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Returning from months at sea, Koldo is met by his beloved Merche, who is less than impressed with him after his long absence. With her head held high, she storms away in a huff leaving him with an envelope announcing a seemingly joyful occasion – Amaia is getting married! But the fiercely Basque Koldo is horrified to realise Rafa is not the groom…even worse, she is marrying a CATALAN! With less than a few days to go before the wedding, Koldo and Rafa must join forces to prevent Amaia from promising herself to Pau, the wealthy hipster. What is not clear to Koldo, is why Rafa and Amaia separated in the first place…
Antonio, a onetime construction foreman who fell off the grid decades ago, is now a night watchman living in a junkyard. Well, not any more: business is bad, and the scrapyard’s owner just replaced him with a guard dog. Jobs are scarce in this corner of rural Mexico, and Antonio has to settle for pumping gas for pittance; but when an old co-worker stops by for a fill-up, Antonio once again gets the chance to lead a team. Setting out with four novices and a rolling spray-paint machine, the men start the job of laying down a dashed yellow line on a 217-kilometer stretch between two small towns. While on the road, a spectrum of hardships and triumphs will force the unlikely team of misfits to unexpectedly bond.
It´s Christmas time in Barcelona and the city is brimming with magic and love. Carles and Laura have just had their first baby and they’re quickly discovering that three really is a crowd. Meanwhile, Grandma Carmen has some news, and decides that Christmas is the right occasion to tell her family about her new relationship. Adrián and Angel are roommates who share everything, but sharing a girl might prove a little more complicated than they expected. All the while, desperate romantic Oscar has set himself a goal: to have a one night stand without falling head over heels in love; and for Jaume, this night has something special in store, as an unexpected encounter with a mysterious young French woman will bring love back into his life after almost 50 years.
June, a woman who left her home in Madrid to escape a terrible occurrence, has now returned; but not as the same person she once was. Wiser and more confident, she yearns to reconnect with her father, brother, best friend and ex-lover Diego. However, her past abrupt departure makes this much more difficult than she anticipated and she must gradually work to regain their love and trust. Her greatest challenge is Diego, who has also changed during her time away. He has become a recluse and retreated into a self-imposed solitary confinement in his apartment where he avoids human contact and natural light. June is determined to save him from disappearing completely. Slowly her presence draws him back into the world as she fights for them to reconcile their differences and realise their old dream of moving to Berlin together.
Barça Dreams details the amazing history of one of the most popular and admired football clubs on Earth, FC Barcelona. Its mites and legends include arguably the world’s best player of all time Lionel Messi, the famous coach Pep Guardiola and the man that revolutionized this sport with his innovative vision, Johan Cruyff.
This emotional journey begins with the club’s founder Joan Gamper, 115 years ago, and follows the dreams and ambitions of a long list of football celebrities. We see the success reached by Messi, Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta, all of them born to play football at the extraordinary school of La Masia. Moreover, this documentary unveils the secrets of a powerful sports club linked not only to the world fans but also to the Catalan identity, as it was formed alongside political movements and events, validating its unique legend “Barça: more than a club”.
When theatre actor Julián receives an unexpected visit from his childhood friend Tomás, the encounter is bittersweet. This reunion is their first meeting in many years, triggered by Julián’s diagnosis with a serious illness. Tomás is baffled by his friend’s decision to forgo continued treatment and instead focus on putting his affairs in order: distributing possessions, reconciling past disputes, and, most importantly, finding a home for his beloved Staffordshire terrier, Truman. It’s this task that is causing Julián the greatest concern. Over four days, as the two men walk the streets of Madrid visiting bookshops, restaurants, doctors, and veterinarians, they examine their lives, speculating on what the future holds.
A Spanish couple travel to Eastern Europe with bright hopes of adopting a child. However, things do not work out as they had expected. The dream they came with threatens to turn into a nightmare as their case is dealt with by dishonest pencil pushers in a strange country and they wait to be assigned a healthy (or not so healthy) child. Finding themselves faced with growing hostility, their own latent conflicts come to the fore.
Rocío is a young single mother who has been without work for three and a half years in the Andalucian town of Jerez de la Frontera. She is on the edge of a precipice, living day-to-day off the small allowance of odd jobs and the generosity of her neighbours. As she fights to keep her apartment (with several months of rental debt accrued) she struggles to provide for her eight-year-old son Adrián. When Rocío’s gas canister runs out or when her water is turned off, she is faced with an impossible decision: if she replaces them, there is no money to feed her son.
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This post is a follow-up to one I wrote last week (see the latter half of it) and also a response to a more recent post by David Walker. I certainly wouldn’t argue with David’s assertion that a Sydney-Brisbane Very Fast Train route is not likely to be remotely viable even in the medium term. Pessimistic “realism” about that route was the major premise of David’s post. The population of Brisbane/Gold Coast is only around half that of either Sydney or Melbourne and the terrain in between is much more challenging than that between Sydney and Melbourne, making construction costs significantly higher.
For mainstream and social media partisans the current prolonged election campaign is an essential life or death struggle for premiership victory by one’s chosen team. But to my way of thinking it doesn’t really matter very much which team wins. The two major parties are Tweedledee and Tweedledum on asylum seekers, defence and national security issues. Both subscribe to eclectic versions of standard neoliberal economics that differ only marginally from each other, albeit somewhat skewed in favor of their primary sponsors (corporate Australia and the trade unions respectively).
Apparently Labor doesn’t intend reverting to the full Fibre to the Premises (“FTP”) version of the National Broadband Network it previously championed 
