Latest news with #rurallife
BBC News
2 days ago
- BBC News
Hunts to miss agricultural show's hound parade after convictions
Two Dorset hunts have been asked not to participate in an annual parade of hounds at an agricultural show after the convictions of six people for illegal fox and Shaftesbury Agricultural Society said it asked the Blackmore & Sparkford Vale Hunt and the Portman Hunt to sit out this year's show on 13 and 14 comes after the convictions of four men linked with the Blackmore and Sparkford Vale Hunt in April and two from the Portman Hunt in September agricultural society said the request did not reflect a shift in its values and was not a "commentary on legal hunting activity". The annual show, at the Turnpike Showground in Motcombe, is a celebration of rural life and includes a 20-minute parade of said the parade, which offers a "glimpse into a longstanding countryside tradition" would go ahead.A statement said: "We understand that trail hunting remains a divisive issue. "This decision does not reflect a shift in the society's values, nor is it a commentary on legal hunting activity. "Rather, it is a response to recent legal convictions and our responsibility to maintain the reputation and charitable aims of the show."As well as the parade of hounds, the show will feature medieval jousting, motorcycle stunt riders, livestock parades, show jumping, terrier racing and steam vehicles. You can follow BBC Dorset on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
ABC News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Cheesemaking meets toxic masculinity in coming-of-age story Holy Cow
In Louise Courvoisier's debut feature film, "Holy cow" is used both as an expletive and as an acknowledgement of the life source that sustains the characters who reside in the film's rural town. What: An emotionally affecting, unassuming coming-of-age story with a cast of non-professional actors. Starring: Clément Faveau, Maïwene Barthelemy. Directed by: Louise Courvoisier. When: In cinemas. Likely to make you feel: Gently transported into the life of rural, working-class children. Holy Cow's coming-of-age story centres on Totone (Clément Faveau), an 18-year-old boy who lives on a farm in the remote French Alps region of Jura with his alcoholic cheesemaker father and seven-year-old sister Claire (Luna Garret). After Claire is left in Totone's care following their father's untimely death, the teen hatches an aspirational plan to win 30,000 euro ($53,500) of prize money in a cheesemaking competition. Many of the actions of Holy Cow's rapscallion protagonist stem from deep feelings of inadequacy and shame in a world that does not allow the space for men to be emotional and complex. Beyond the economic precarity of his life, he labours beneath unspoken rules that govern relations between men and women and lofty gendered expectations that he can not always meet. He violently lashes out at a peer when the subject of his affections rejects him, affects a feigned air of disgust when discussing pleasuring women with his closest male friends, and generally regards women his age as a means to an end. An antidote to the undercurrent of toxic masculinity is Totone's tight-knit friendships with schoolmates Jean-Yves (Mathis Bernard) and Francis (Dimitri Baudry). The way they care for each other is imperfect yet enviable in its ability to counter the grief and trauma that Totone, in particular, is undergoing. Another respite is Totone's guardianship of Claire, who he lovingly and unstintingly cares for to the best of his abilities. Together, Totone, Jean-Yves, Francis and Claire are a hodgepodge quartet muddling their way through life. Central to Totone's ploy to make the best Comté in the region is pilfering grade-A milk from Marie-Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy), a young, straight-talking farmer he starts seeing. The pastoral beauty of Comté cheese country — where Courvoisier herself is from — is expertly evoked through Elio Balezeaux's lens, though the insularity of living in a small town with limited possibilities is depicted in equal measure. Faveau's understated performance as Totone expertly balances trepidation with the increasing realisation that he can break out of the confines of gender and class in his life. Yet, as the film adeptly shows, transcending one's station in life is not as easy as a cheesemaking competition may lead you to believe. Holy Cow could have materialised into a bleak study of poverty and misfortune, but it remains intentionally warm and hopeful despite the mishaps Totone experiences — while not varnishing the challenges of growing up without emotional and material anchors. It is not interested in textbook happy endings or neat resolutions for its characters. They hurt each other and act with a recklessness typical of who they are — children. Instead, it morphs into an optimistic portrait of chosen family and accelerated adulthood, with the cheese a not-so-subtle metaphor for Totone's growing maturity and eventual entry into a world he had no choice but to join. Holy Cow is in Australian cinemas now.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years review – a wild walk between life, death and sheep-shearing
Rural life hits you in the face like the stink of cow dung as soon as you step into the Royal Scottish Academy. Andy Goldsworthy has laid a sheepskin rug up the classical gallery's grand staircase – very luxurious, except it's made from the scraps thrown away after shearing, stained blue or red with farmers' marks, all painstakingly stitched together with thorns. This is the Clarkson's Farm of art retrospectives, plunging today's urbanites into the raw sadness and beauty, the violence and slow natural cycles of the British countryside. Goldsworthy may love nature but he doesn't sentimentalise it. At the top of the stairs there's a screen and through its gaps you glimpse the galleries beyond. It feels mystical and calming, until you realise it's made of rusty barbed wire strung between two of the building's columns that serve as tightly-wound wire rollers. It made me think of Magnus Mills' darkly hilarious rural novel about hapless fencers, The Restraint of Beasts. Later you can relax looking at seductive, purple abstract watercolours – until you discover they are made with hare's blood and snow. The show is titled Fifty Years, which might make anyone feel old, and Goldsworthy may have been goaded by it. He fills the gallery's main floor with new and recent work, while you'll find an archive of his 20th-century career downstairs. But how could he exhibit his past achievements except in photos and video? Since the 1970s Goldsworthy, who was born in Cheshire and grew up on the outskirts of Leeds, has been making art with nature, in nature, even for nature, since some of his interventions could only be experienced by birds or sheep before the colour faded from a rubbed stone or a mat of leaves decayed. Other outdoor works are more permanent, using dry stone walling to make sheepfolds and little houses in sculpture parks and nature reserves. In Cumbria you'll find his monumental Grizedale Wall snaking between the trees. What makes this a work of art? It's simple. There's no practical reason a farmer would place an elegantly curving stone line in a forest. But by making it, Goldsworthy insists you ask what art is. He's a peasant dadaist. In photos of an early action he throws bunches of sticks in the sky to see how they fall – a fresh air reworking of Marcel Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages in which chance determined how a string fell. An entertaining video shows what happened when Goldsworthy brought a giant snowball from the Scottish Highlands to London's Smithfield meat market in June 2000: the meatpackers have fun moving it about with a forklift. Inside the snow, the artist gently explains, is a core of hair from Highland cattle. He's not saying meat is murder so much as what we consume is divorced from any sense of natural life. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion It is our connection with nature he wants to reawaken, not in a quiet contemplative way but as a shock. Earth and blood are the same, he suggests in the most powerful room. It is dominated by a whole wall made of cracked red clay that he collected by hand in Dumfriesshire's Lowther Hills. The epic scale and fiery colour seem more American than Scottish. Goldsworthy shows you this is a big country, too. The work is called Red Wall – but I don't think it's a political joke. The redness is all. In the same room a three-screen video records an alchemical performance in which Goldsworthy rubs a rock in a Dumfriesshire river to reveal a layer of iron-rich pure redness; the red appears as bloody clouds in the green water. Iron reddens the earth and reddens our blood. We are part of nature's cycle. Our bodies will return to the earth – at least, if you live in rural Dumfriesshire as Goldsworthy does. When you die there you still get buried, in a churchyard, according to Goldsworthy's grand project Gravestones, for which he has taken photographs of Dumfriesshire churchyards under stormy skies. Goldsworthy's 'gravestones' are not headstones but the pebbles and rocks that have to be removed when fresh graves are dug. He wants to create a vast monumental field with them, to show that there is animate nature and inanimate nature – blood and stone. We return to the earth, leaving our imperishable elements. He tests his idea in an installation here. Stones from graveyards form a continuous floor, like a rocky seashore, completely filling a room except for a narrow walkway. The stones have literally been cut short, neatly sliced through, to form a straight boundary between the artwork and the observer. It's typical of this artist's poetic precision. You wonder how he cut the stones in two so neatly, and accurately measured the perfect line they make. Then it hits you. This is the straight smooth absolute line between life and death. That's true in the country, and the city, too. Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh from 26 July until 2 November 2025
New York Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Il Dono' Review: Slow Living
In the opening scene of Michelangelo Frammartino's documentary-drama 'Il Dono,' the electric chime of a cellphone ring feels like a freak intrusion from another realm. At first, we watch from a fixed distance as an old farmer does yard work with a couple of young men, their actions unfolding in what feels like real time. Then there's the ring, which would seem innocuous enough were we not already so immersed in the man's rural existence: the birdsong, the trill of insects. When he picks up the device left behind by one of his young helpers, he treats it like an alien object. It's the first time he's ever seen such a gadget. 'Il Dono' premiered in Europe in 2003, but its recent restoration has occasioned its long-delayed arrival to New York. Serendipitously so, as the film's slow, meditative rhythms offer a reprieve from citygoers daily grinds — should they be willing to stash away that screen and lock into a much more languorous, almost mystical wavelength. Like Frammartino's other films, 'Le Quattro Volte' and 'Il Buco,' 'Il Dono' is set around his family's hometown in the mountainous Italian region of Calabria. The almost wordless film follows the quotidian lives of two people: the old man, played by the director's grandfather, Angelo Frammartino; and an unstable young woman who reluctantly exchanges sex for car rides around town. Despite the region's visual magnificence — its winding cobblestone roads and rolling hills — there's a melancholic emptiness to each of Frammartino's striking compositions, accented by the deliberate, solitary movements of its few (mostly aging) inhabitants. The young woman's story tells us that survival means escape, but otherwise 'Il Dono' manages to strike a balance between damnation and idolatry of its medieval setting. We're sucked in, enraptured, even as we feel its lives fading away. Il DonoNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters.
BBC News
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
In pictures: The Royal Welsh Show in Builth Wells
Thousands of people have been flocking to the Royal Welsh Show this many, the four-day agricultural event, organised by the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society, is a highlight of the year, celebrating rural life, farming and Welsh is a selection of images from the show in Llanelwedd, near Builth Wells, Powys, so far.
