associations render the confusion of contemporary American society. The characters (often, but not only, representations of Black and queer culture) question politics, race, sexuality, and religion. The color fields are sharp, the style is graphic, two-dimensional, and one recognizes the influences of Cubism, Matisse and Léger, and the Harlem Renaissance. Today Nina Chanel Abney arrives in Europe, with “Now What? Or What Else?”, her first solo exhibition in Paris, at Galerie Perrotin. It’s a new body of work, in some ways unprecedented, that tries to investigate what it means to live in a collapsing world: ecological, cultural, political. How do we keep going?, Abney asks herself. The visual answers are surreal, humorous, and also horrific. They are a flow of simultaneous impressions whose vitality overwhelms the viewer.
SEPTEMBER 19-27. DONOSTIA SAN SEBASTIÁN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL / SAN SEBASTIÁN, SPAIN
The last European festival on the beach
San Sebastián is not just surf, pintxos, the elaborate Basque version of tapas, and hyper-tourism – in recent years the increase in rents and the proliferation of Airbnb and luxury accommodations has emptied the city of its inhabitants. It’s also home to the Donostia San Sebastián Film Festival (Donostia is the city in Basque), the last beach appointment on the European cinema festival calendar and the main Spanish-speaking event for the sector. The program is articulated in thematic sections, with sensitivity for independent cinema from around the world. The official selection presents, for now, 24 films, including the latest works by Edward Berger, Claire Denis, Agnieszka Holland. Much attention is given to emerging directors, with a dedicated section opened by “Bad Apples,” a “biting satire” by Jonatan Etzler starring Saoirse Ronan. Horizontes Latinos opens the gaze to Spanish-language cinema in Europe and Latin America, Eusko Label supports independent Basque productions; there’s also a selection of more freestyle films, and one of films already presented at other festivals, including “La Grazia” by Paolo Sorrentino and “The Voice of Hind Rajab” by Kaouther ben Hania, both screened at Venice. Culinary Zinema is dedicated to the relationship between cinema and gastronomy, in a small city of 180,000 inhabitants where there are 18 starred restaurants.
SEPTEMBER 20-JANUARY 18. KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: THE HISTORIES / LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Kerry James Marshall can do anything
In a beautiful portrait of Kerry James Marshall from a few years ago in The New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins defined the African American artist as a virtuoso of landscape, portraiture, still life, historical painting, and any genre of the Western canon from the Renaissance onward. In short, he concludes, he can do anything. Marshall, one of the world’s most influential artists, is the great chronicler of African American experience and culture. A summa of his artistic research will be visitable at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which inaugurates on September 20 the largest European retrospective dedicated to him, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. More than 70 works, from paintings of the early eighties (like the famous “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self”), to prints, drawings, and sculptures. His works, of mastodonic dimensions, with symbolic vitality and complexity, have as subjects the civil rights movements, Black Power movements, and the daily life of African Americans, elevated by him to epic – there are families on the lawn engaged in a picnic, young people having fun in a dance hall, children playing. The exhibition’s last section presents an unprecedented body of work: eight paintings on episodes of African American history, starting from the slave trade.
SEPTEMBER 11-24. INTERNATIONALES LITERATUR FESTIVAL / BERLIN, GERMANY
Books in the state “between flame and ash”
Berlin’s International Literature Festival creates favorable conditions (with a program structured for adults and children) for dialogue, the development of critical thinking, and for literature to be truly an encounter, where perspectives broaden and open to tolerance. This year the Haus der Berliner Festspiele hosts the twenty-fifth edition, titled GLOW, that “state between flame and ash.” A state of possibilities investigated by the themes that traverse the program, starting from the encounters conceived by 2025 curator Cristina Rivera Garza. The Mexican Pulitzer Prize-winning writer has invited Spanish-speaking and migrant voices, like Velia Vidal, who have addressed themes of crossing and borders in their work. The theme of exile is also present in the guests’ lectures: that hiatus, emotional and linguistic, opened between uprooting and the search for a new home – sometimes found precisely in writing. Nobel laureates Irina Scherbakova, Russian historian, and Svetlana Alexievich, Belarusian writer, who for fifty years have faced censorship and repression to give voice to the invisible in former Soviet countries, will be in conversation about human rights in dictatorships. A couple of other names: an encounter in memory of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Amelina, Samantha Harvey, author of “Orbital,” Anglo-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad, and Nobel Prize winners Abdulrazak Gurnah and Herta Müller. In this space of literature and debate, the curators suggest, divergent opinions are welcome.
SEPTEMBER 27-28. TUTTO È VITA FEST / MONTECUCCOLI (FI), ITALY
Everything is life, even death
When we deny death as an integral part of life, we express a paradox, rendering ourselves unprepared for that moment. The TuttoèVita foundation, directed by Guidalberto Bormolini, helps accept death, offers (and teaches) paths of spiritual assistance to those facing serious illness or bereavement, or accompanying someone, through spiritual care: meditation, deep communion, kindness. The Village that the foundation is building to host people at the end of their lives opens to the public (it’s always open for volunteers) for a weekend of music, encounters, yoga, art and guided meditations, moments of reflection and dialogue, private and collective.
