Sorry, I couldn't help it: it's my character

In the film Mister Arkadin (1955), Orson Welles, playing a multimillionaire with a dark past, recalls that fable in which the scorpion stings the frog in the back even though the poor frog is carrying it across to the other side of the river. "Why did you do it?" asks the dying frog. "I'm sorry," replies the drowning scorpion. "I couldn't help it; it's my character." Well, with his usual British irony, Esteve Riambau , who was director of the Filmoteca de Catalunya for 14 years, uses that catch-all phrase to justify the scope of his "memorable memoirs" and the Cartesian spirit that shapes them. Dates, names, anecdotes, and encounters in detail throughout a "fiercely cinematic" life, writes Cuban Leonardo Padura in the prologue.

Since Riambau graduated in medicine, the scientific method ("It's My Character") has served him well in crafting a book as rigorous as it is entertaining: The Movie of My Life (Tusquets). It was presented at Filmo on Tuesday, of course, in excellent company, with filmmaker Rosa Vergés and actor Josep Maria Pou (Padura was missing, as he was on his return flight to Havana). Pou's stage presence meant that a good part of the discussion revolved around the figure of Welles, as the latter struck up a friendship with the author of the book during the editing of a film and a play about the brilliant director and star of Citizen Kane . Incidentally, Riambau is curating a retrospective exhibition on the American actor and director, an exhibition that opens next week at the Cinémathèque de Paris.

While the presenters conversed, the audience watched a carousel of photographs of the author alongside towering figures from the history of cinema scroll on the Filmo screen, the same images that illustrate The Film of My Life : Marco Ferreri, Bertolucci, Agnès Varda, José Luis Borau, Costa-Gavras, Tilda Swinton, and the list goes on. A glossy phone book. "I was dying of envy reading you," Pou confessed. The truth is that, aside from his "boundless curiosity," Vergés emphasized, Riambau has known how to forge relationships with this glittering cast. Complicity as long as they were on the same wavelength: "I care more about the people than the films," he said.

Alejandro Amenábar and Jordi Esteva completed a cinematic week.

This week brought more cinema (please), thanks to Alejandro Amenábar . On Wednesday, this publisher's journalist Leonor Mayor Ortega interviewed the director after the screening of his film El cautivo , about the imprisonment of Miguel de Cervantes in Algiers, captured by Barbary pirates on the high seas. The Mooby Bosque theater was packed, despite the fact that the Barça-PSG match was on (gulp!). Amenábar seemed very relaxed, very comfortable in the subsequent discussion with the audience, whom he regaled with juicy anecdotes from the shoot: the difficulties with financing (he was left with €15 million of the €23 million budgeted) and the initial doubts regarding the actor Julio Peña, who plays the author of Don Quixote in his youth. He said, for example, that he got Peña drunk to break the ice with his on-screen antagonist, the Italian Alessandro Borghi, who plays Hasán Pajá, the illustrious writer's captor.

The audience wasn't shy either. The question immediately arose about the controversy surrounding the film: that is, Cervantes had sexual relations with the governor of Algiers. "There are caverns with which it's very difficult to connect," Amenábar commented. But to tiptoe around Cervantes's alleged homosexuality, which the filmmaker explores with the freedom afforded by biographical details, would have meant "making me ashamed of myself, as a person and as an artist." "It's my character," he might have added.

Esteve Riambau presented his memoirs at the Filmoteca, paraphrasing Orson Welles.

From multi-million-dollar blockbusters to "artisanal cinema," made with "four duros," according to Juli Suàrez , producer of Jordi Esteva 's film L'impuls nòmada , which was screened on Thursday at Zumzeig (Calle Béjar, 53). A delicate little gem, beautifully filmed in black and white, about a childhood in 1950s Spain, in which an 11-year-old boy tries to escape from his priests and family through imagination, maps, a love of nature, and books.

Please note: There will be another screening next Friday, October 10, in the same venue, with cultural journalist Jacinto Antón as the master of ceremonies.