In one of London's upscale neighbourhoods, the distance between a popular restaurant and a child's bedroom may be just four metres. It is a sufficient distance, it seems, to turn the laughter, clinking of glasses, and conversations that fill a summer evening into a complaint before the municipality.
This is the story currently being lived by the “La Familia” restaurant in Chelsea, which over the course of half a century has become one of the favorite places for royal families and stars of art and music.
The problem is not the food, nor the reputation of the restaurant, but the garden outside.
The famous Italian restaurant may be forced to reduce the hours of use of its garden after a complaint filed by a neighbor due to noise. The garden itself is an essential part of the character of the place, whose name is linked to many memories in the neighborhood.
The late Princess Diana had taken her son, Prince William, to lunch at “La Familia” during one of their last public appearances together, and the prince later returned to the restaurant, accompanied by his wife, Kate.
Since its founding in 1975 by Alvaro Macchione, the restaurant, known for its Tuscan-inspired dishes, has maintained its family-friendly feel. Today it is run by his daughter, Marietta, with the help of her mother, Letizia, who is 92 years old.
But for Francesco Berticarari, a 34-year-old Italian investor, the garden's atmosphere has become more than just fleeting sounds.
Birtikarari rents a house worth around £2 million, directly overlooking the park. He says that the sounds of talking, laughter, and sometimes cheering, in addition to the sounds of plates and cups, disturb his family.
He points out that his two-year-old daughter's bedroom is only about four meters away from the canopy that covers part of the garden, while his wife is waiting for their second child.
Therefore, he demanded that the park’s operating hours be reduced to 9 pm from Monday to Saturday, and 8 pm on Sunday, instead of midnight and 11:30 at night, respectively.
But the restaurant did not face the complaint alone. The Municipality of Kensington and Chelsea received 247 letters supporting the continuation of the park's operation.
Among its defenders was guitarist Eric Clapton, who has been performing at La Familia for more than 30 years, along with singer Brian Ferry, actor Gary Fannin, and former footballer Lee Chapman and his wife, actress Leslie Ash.
The Ten Eker Residents Association, which represents more than a hundred families, believes that the park is part of the life of the region, while the municipality says that the number of complaints has remained limited despite some observations being recorded over the past year.
On October 13, the Licensing Committee will consider the application.
Then it will be determined whether the laughter of the patrons of “La Familia” will remain a part of Chelsea’s nights, or whether the garden of the restaurant that Princess Diana loved will be forced to say: “Good night,” a little earlier.
Swiss director Vincent Chabloz said that his relationship with the “Derborence” region in his country dates back to his childhood, and that his long knowledge of the place prompted him to present it in his documentary film “Derborence: The Time of Animals” (Derborence - Le Temps des Animaux), explaining that the film raises questions about man’s relationship with nature and other creatures.
Chabloz added, in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat via Zoom, that he did not go to the region with a preconceived idea to make a feature film, but rather the idea crystallized through his relationship with it and his continuous discovery of its details. The place, with its history and diversity of wildlife, seemed to him too rich to be summarized in a short film, and it prompted him to search for a story that could encompass this world.
The film follows the wildlife of the Swiss mountainous region through the animals themselves, observing their daily habits, paths, and relationships with the place, in a visual experience with few words, where the movement of the creatures, the details of the environment, and their sounds become essential elements in the narrative, which allows the viewer to approach the rhythm of life that continues far from his presence, and is not shaped according to his expectations or needs.
The film participated in the Francophone Film Festival in the Swiss city of Bienne last month, and is scheduled to be shown at the “Salamander” Festival in the Swiss city of Morges on October 23.
Derborance is located in an isolated mountain valley in the canton of Valais in southern Switzerland, surrounded by rocky slopes and dense forests, which includes a lake located at an altitude of 1,449 metres. The region witnessed two massive rock collapses in 1714 and 1749 in the Diablore Mountains, which blocked the course of the Derbonne River and formed the lake, and the effects of these collapses became part of the place’s topography and natural history.
Chabloz attributed his choice of animals as the focus of the story to his desire to reconsider the human relationship with other creatures, explaining that he wanted the viewer to get closer to wildlife through the perspective of its inhabitants, and through this choice, the film raises a question about the position of humans within the natural world, and about their relationship with the creatures that share the place with them, and have their own customs, paths, and ways of living.
The Swiss director added: “This perception was reflected in the use of words, as I deliberately reduced the dialogue and commentary in order to leave the image room for expression. I did not find it necessary to add text explaining what the scenes actually reveal, especially since the audio commentary could have interrupted the state of immersion that I sought to build, and return the viewer to a human interpretation of what is happening in front of him.”
During the years of photography, Chabloz discovered that animals resemble humans in more aspects than he expected, “especially in that they have daily habits and repetitive routines. They also follow specific routes, frequent drinking places at close times, and repeat many of their activities, which helped me understand their movements and determine the appropriate locations and times to wait for them and photograph them.”
He continued that his method was based on photographing the moments that wildlife offered, then building the story in the editing room. Instead of preparing a scene in advance and waiting for the animals to behave according to his vision, what is happening in front of him, over the years, has become rich material even before choosing shots capable of forming a coherent narrative, giving the scattered details their meaning within the film.
He explained, “The biggest challenge was collecting enough material to build a full film, which required 8 years of work. Waiting does not guarantee obtaining an important scene every day of filming, but it does give the photographer the opportunity to capture rare moments that he may miss if he is absent, and that is why the completion of the film is linked to continuous preparation and adaptation to the movement of nature and changing conditions.”
Chabloz pointed out that photographing animals with their usual behavior requires that they do not feel the presence of the photographer, because realizing that they are under surveillance may change their behavior, so he resorted to different strategies for hiding and staying at an appropriate distance, taking advantage of his knowledge of the place and the habits of the creatures, so that he can follow their daily lives with the least possible influence on what is happening in front of the camera.
This task was more difficult with rare animals, most notably the lynx, which the director said he had the opportunity to see and photograph only once throughout the eight years of work. This experience reflects the difficulty of relying on the appearance of a specific animal to build a scene, no matter how much knowledge the photographer possesses of its environment, or how much time he spends tracking its tracks and waiting for it.
Chabloz pointed out that photographing avalanches posed a different kind of challenge, related to the difficulty of predicting their timing and determining the place from which they would start, as well as choosing a safe location for the camera. He explained that “these scenes required a combination of waiting and caution, because an error in estimating the distance or timing could have serious consequences, and nature does not provide an opportunity to recreate the scene.”
A recent re-examination of mass graves dating back to Egypt's First Dynasty has uncovered evidence suggesting that some members of the royal entourage may have been deliberately killed and buried next to the kings' tombs, in a practice believed to have been intended to continue their service to the ruler after his death.
A team from Purdue University conducted the examination using modern forensic methods and concluded that 18 out of 46 skulls, or about 39 percent of the sample, bore traces of serious head injuries that likely occurred in the period surrounding death. The results were published, Monday, in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archeology.
This practice is known as “court sacrifice,” and is a form of human sacrifice in which people close to the ruler are killed upon his death, out of the belief that they will continue to serve him in the afterlife. The practice may also be a means of demonstrating the ruler's power and authority, while evidence from various ancient cultures suggests that some people may have volunteered to die in the hope of immortality or gaining status, and others may have been forced to do so.
The funerary complexes at Abydos were built around 3000 BC, during the reign of the first kings of unified Egypt. In addition to the royal tombs, these complexes included rows of subsidiary tombs surrounding them, in which people of different ranks were buried, including low- and middle-ranking officials and craftsmen.
The British archaeologist Flinders Petrie had excavated these tombs in the 1920s, and noted the large number of tombs surrounding the royal tombs, but at that time he did not find clear evidence that their owners had been killed. Petrie kept a number of skulls, some of which were sent to Britain, before 46 of them were later re-examined at the University of Cambridge.
The recent study showed that the injuries consisted mainly of linear fractures of the skull, in addition to injuries caused by sharp objects in some cases, including a severe injury to the eye area of a person. Researchers believe that these injuries occurred very close to death, and that some of them could have led to rapid loss of consciousness, internal bleeding, and then death.
However, the study cannot conclusively determine how the killings occurred; Linear fractures may result from a blow with a flat, wide object, but they may also occur as a result of a fall. Some members of the entourage may have died of natural causes, or were killed in ways that did not leave visible marks on the bones, such as strangulation.
The researchers concluded that the findings highlight the scientific value of re-examining ancient archaeological evidence using modern techniques, and also open a window into the lives of people who have largely remained outside the traditional narrative about ancient Egypt, raising questions about their identities, their relationship with rulers, and their role in royal life and death.
