31/10/2012 - Cineuropa marks the 5th Avignon Forum with interviews with several personalities from the cultural and creative sector

With its theme 'Culture: Reasons to hope. Imagining and transmitting', from November 15 to 17, the fifth Avignon Forum aims to offer reasons for hope in a time of pessimism.

Every year, the forum organises and supports international meetings in Avignon and Essen with the Avignon-Ruhr Forum. Suggestions made during these discussions between actors in culture, creation industries, economics, and media are then relayed to national and international bodies.

Cineuropa is marking the event by publishing interviews with several personalities from the cultural and creative sector.

Does culture / creative imagination give you a reason to hope?
Radu Mihaileanu: Culture is the only reason to hope! Knowledge, the wisdom and the development of a thought, a free will and a wide humanism, will be able to solve the complex problems of our times. We must stop simplifying everything. And yet, if everything is made more complex, only culture, in all its forms, can answer, help, raise the relevant questions. However, I am quite pessimistic about the ability to take the bull by the horns. I hope that all politicians, cultural and economic actors seize it. All the crises (economic, climatic, …) show the inability of the man to consider the world in its entirety and in its movement. We are at the end of a cycle, we must reinvent ourselves ! This is the History of humanity, this is sometimes frightening but it is a beautiful reason to hope …

Who embodies it the best?
I have several heroes in my pantheon of hope bringers: Nelson Mandela for his incredible ability to peace builder ; Aung San Suu Ki for her bravery, her perceptiveness, her willpower, her wisdom, her ability to be “above the noise”, the fear … All people who succeed in reconciling harmony, balance between ying and yang, the good and the bad, the analysis and the view. These days, there are sadly a lot of administrators and few visionaries …

What would be the personal initiative / project / work that embodies your reason to hope?
Through my movies, I try, and I am not sure that I succeed, to make people think and to give hope again to take up the challenges of our times. In Live and Become [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Denis Carot
interview: Didar Domehri
interview: Radu Mihaileanu
film profile], released in 2005, which tells the story of Ethiopian Jews immigrated in Israel, and particularly this Ethiopian young boy who leaves his mother and his country to avoid to die, the metaphor of those four mothers who join hands to save a child is the metaphor of the will to save our “child planet”. In The Concert [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Radu Mihaileanu
film profile], I wanted to show that some day, we would be able to reach harmony, like the one between a solo violin and an orchestra, metaphors of the relations between the individual and the community. In The Source [+see also:
trailer
film profile], I wonder about our ability to love and about the women’s rights. I also have many activities to defend the cultural policy and the “droit d’auteur” through my activities with the civil society of authors, directors and producers (ADP) and with the society of playwright authors and composers (SPAC). I also was European ambassador for the Intercultural Dialogue, and the next year, European ambassador for Creation and innovation. My dream is to organize a European civil society of authors, directors and producers, that is why I already started a manifesto of culture where education also plays a central role.

How would you like to pass it on to future generations?
Through my movies, my political actions, my conferences on the cultural policy, lectures in schools and universities, I always try to defend, for the future, freedom of expression, diversity and independence. I prefer to be in a dialogue, in a exchange of thoughts, of struggles. Through the education of my children (18 and 21 years old), in order for them to become active, smart and complex members of the global community. I really think that at times of crisis, at the end of a cycle, this is the ideal moment to innovate, reinvent ourselves, standing again, redouble our energy. Education is essential : young people have to educate themselves as actors. Not as spectators. Every one brings his point of view, a strong and diverse opinion. Every one contributes to the world’s movement and intelligence.

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