A software change in my prison-issued electronic tablet ate up my drafts and eliminated basic writing tools. That may sound minor, but try sending a poem to your kid without line breaks.
When festivals are virtual and word of mouth can’t spread as smoothly, it can be tricky to gauge buzz around films. With
Souvenir Souvenir, however, there’s no doubt. The new film by Bastien Dubois is on a roll: in the last few weeks, it has been named best animated short at Sundance and Clermont-Ferrand, two blue-chip festivals, and just yesterday, it was nominated for an Annie Award.
The film addresses the brutal Algerian War, an eight-year decolonization struggle that resulted in Algeria’s independence from France in 1962. The conflict will be unfamiliar to many viewers outside those countries; even in France, the events of that time are often veiled by willlful amnesia.
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Welcome, readers of The Wild. Two words: uphill skiing. Sounds crazy, right? The sport, also known as skinning or ski mountaineering, has been around for awhile. Now it’s booming because it keeps skiers and boarders away from crowds and off ski lifts, ideal for these socially distant times.
Uphillers, as they’re sometimes called, use “skins” that cover the bottom of their skis to tromp up a slope a super-tough, lung-busting workout and then do a downhill run. Snowboarders do the same thing with split boards, which come apart to create mini-skis with skins for the uphill trudge.