Just by pure chance I heard about another two Lusophonic Occurrences here in London this week.
One is the Utopia Film Festival, which started yesterday and goes on till the twelfth. The films look quite serious and not exactly entertaining but if I can shake the lurgy, I might go and see one towards the end of its run.
And the other is a weird one. It’s a brand new international Portuguese literary festival in London, on Saturday the 7th. But hang on, haven’t we already had a brand new international Portuguese literary festival in London, FLILP, in June this year? I mean, I’m grateful for all these international Portuguese literary festivals you’re bringing to my town, but there must be other towns and other countries that need brand new international Portuguese literary festivals!
Anyway, it’s called Letras Lusas Em Londres and it was organised by Alcino Francisco, who I actually met and spoke to at FLILP in June, where he was one of the guests, and bought a copy of his book.
It’s surprisingly hard to find details of the festival though. I can see a few people on Insta refer to it, and even an interview with Alcino himself, but I can’t find an official account for the event on Insta. Alcino Francisco’s own Instagram account is dormant. If I Google the name of the festival, there’s a Facebook page right at the top of the ranking, but when I click on the link I land on some random video clip, so I think the page was deleted. This news article describes it, but there are two links to the organisers’ websites and both of them are deadlinks.* I can see there’s a reasonably full list of guests on this page, but nothing like this glossy publicity materials FLiLP put out in the run-up to their launch. It’s all weirdly hush-hush really. I dug around all over the place. I found another blogger who had done a couple of posts about it, so he must be better informed than I am, but, again, I’m not seeing anything linking to some central place on the Web where the organisers have set out a programme, or what to expect or… Well, anything really. The woman who put together FLiLP seems much better organised, as well as… Ahem… More original.
An old friend of the family has suggested we go together but even if I wasn’t full of cold germs, I don’t think I’d want to trek over there because I’m not even sure it’s actually happening. That’s how bad the lack of information is.
*By the way, it also contains the phrase “@s leitor@s” which almost made me want to take Solanium’s example and learn Spanish instead.
Luso 