ferran mascarell

‘Castells’ or the traditional human towers originally from Southern Catalonia and generally built during town festivals were included in the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO last year. An exhibition at the Palau Robert in Barcelona will celebrate this first anniversary. It reflects on the tradition’s cultural and social value, and its role as one of Catalonia’s best known symbols.

In an historical decision, the Catalan Academy of Cinema chose a movie entirely in Catalan to represent Spain at the Oscars awards. ‘Pa negre’ (‘Black bread’) was the absolute winner of the last awards of the Spanish Academy awards, surprising everyone. However, the fact of it being in Catalan and that the movie competed with Almodóvar’s ‘The Skin I Live In’ made it difficult to predict if the movie was to finally represent Spain at the world’s top awards.

An agreement among the Hollywood majors, the movie theatres and the Catalan Government will increase the presence of American movies dubbed into Catalan. In 2011, only five Hollywood films were dubbed into Catalan. In 2012, 25 movies will be available in the language. The reason for this agreement is to promote the presence of the Catalan language in movie theatres, as currently Spanish almost monopolises the market.

The use of the Catalan language is growing but it is clearly used less than Spanish in Catalonia. Some sectors are especially behind, such as judicial system, where only 14.5% of judicial sentences were written in Catalan.

The Spanish Constitutional Court has accepted to make a decision on the Spanish Government’s appeal against the Catalan law promoting the Occitan language in the Val d’Aran County, in the Pyrenees. The Val d’Aran has autonomy status within Catalonia, considering its historic links with the Occitan culture. It is the only place where Occitan has the status of preferred co-official language. Now, this status has been cancelled because of the Spanish Government’s appeal. The Catalan Minister for Culture considers the appeal “an attack against language diversity”.

Artur Mas hired one of his former political adversaries for the top position at the Ministry of Culture. Ferran Mascarell also held this position in 2006, in the left-wing government coalition. Now, he comes back with a centre-right executive. Mascarell has extensive experience in cultural management, in the public and private sectors. He had a successful career in the Barcelona City Council and he was recently on the board of the RBA Editorial House, in charge of audiovisual products.