07/11/2012 - 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.

What is your reason to hope?
Philippe Le Guay: Every day, I spontaneously switch on the radio when I wake up: it is the usual spate of bad news, economic crisis, attacks, cyclones… and then I go out in the street, I observe the light on the roofs of Paris. I try to enjoy the moment of life given to me. Hoping is a decision we make.
All things considered, I realize I am wrong to reduce the news to the bad news. Our time brings us every day new reasons to be surprised. And times of crisis suggest revising the old models, to invent something new. Oil is getting rare? We must limit the traffic, find other natural resources. And invent exclusive rules, a new presence to the world.

What would be the project which embodies your reason to hope?
My job is to tell stories. We can decide that everything has been said, or on the contrary, we can be surprised that thousands of situations still have not been described. The reading of newspapers is a wonderful stimulus: young female rock musicians sent to a work camp, a billionaire abused by a dandy, American nationalists attached to their weapons like Buffalo Bill… We cannot stop seeing new topics which were unthinkable only a decade ago.
No, not everything has already been told. It is up to us to draw from ourselves a new way to perceive the reality and to make it perceive around us.
When I write a story, I often think to a chess game. Nothing is more familiar than a chessboard and the pieces which compose it. However, every combining leads us to a particular story…
In this respect, the great painters teach us inexhaustible lessons. Let’s think to this way of exploring tirelessly the same themes, the nudes, still life, the portrait … there is nothing in common between Rembrandt and Bacon! And yet, yes there is. This mystery of creation, that I keep visiting and exploring, gives me reasons to hope.
But maybe something greater than hope exists? I think to this sentence which ends La place royale by Corneille: “I stop hoping and start living”.

In partnership with