EFA - Think Tank 2009

EFA Think Tank

THE IMAGE OF EUROPE

under the patronage of JosĂŠ Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission

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Front row (from left to right): Volker Schlöndorff, Labina Mitevska, Marjane Satrapi, José Manuel Barroso, Agnieszka Holland, Dieter Gorny.

Second row: Michael Schmid-Ospach, Constantin Costa-Gavras, István Szabó, Johanna ter Steege, Wim Wenders, Albert Solé.

Third row: Peter Cowie, Kujtim Çashku, and Ademir Kenovic.

In the back: Thomas Høeg, Barbara Gessler, Fernando Trueba, Marion Döring, Søren Høy, and Michael Althen.

EFA Think Tank

THE IMAGE OF EUROPE

under the patronage of JosĂŠ Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission 27-29 May 2009

CONTENTS: A PLEA FOR THE EMOTIONAL SIDE OF EUROPE

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Circle 1 AN EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE

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Circle 2 THE IMPORTANCE OF IMAGES

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Circle 3 THE IMAGE OF EUROPE

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Speach by Wim Wenders

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Speech by José Manuel Barroso

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EFA Think Tank 2009 Participants & organisation IMPRINT

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A Plea for the Emotional Side of Europe EFA Think Tank THE IMAGE OF EUROPE with EU President Barroso results in filmmakers’ call for film education in school.

Twenty leading creators from the fields of film directing, writing, acting, production, distribution and education met with José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, to exchange their views on the impact that images and cinema have on the identity of Europe and the way Europeans identify with their home continent. The President who had followed the Academy’s invitation to take the meeting under his patronage stated that the European Union is perceived by many citizens “mainly as an economic union,” and demanded: “We have to concentrate more on the emotional side of Europe.”

The meeting took place in the framework of the think tank THE IMAGE OF EUROPE, organised by the European Film Academy in Germany’s Ruhr Metropolis, European Capital of Culture 2010, with the support of Filmstiftung North Rhine-Westphalia and RUHR.2010.

On the invitation of Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff the participants discussed a variety of issues such as the growing damage done by piracy or the distribution problems outside the country of a film’s origin. As Wim Wenders pointed out, “there’s a new cinema by a young and optimistic generation that is moving freely across the borderless continent. Only their brilliant films don’t travel as much as the filmmakers do.”

It was unanimously agreed that film can play an enormous role in the way European citizens relate to their home continent, and that a sensitivity for other cultures and countries keeps alive the spirit of diversity and creates an appreciation for the richness of European culture. As Volker Schlöndorff emphasized, it is time to “consider another lingua franca, the language of the images.”

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These discussions have led to the following APPEAL: WE, the participants of the Think Tank THE IMAGE OF EUROPE, persuaded that children who live in a world dominated by images need to understand the grammar of the moving image just as they need to know the grammar of the written word; • call on the member states of the European Union to place film education on the agenda of the Council of European education ministers with the aim of including film, like literature, not as a supplementary programme but as an integral part of the school curricula, • offer the European Commission our help in shaping the future of European cinema as part of European culture and identity.

The European Film Academy is ready to assume a major role in contributing to the development of a pan-European programme for film education. And the Academy will explore other paths and tools that may help shaping that “emotional side of Europe”. The members of the think tank will act as ambassadors in their respective countries to spread the content and results of this meeting.

Think Tank THE IMAGE OF EUROPE Essen/Germany, 27-29 May 2009 Michael Althen, Kujtim Çashku, Constantin Costa-Gavras, Peter Cowie, Thomas Høegh, Agnieszka Holland, Søren Høy, Ademir Kenovic, Labina Mitevska, Marjane Satrapi, Volker Schlöndorff, Albert Solé, Johanna ter Steege, István Szabó, Fernando Trueba, Wim Wenders.

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Circle 1

AN EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE

Wim Wenders

Volker Schlöndorff

Marion Döring

István Szabó

Wim Wenders: Welcome to our think tank! In the name of the European Film Academy I want to thank you all for coming here and for helping us to reflect upon the image of Europe.

When I grew up I was enthusiastic about Europe. Many of us here were enthusiastic about Europe, probably for different reasons.

Europe was a great new idea after the war, there was a bold utopian element to it, there was hope to invest, there was a future to invent, there was guidance to be expected, strength to be found. But I don’t want to dwell on the past.

Today there is a certain weariness about Europe among Europeans, a certain lethargy. Many young and old are tired of Europe, they associate with it bureaucracy, weight, politics. Briefly, it does not inspire – on the contrary. They understand local problems really well, regional ones have a huge impact on them, but national issues are already received as a burden and on the horizon are all the global troubles. Why does there have to be yet another category in between – European? Is this too big an idea today or not big enough?

But I don’t want to dwell on the present either.

I’m very confident that today and tomorrow we will hear plenty of interesting thoughts about the past and the present. I rather want to direct our thoughts towards the future. What can the idea of Europe and through that European reality become in the future? What can we do to influence it? Can we steer it, and if so, in which direction?

So I want to throw a few thoughts into the tank, so to speak: In the future, European people will still be deeply rooted in their local and regional environment – call it whatever you want: language, culture, habitat, context… Their strongest emotions will be directed towards and received from local and regional experiences. Local and regional elements will continue to dominate our lives. The biggest threat/ challenge/contest but, of course, also opportunity will come from a

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Søren Høy

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Agnieszka Holland

global perspective. The dimension in between, either national and/or European will shrink or will be compressed between the two brackets “regional” on one side and “global” on the other.

Actually, the impact of “national” and/or “European” ideas will entirely depend on how much national or European entities will help to protect or gently open up local and regional concerns and interests against or towards the global context. In the amount that this defence or guidance will be handled by national institutions or principles, European institutions and thoughts will be seen as superfluous, heavy, and in the end burdensome. In the amount that Europe itself will become the shield against and the navigator towards the planet as a whole, Europe will benefit and appear useful, helpful, protective, necessary, and good. That’s the first thing I wanted to throw at you – how Europe will position itself between regional and global issues will determine how it will be perceived.

The second thought is: in the future the culture and importance of the word is rapidly diminishing. More and more people read the news on their little devices or check them on their computers. Content is getting compressed. Our attention is guided by icons, brands form our habits, there are visuals everywhere, and language gets converted down to headlines or to captions. More than ever, the image is going to rule communication, opinions and values. What we think, how we dress, what we eat, which car we drive, how we behave, what we see – briefly: who we are is fed to us and suggested through imagery, not through books anymore or theatre and even less and less through television, that classic 20th century image provider.

The third thought I want to throw into the tank might be seen as slightly blasphemous but we will have to face it: In the future, culture will have much less impact. Industry will take over its role and dominate social processes. And actually, maybe the realistic way

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to look at that is to face the fact that this is already happening today, not just in the future. Culture is receding everywhere while industry is gaining importance. I’m not saying we’re going to enter an age of mindless thinking. I’m just saying that the language of products will start replacing all the structures that are in the end traditionally based on our language of culture. It’s happening all around us: Ideas, ethics, stories, morals, the understanding of the world – those notions have already all turned into content. They are driven by content providers and these providers and their software are today’s engines, not the ideas themselves like in the old days, not culture. So all our great notions – already now and certainly in the future – will have to be carried and sold and presented through providers of culture and their industrial sponsors. We will be driven and moved more than we ever anticipated by industrial forces. And that’s what I think might be perceived as a little blasphemous.

Let’s not beat that old war horse European culture too much; it’s not that horse’s fault that it has somehow become lame. If you look at it, there’s just no more saddle on it. Let us strengthen our providers, our software, our industry, all the structural elements that can carry culture, can carry our ideas and ideals so that they will continue to survive.

These ideas and ideals will only survive if they remain popular. Why has the very word culture become so utterly unpopular? If in any discussion that word comes up, the attention span goes down right away.

People of cultural fields and institutions all over Europe, us included, have in the past tried to defend cultural values and have led that discourse under the condition and with the understanding that culture has driven our European heritage and therefore will continue to do so. That might not be so in the digital age where the transport of meaning forms, deflects, shapes and changes that very meaning.

So maybe we should not put all our money on culture itself. Let’s control and promote its transport as well.

At the very end of the day – you might have guessed it already – I want to talk about European cinema, of course. We will not make it a secret – if we asked you here to talk about the image of Europe it was not entirely without a hidden agenda, ein Hintergedanke – a great German word. We are the European Film Academy. All three elements of our name are in danger of becoming obsolete or at least lose their influence and impact. I have mentioned the danger to the notion Europe. Film, you all know that, might not have a future anyway

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in the digital age. And doesn’t the third element of our name smell old-fashioned: Academy? Are we therefore an obsolete organisation, or at least running that risk? Our film culture is solidly based on the cinema both as the place of that 7th art, the movie theatre, as well as on its very elements, celluloid, prints, projectors – all of which are on the way out. The photomechanical age is vanishing.

That’s no reason to despair though and to beat the drum of nostalgia. Because as we enter the digital age more and more, the realm and the influence of the image is enlarging. In the future, people – Europeans – will need one thing more than anything else: comfort, guidance, consolation, distraction and nothing offers that so much as stories. And cinema does just that and will continue to do just that – provide those comforting stories in their most popular form, moving pictures: That need will still be valid, even when the last movie theatre has vanished and if other forms presenting that comfort food for the soul will have replaced them.

We do not insist therefore on becoming the possibly obsolete European + Film + Academy. We rather want to represent the industry, the craft and the art of those people who will produce in the future the soul food for the eyes and the soul for the benefit of our home continent Europe. That Europe of the future will not even exist in the minds and hearts of its people if it will not project its own imagery and stories with confidence, emotions, guts, attractively and convincingly, at the height of the available technology, at the state of the art, both in cultural and industrial terms.

The incredible influence America has today on the global culture was conditioned and formed by the fact that American cinema invented and kept alive the American idea. The power of the image was understood, cultivated and fostered in America and by Hollywood more than by anybody else – arguably with the exception of the revolutionary Russian cinema. Any American identity has been shaped by the movies. The American dream is now being dreamed by the entire world as a result of an industry taking charge of cultural notions and giving them a much more powerful platform.

So, we too will have to strengthen our future imagery, its promotion, its impact, its resonance in the world and especially inside Europe. We should do that by reinforcing the industry that creates those future images, those European films of the future, to describe our European story, image and self-image needs. National ideas will

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shrink more and more. National industries will shrink more and more – if we play our European card right – while local and regional impulses will continue to thrive and to give people the roots they so badly need in the global community. These regional and local roots are the very strengths of our European cinema, or plural: cinemas. We tend to think of our diversity as a handicap. No! In the future it is going to be our biggest asset. Let us think in these two days about the industry, the craft, and the education Europeans will need in order to create a more positive and useful image of Europe. It will have to be cutting edge in the near future. It will have to anticipate what will happen to cinema in that transition from an analogue, photomechanical to a fully digital tool. It will have to anticipate what will happen on the way from two-dimensional to three-dimensional representation.

It will have to anticipate how our movie theatres and cineplexes will turn into new kinds of venues in the future. It will have to anticipate how traditional storytelling will be changed to adapt to new carriers and forms of transportation. It will have to anticipate how the reception and understanding of imagery can be taught, learned and studied, especially at an early age. It will have to finally anticipate what locally and regionally anchored Europeans in the future will expect from their home continent. Then we’ll have a Europe of stamina, of consequence and of weight – not as a burden, but in a good sense. The European Film Academy, as the only body that unites all the industries from all those European regions in the widest sense, will have an important role to play to shape that image and those images of Europe.

The hidden agenda, our Hintergedanke, of initiating this think tank is to tell the political Europe: Let us help you, or better: help us to help you, help European cinema to help shaping the European identity of the future. How? I’m just here to welcome you, you are the think tank!

Volker Schlöndorff: I think the reason why I first went to the cinema was to escape from school. School was culture, cinema was sex and crime. But I’m here to speak in our now common lingua franca, in a more pedestrian way than Wim, on the cultural identity, the image of Europe.

We would like to convince somehow this European bureaucratic body that it should consider another lingua franca, the language of the images, as a thing to be taught in school, to be part of the school curriculum so you don’t have to run to the internet, as in our days

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to the cinema, but you can get it right there in school. Of course, all schools use film as an instrument, as a tool to teach literature so kids don’t have to read books anymore, they watch the DVD – that’s the dividend I’m living on. Or they use films in the form of documentaries about the life of the honeybee, or the last Eskimo, or whatever. But film is never seen as a medium per se.

When I see how my 17-year old daughter suffers going through Kafka’s “Letter to the Father” or other pieces of literature and how this painful reading shows her that life is vulnerable and painful but how much it turns her against literature – I’m afraid she will never read voluntarily after that – I think that the first danger to avoid when introducing film into the curriculum is making it yet another heavy duty.

But as Wim says, when we teach the language of films in school, we also teach a part of heritage, European heritage, world heritage, which was always regional. It cannot be otherwise. Europe can never become like the US, this one entity. But it can be exciting to see in regional stories, human stories, individual stories. We will never be one people; we will never be one culture. There will not be one image, there will be many images, and hopefully there will be many stories. The true language is going to be defined in the future; it will be mostly a digital language. But to speak it well it could help to have known the 24-frames-per-second time we grew up in. Politicians will mostly see teaching film in school as something useful to bring people together, solidarity, brotherhood with other cultures and other peoples, it can teach geography, the customs of the countries, and so on. That is okay, we will give that to politics. Education should be nobler than that. It’s about creating a community, of having shared experiences which can happen through film.

And in many European countries there are examples of how to introduce film to the school curriculum. In France, Bergala worked on it and the CNC and the Ministry of Education and Culture introduced a programme of films which are proposed per year to the schools which teachers and pupils should watch together, discuss together – I think the shared experience in a cinema is very important. In the UK, there is the National School Film Week. It proposes films for viewing to school classes with their teachers in regular cinemas. In Sweden, it is even more written into the curriculum, especially because cinema offers a cross-curricular discipline. Again, the Swedes put in first place the shared experience of viewing a film together. That seems

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to come back in all of these programmes. Read the language, if you are manipulated by images, know in which way you are manipulated, make the distinction between document and fiction. To finish, I just mention the German initiative, which is once during a week per year children are taken by the schools to the cinema.

By the end of this conference we would like to come up with a proposal to Brussels, combining and condensing these different approaches, and that cinema should be part of education, the language of cinema and the art of cinema.

Marion Döring: We will go around now and I want to start with one of the founding fathers, István, you’ve been one of the spiritual fathers of this Academy which was initiated in 1988 in a totally different Europe still divided. If I were to ask the István of 21 years ago about his expectations of Europe and the István of today about the role Europe plays in your contemporary life, what would be your answers?

István Szabó: Twenty years ago I was hoping for a Europe which can change the lives of people keeping traditions and values together and can help people to change their attitudes. And now, after 20 years, and after enormous political changes, I learned something.

I think you can change a political system, even over night, but you cannot change the mentality of the people. People living in Europe are people who did not leave, to America for example, to start all over, to create a new country, learn a new language, and live a new mentality.

They were more faithful to their language or to their country, their relatives, they wanted to stay. It’s a certain conservative mentality and I think this is an important part of Europe.

MD: What is the image that you brought with you? Did you bring an image?

IS: No, I brought fifty. (laughter) And I will tell you why: When you asked me to bring a picture of what Europe means to me, two pictures came to my mind: The first one was a postcard of the Acropolis which is a very important symbol for Europe. And the second one was the gas chambers of Auschwitz: two pictures. To me, the history of Europe until now is a bridge between the Acropolis and Auschwitz. So I decided not to bring a picture. Instead I asked a friend of mine who

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is a teacher in Budapest to ask the children to draw an image of what they think of Europe. And I got fifty pictures!

MD: Søren, when you were a kid, what kind of films did you see?

Søren Høy: From when I was about seven until I was about twelve years old I didn’t see much daylight. You have to put this into context, though, because I come from the country side in Jutland where the sun never shines. My mother is an artist and she really wanted me to see these films. When I started studying film later on, I found out that film in some context in Europe is looking back. But it turns out that making films is looking forward, which means that we represent the future for a lot of people. We, as artists and creators, we have a huge obligation today. I read recently that from 2002 to 2007 as much material was published as was published from year zero to 2002, which means that we are overflowing with publications. And we can actually use that in the film world. When I see Europe today, I see a very strong Europe. Because all of a sudden it turns out quantity is quality – we need a lot of films to make good films. In a lot of ways I feel that we are moving in a very interesting direction, towards a generation of filmmakers who like telling stories in their own ways. They’re not just slaves of a system. They are very strong individuals but only in a collective association. They’re not strong alone but they’re strong together.

Kujtim Çashku: I would like to come back to the idea of changing the political system. That can be done if we change the way people think but it cannot be realized if we ignore the power of culture.

I was in a demonstration 19 years ago with the current prime minister of my country. We fought together with him to topple the former communist regime, taking down the monument of the dictator and steering Albania towards Europe. Ironically, 19 years later, on the same day, I was beaten by the police of this very man, who is now prime minister, defending an open-air movie theatre in the public garden of the Academy of Film and Multimedia “Marubi” in Albania.

The prime minister and I started together with the same idealist approach towards European culture. We wanted to re-orient our country towards Europe.

Since then, he went into politics and I remained a filmmaker.

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I have come to realise that the careers of a politician and a filmmaker are different, even though they may have started from the same vantage point; the two career paths diverge and regretfully and paradoxically they can clash. This realization has caused me to start thinking about a divorce I see today between politics and culture.

Politicians exercise their power without considering culture as part of their agenda, although they use culture to exercise their power. They don’t even consider that it was a cultural movement that toppled an old regime and brought them to power.

So that’s what I mean when I say that I am rather pessimistic when I see a lot of interest on the part of the European Parliament and other institutions focusing on security and military affairs or free markets in Albania and elsewhere, but not on culture!

MD: Ademir, you come from Sarajevo which was a functioning multicultural society before the war. How important is culture and film in letting people grow together again?

Ademir Kenovic: As a general feeling I have lots of pessimism and traces of optimism. And I would say that this pessimism is connected to the ideal system, words, interpretations of Europe, outside Europe.

That’s why I brought these beautiful images of the distant worlds which I thought are somehow the first things that come to my mind when I think of the place where I live, Europe…

Concerning the traces of optimism, I somehow felt free to bring you a short film which I made with a couple of friends about the only thing I believe in, nature and people. I’m not a tourist agent but you probably saw billions of negative, of war pictures from Sarajevo and I just wanted you to see [some] different pictures.

Marjane Satrapi: Actually I didn’t bring any image of Europe because I didn’t know which image to bring. It is very difficult for me to bring an image of Europe other than a passport. Europe will not recognize me as a European. When my movie [Persepolis] came out, the first reaction was: why is the movie in French and not in Persian?

I mean, nobody asks Sofia Coppola why Marie Antoinette speaks English! Nobody asks Milos Forman why Mozart was speaking English instead of German. You have American actors who are ordered to speak Austrian so they use a British accent and for everybody that’s completely normal. But when I make a movie about Iran, in French, it

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is unbearable. It was the Iranian film – until it went to Cannes and it won lots of prizes and suddenly I turned into a French director and my movie became a French movie. So, this is also a problem in Europe.

I’m probably the only person here who was not born in Europe. My whole education was in a French school and I have lived in Europe for a long time but I’m not of European origin. And in a way this kind of reaction from Europe is, as was said before, very conservative. And this conservatism can even be racist. Now I’m doing a movie with French money in a German studio with American actors and they tell me: keep your difference. That’s a new way of expressing racism, it means: you’re not like us. It means: just make your small Persian movies and we’ll all be very happy. I think that this way of not being open to other people who also live in Europe can cause an extra problem.

Earlier Wim Wenders was talking about the impact of American cinema. But American cinema also had this openness to tell any story coming from anywhere and turning it into an American movie.

In Europe, if you’re French you have to make French movies, if you’re German you have to make German movies. There is a lot of talk of how French cinema is very great but basically there are a lot of very bad movies. So it’s not just a question of quantity, it’s also a question of quality. In order to be able to hope for European culture, European culture cannot stop at the borders of Europe, it has to go beyond that, because Europe is made by Europeans but it is also influenced by a lot of things beyond. God knows if I could have the final cut in America, and if I didn’t have to deal with all of these financing people, I would rather make my next movie in America. The problem is that I won’t get final cut. So I prefer the freedom of the European cinema.

But there also is this prejudice against the one who doesn’t come from Europe, even though I’ve lived here for half my life. Maybe we need this openness also in Europe. I mean, we have different languages and different ways of thinking. But the cinema tells stories, it doesn’t depend on a special place, maybe we can collaborate more in order to have a wider, bigger cinema. I’m absolutely not pessimistic about the digital taking over, that it’s all going to be bad for us. I come from illustration and I remember when the computer arrived everybody said that was the end of drawing by hand. But the problem is that the computer does not do what the hand does – never. And it’s the same with digital cinema. If you want to have 35mm quality for something that was shot digitally, you have to spend so much more money, you

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spend so much more time that it’s better to shoot it on 35mm in the beginning. There are things that you cannot do otherwise.

It has been said that cinema should be part of the education.

That’s a very good idea. And I don’t quite agree with your story about your 17-year-old daughter. I refused to read any kind of literature as long as I had to read it. But when I came out of school, I read it all.

And at least I had a basis; at least I knew who Kafka was. I hated Kafka in school but then I read it all later. The basis of education is useful.

MD: Monsieur Costa-Gavras, you are from Greece and from France.

Does having two cultures help to be more optimistic about Europe?

Constantin Costa-Gavras: Optimistic, I don’t know. Someone said before that in Europe you have to be faithful to something. I believe in that. I’m obliged; I have to live with a Greek culture and a French culture. Coming back to Europe today, European cinema, I think cinema first of all, is personal, then it’s national, then maybe it’s European or something else. It can be European under certain conditions in a certain way. In Europe, for the past ten years or so, politics are not ours.

They may be good for the economy but my feeling is that Europe should set an example for culture, for education. Because Europe, in more or less 3,000 years, we have been through everything, the worst things and probably the best things. And we arrived at a point where we said, OK, let’s do something different. We started about fifty years ago but up until now we didn’t get where we should go.

Michael Althen: Maybe this has something to do with the picture I brought because as you might know I work as a film critic. And we have to prepare obituaries for people, just in case they die at a time when it doesn’t fit our schedule. I never wanted to do that, I just refused. I don’t believe in writing obituaries beforehand. And because this is decided in advance I knew that if Michelangelo Antonioni died, I would have to write an obituary. And if I have bad luck I’d get a call and I’d have to write it during my holidays. But I lived with it for ten years. But then, one summer, I wanted to go on a holiday with my family and I couldn’t live with this any longer. I wanted to enjoy this one holiday without that fear in the back of my head that there might be a call. So I sat down the night before we left and wrote this obituary. And on the next day, when we left, I received a phone call

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saying, Ingmar Bergman died. And I thought, “Wow, that was close!”

Well, you all know what happened, Antonioni died the same day, they called me the next day and I already had the obituary. Why am I telling this? Because this 30 July 2007 was a date when you had the impression that something big had ended. But in a way it was also a confirmation of how much it is still alive.

Agnieszka Holland: I was thinking about the frustration we feel because as European filmmakers we’re not able to produce for the world and for ourselves the images which are powerful, universal and unifying and which are attractive for audiences across Europe and the world. And I was thinking how America is using European imagery. There are three main directions where American cinema is using European imagery: First there are historical and cultural images from the ancient Greeks, Rome, the Middle Ages, Tudor England, revolutionary France, Victorian England, the fin-de-siècle.

The second is the touristic presence, especially in romantic comedies – food, wine, landscape, architecture and folklore – it’s mostly set in Paris, Rome, Tuscany, and the Greek islands. These are very joyful and attractive images of Europe – of course, also very superficial.

And the third is the Second World War which became a part of American history and American imagination, especially the holocaust which provides images that are incredibly powerful and I think still present in our minds – Auschwitz, the Warsaw ghetto, the liberation of the concentration camps. Poland, as a place where American producers are coming, is attractive only because it has fantastic locations such as Majdanek and Auschwitz.

And even if the people who are running the museums in places like Auschwitz haven’t been so eager lately to allow productions to shoot there, Polish production designers still know very well how to reproduce concentration camps. I remember that several years ago I was approached by an important American producer who was making a series about the liberation of Europe. He asked me to shoot the episode where American GIs are liberating concentration camps.

He was very flattering, telling me that I am the only person he knows who would be able to shoot it. I said I cannot do it because those images are so well-known and so present, so non-exchangeable that I cannot imagine reproducing them. Those people were living skeletons, looking into the camera, looking at us. Even technically it is impossible, I said, where will I find such skeleton-like people? Maybe

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in the last stages of AIDS but that’s immoral. And he said, you know, in Yugoslavia they just liberated some camp and there are pictures of those people who are extremely thin. And he said, maybe we can transfer some of them to our set. I said that it’s probably going to be difficult. Don’t worry, he said, we have in the budget an amount to produce plastic skeletons. And I said, yes, but they were living, you know, they were moving. He said, yes, but we can use animatronics.

So, this is just an anecdote and of course they did it and it looked good and in some way they were right. Because these are the kinds of images that speak to the American audience and if it weren’t for a kitsch TV series like Holocaust Americans would have never really understood what the Holocaust was, never would have appropriated that as part of their own history, their own guilt, their own knowledge.

It’s maybe because nobody produced any images in Gulags that the victims of Stalin are not present. And if you go to Italy or to France and you speak to the French or Italian intellectuals, they still don’t believe that they existed. I don’t think that these are bad or stupid people, it’s just that they never really appropriated the knowledge of this disaster because the images don’t exist.

So, images are very, very powerful and the images of Europe in the collective memory are from those three sources. We did not succeed to produce such images from recent history. Of course, there are some exceptions like Prague ‘68, May in Paris ‘68, strikes in Gdánsk – you have some images like that but we don’t really know what to do with them. Poland, for example, in a way became the beginning of the end of Communism; it was very spectacular, very heroic, very funny and tragic at the same time. Nobody except for Volker Schlöndorff has made a film about this. And poor Volker was attacked by everybody in Poland, the movie was totally destroyed.

It was destroyed by the stupid people with the lazy minds who don’t understand that he was trying to create something that can unify Europe around an event which is maybe the most beautiful in Europe in recent history.

MD: Johanna, how difficult is it to be a European actress?

Johanna ter Steege: It’s wonderful to be a European actress! I am very optimistic; I have to be very optimistic. It’s wonderful to be a European actress, first of all because I feel that we are able to tell stories. And I love to play in movies that tell real stories with content.

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It is in a way difficult if you come from a small country like I do, from the Netherlands, and you don’t speak English, French, or German. So, France would have been a better country for me as an actress, I think, and maybe England, too. But then I had the opportunity and luck to meet István [Szabó] and to meet George Sluizer and Robert Altman and Philippe Garrel and so many, many people. I have done many, many beautiful things and I’m sure that many more will come.

MD: Thomas, you are a Norwegian based in London and you are both an artist and a very successful businessman. What role does Europe play for you in these different contexts?

Thomas Høegh: For me, Europe was not something that was a choice of Europeans, it was a choice to avoid another calamity and it was made, at least partly, by the Americans. And to some degree we have never managed to get out of this construct. It’s not a choice; we live under our lowest common denominator. We have elected to support and be aggressive about the importance of democracy.

But democracy is also our worst enemy in that democracy is a sort of perpetual popularity contest. And when we as Europeans are primarily bound by much smaller entities than Europe, either by our national identity or our tribal identity, religious or political identity, it is very clear that whatever choices are made by our national politicians are dumbed down to be popular enough to win the next elections. Making unpopular choices is not something politicians are very good at because they are more preoccupied with perpetuating their position. And if you then take that to the extreme, which is the European landscape, it is dumbed down once more. And for me that is a very frustrating position because it lacks leadership in the ultimate instance. That means that making difficult choices about what it means to be European and what it means to create an identity of Europe, nobody is going to put their hand up and make bold statements and bold decisions, much less bold actions. That’s incredibly frustrating because it means it’s going to be hard to get much further without some kind of crystallization of extremities. Having said that, I’m very much in favour of us as a group to challenge the European Commission about taking an initiative and about starting to show that the power of the image is something that they can use to create an identity of Europe, almost like a brand for Europe; to use a more commercial term, and I think that the European Union should be much more

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aggressive about commissioning works of art, not necessarily just film but other things that can create a real identity for Europe.

I actually think that there is a patchwork of European culture but it isn’t very easy to identify and to highlight and certainly not easy to celebrate. But I’m an optimist. We have the benefit that people actually admire us. They want to know what happens in Cannes. Just imagine if no one cared, if no one bothered to write a bad review on Lars von Trier’s latest film. Imagine what it must be like working in classical music where there are no more reviews. That’s a crisis! At least we work in an art form that people care enough for to say that something is bad.

MD: Albert, you have a Spanish-Hungarian-French-Romanian background and you were born in Budapest but you have never been to Budapest?

Albert Solé: No, actually I was born in Bucharest, Romania, because of the political commitment of my parents. They were both anti-Franco activists, and they belonged to the Communist Party and worked for Radio España Independiente, La Pirenaica, the Spanish Communist Party radio station settled in Romania. So, I was born in Bucharest but I was registered in Budapest. So I’m officially a citizen of Budapest although I’ve never been there. And then I have also got a French and a Spanish passport, so I have three passports. And every time I’m asked where I’m from, of course I can say just one thing: I’m European. And to me Europe is at the same time a land of exile and a land of shelter.

I brought a picture of me at the age of three. It’s just a picture of a father with his son, with the Eiffel Tower in the back, but it’s the only one I have of me and my father when we were in exile in Paris.

After that we were expelled from the Communist Party and we had to go back to Spain and my father spent some time in jail. I’m telling you all these personal stories because I shot a movie which was supposed to be a personal movie and then it became a generation movie, and a movie about the history of a country. And it got a lot of recognition and awards in Spain. That was a big surprise to me. Therefore I understood something very important – there are basic stories that attract European people despite their origin, their age, their generation, their experiences, because there are common matters and issues among all of us. I started to shoot the movie knowing that my father was ill with Alzheimer. So it was a movie about identity,

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about history, about a son looking for his roots, looking for his father.

I also wanted to reflect about social and political commitments. And this is very much linked to European identity; I think this makes the difference from other movie industries. Here, we are able to put a lot of ideas and values, many capital issues into our movies and I would like to see this in everything coming up from the European industry.

Labina Mitevska: I must say that I love Europe; I’m a complete optimist – about Europe, our creativity, our stories, our talent, our energy, our screens, our tears, our laughs, our smiles. For me this is the hope – European cinema. We need to face it, to eat it, to get it into our stomach. We need to be brave in every step. I have lived in different places at different times but I’m always enthusiastic about Europe. I found my peace in Macedonia in a small village, a very peaceful place where nature is giving to me food and serenity. Every time I go there, I have to go from house to house to buy my food.

So every time I go, I’m asked, “Oh where are you coming from this time”, I say, from Germany, from France, and so on. And I realise that I have become a story-teller of Europe because the villagers never leave their land. I tell them beautiful stories which make some people happy. Where most of the citizens have never seen Europe, they have seen images but they have no experience. I will continue being a European story-teller in villages because the more we know about each other, the stronger we get. That is why I brought images of the villagers from Macedonia.

Fernando Trueba: Spaniards are very much into Europe, maybe because we lived in a dictatorship for such a long time. When I grew up I was dreaming of Europe, of Europe as an escape from Spain.

For me, France was the Promised Land; I was very optimistic about Europe. I remember somebody saying: Europe is the place where the death penalty does not exist. And I loved that, I wanted to belong to such a place! And then I discovered movies and literature, I was reading everything in French, because that was the only language I could speak. But I must admit that in the last years I have lost my faith in Europe because I think that Europe has lost faith in herself and Europeans have lost faith in their continent. In the moment the French voted against the European constitution and Spain supported the war [in Iraq], I lost my connection, I don’t feel I belong here.

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Circle 2:

THE IMPORTANCE OF IMAGES

Peter Cowie

Constantin Costa-Gavras

Johanna ter Steege

Ademir Kenovic

Peter Cowie: As I was preparing for this meeting, I kept wondering, “Is there really an image of European cinema, and if so, what is it?”

And I think there is, it’s an image of a history, and it’s an image of a cultural tradition. And in a way, this image has two faces. On the one hand there is the thematic image, its pre-occupation with social concerns, whether it’s Ken Loach in Britain, Laurent Cantet in France, or Christian Mungiu in Romania. And it’s interesting that that has developed from an altogether different thematic tradition in the heyday of European cinema, that great flowering which we associate with the years from 1956 to ‘66, when the concerns were almost metaphysical – religious, political, and certainly moral. I’m thinking of Bergman, Fellini, even Godard. And this continues in the work just shown at the recent Cannes festival of Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier. Maybe it’s due to our Greco-Roman roots or the Judaeo-Christian tradition of dealing with everything in terms of moral issues.

But the other face of this image of European cinema, for me anyway, is the physical image. It’s the image of making films inexpensively.

It’s the image of making films with players, not stars; of making films informally, on location, with wild sound, trying at all costs to be authentic.

One of the things we’re going to talk about this morning is the influence of images on minorities and the way minorities are perceived. And in a way European cinema has an immense advantage there because it’s rich in minority communities and languages. And the cinema can introduce these minorities to other nations; it can help those other countries and other regions to comprehend their culture and the way they tick. Many of the most gifted filmmakers in Norway, Sweden, Germany, France are themselves immigrants, or the sons or daughters of such immigrants.

Marjane, maybe you can talk to us a bit about the fact that usually all the discussion in the media is about the way people react to immigrants

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Michael Althen

Fernando Trueba

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Labina Mitevska

Thomas Høegh

and to the “threat” of immigrants taking their jobs and so on. But for you there was an inverse experience because I believe you came to Vienna as an immigrant, and you perceived the people there through your eyes. Perhaps you could tell us what that experience was like?

Marjane Satrapi: It was tough! (laughter) No, because I went to Vienna at the time of the height of the repressive regime in Iran, there were lots of arrests and executions. Part of my family had been fighting with the shah and they had been executed by the new regime. It was a situation of war, we had been bombed every day, and I was the only child of my family plus, you know, I talk too much. So, my family decided to send me over.

When I arrived in Vienna I was expecting Europe to open its arms, like “Here, child, you who has suffered so much, come, we are here to embrace you and to make you feel good.”

Well, I don’t know why my parents sent me to Austria in the first place. But in Austria people thought Khomeini was like my father. And explaining to people that I actually escaped from a regime and that’s why I’m there didn’t make any difference. Being Iranian meant always getting questions like how many wives my father had. You know, these stupid questions, almost as if we lived on the back of a camel.

Immigrants are always the people that you look at, we are being watched. So I said to myself, “Why not turn it the other way around?

I can also watch, I can watch the others and I can give my point of view.” And all my work is to underline the resemblances between the cultures because I really don’t get this shit of the culture clash. In culture you cannot have a clash, you can have differences of opinion; you can have different views. So I tried to concentrate on the human side of it. And that’s probably why the movie worked.

When I made Persepolis, I intentionally didn’t make use of any

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orientalism for the images of Iran. Because if you do that it becomes a story about people who are far from us, they don’t look like us. So all the orientalism takes place in Vienna, the Strassenbahn, the dog and the sausage, Sacher Torte and the yodeller and what have you...

The challenge for me was that if the European viewer of the movie feels so Iranian that when he arrives in Austria, he will have the same surprise that I would have had. And, incredibly enough, it had the same effect even on the Austrians. You can make a connection with somebody who has nothing to do with you. I think that as human beings we are all the same.

PC: Ademir Kenovic, in the early 90s you became the voice of Sarajevo to the outside world. And that must have shaped not just you but probably a whole generation of students and other directors you worked with. Was there a life before and after for you, in terms of filmmaking?

Ademir Kenovic: Yes, definitely, there was. Of course, the experience of living in war, or under siege, strongly influenced and strongly changed the way each of us was working. We were the first to react because being a filmmaker is like being a street-fighter: We immediately knew that we had to react. And the best reaction for us was to do what we knew, to document this miracle around us. So that’s what we did. And, of course, you change. First of all, you become more efficient. And you need less and less of what you normally use for filmmaking.

We were thinking that we ought to tell the world what is happening here. And then, after a long time, you realise that you cannot in fact do that. The world cannot hear you because there are billions of other pieces of information and you’re just one tiny voice which just cannot get through. And if you eventually do get through, you are put into some kind of context, into a relation.

So, part of the experience is that you get to a certain point where you have a strong emotional urge to say something, to tell people. Then you realise that it’s not possible. I mean, when I say that I am mainly a pessimist with traces of optimism that is what this war situation has unfortunately made out of me, and out of lots of us.

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PC: Costa-Gavras, you’ve made so many political films that have really reached a very wide public. But have you been conscious when you’ve been doing research, of how governments and dictators twist images to their own terms, their own use? And how dangerous that is, even as a filmmaker, that if you put images in the wrong order you can get a different result.

Constantin Costa-Gavras: Well, yes, you can do anything with the editing. And research has really been a big school for me. How you can use cinema - it can be a big manipulation of the audience.

But I’d like to talk about the comparison of European cinema and American cinema. I think that there are major differences. American cinema is centralised cinema with a common philosophy. I remember John Landis telling me, “For you Europeans, when you make a movie, you make art. For us, when we make a movie, it’s as if we make a chair. The chair has to be sold as much as possible. It’s an industry, then it can become an art. But for you, first you do art, and then you think you can sell it.”

On the other hand, European cinema is not centralised. Each country has a different culture. I would even say that each director has a different vision. And because of that there are extraordinary differences and schools of cinema, starting from the Italians and the French and the Russians and the Polish and the Czechs, the British and so forth...

PC: And yet you’ve managed to make films like Betrayed or Missing or Music Box in America. And you’ve also made The Confession, Z... in Europe. And they are quite similar.

CCG: Yes, and it was important to me when I went to the United States to tell them, “Okay, I will make the movie, but my way. And I would like to have my French crew and to do the post-production in France. I don’t want to have you on my back during the editing.” And they accepted it. If they hadn’t accepted it, I wouldn’t have done the movies.

PC: What about State of Siege? It was sort of halfway between the two, wasn’t it?

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Constantin Costa-Gavras: Yes, but State of Siege is a much more a European movie than an American movie. It’s an American story; it’s a European movie. European, I would say, also a bit Latin American.

PC: Whereas Missing is slightly more of an American movie than a European one.

CCG: No, Missing is completely American. (laughter) Marjane Satrapi: I just wanted to say something. The first political movie that I saw in Iran, in ‘78, I was eight years old and my parents took me to the cinema, was Z. And my whole political consciousness came from his movies, so when a movie is great it goes beyond the borders. I mean, me, a kid in Teheran, and Costa-Gavras is my political consciousness!

CCG: I’d like to add something to this idea of political movies: I never said I would make political movies. I said, “This is a good story that I like and it touched me deeply; I would like to tell it the way I feel it.”

MS: Yes, but you did, you shaped my political consciousness!

Volker Schlöndorff: I would like to emphasise what we all have in common, especially in Europe. Let’s say culture is the problem. Culture is the origin of war. People set themselves a culture, mostly a religious one.

And then everybody beyond the border of that village, of that community, was considered of a different culture, considered the “other”, and therefore I was free to kill him. He was not like us. Progress is civilisation, civilisation as the cohabitation of different cultures in one structure.

So, there is an element of irony in us in Europe insisting so much on culture – because culture is the problem. Culture is the reason why Europe is not coming together because it has so many different cultures. On the other hand you have America, where a distinctive culture grew slowly out of British colonisation, with immigrants coming in, and finally it shaped what we consider the American culture, which is the lowest common denominator, or the highest common denominator of people coming from many different places in the world. And this “American way of life”, because it is shaped by people coming from all over the world, is easy to re-export to all corners of the world because everybody finds a little common link to it.

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So, we have to overcome our cultures and see what’s common in them. And my experience – whether I worked here or in France or in America or wherever – is that people are pretty much the same all over the world. I had no problem identifying with the worker on a shipyard in Gdánsk or with the salesman in Brooklyn. I didn’t even have a problem identifying with the French Jew Mr. Swann and his girlfriend Odette.

But the Poles and the French have a great problem with my way of showing and of telling their story, even though I tried to make myself invisible as a director. Nevertheless, they said, “He’s not one of us.” You don’t touch Proust; you don’t touch Solidarnosc...

I never had this problem in America, I could do any movie: Willie Loman in Brooklyn, Natasha Richardson in North Carolina or whatnot, no problem, nobody would ask. Because the American film language is open enough to absorb Lubitsch as well as John Ford. There’s more tolerance.

PC: I think it works on the other side, too, because Bertrand Tavernier, your former schoolmate, had a terrible experience on his last film, In the Electric Mist.

VS: I know about Bertrand’s experience, and it was just an unhappy experience. Shit happens, period. But it’s not the rule.

CCG: I spoke with Bertrand and he says it’s also a problem of length.

His movie is over two hours long. And the Americans cannot accept that, those long shots, people travelling by car... So the American version is edited down to one hour forty-something. They cut almost half an hour, which makes it a completely different movie…

MS: Yeah, but there was this movie, I cannot remember the title, with Daniel Day-Lewis…

Agnieszka Holland: There will be blood, yes, it’s not true that you cannot make a slow American movie over two hours.

MS: Yes, exactly... you have this movie that is almost three hours long, filming the beautiful landscape for hours. They still have movies like that.

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Volker Schlöndorff: But the large American audience did have a problem with it!

PC: That’s right. I was just going to say, unfortunately, if you talk to Americans about the film...

Agnieszka Holland: But still, in America it made over 40 million dollars. Try to make a European film of this kind and get even one million people into the movie theatres. I start feeling angry when I hear this old European-American kind of opposition. Of course, it’s very different how they consider cinema, the industry, and the director or filmmaker is much less free. But at the same time, they are much more open than the Europeans, you know. It’s a very, very complex and complicated story. And anyway, the period when we were free, independent, artistic and individualistic and popular in Europe is over.

Labina Mitevska: Why do you say it’s over? I don’t understand. What is over? Every day we see amazing films coming from Europe...

AH: What?

LM: Every day we see amazing films coming from amazing directors’ visions. I don’t understand when you say, “It’s over.” It’s such a strong word.

AH: I can tell you it’s not the beginning; maybe it’s the beginning of something new. But anyway, the situation when Federico Fellini did a movie which had a million people in the theatres in Poland is over.

Now I see the most wonderful European movies, like Hidden [Caché]

by Haneke or Child [L’Enfant] by the brothers Dardenne, and the box office is 20,000 people!

PC: Yeah, but what about Lives of Others? That did very well…

AH: Well, you always have one or two examples which break even, but I’m speaking about the general thing. Of course, we have plenty of talents, and of course you can still find more great European movies than great American movies. But the situation has changed. And I think that this arrogant European attitude toward Americans is just

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naive. And I can tell you I had an experience which is a bit like Ademir’s or Marjane’s or Costa’s and Volker’s in America. I think the problem in Europe is that we have the French image of themselves, we have the German image of themselves, we have the Polish image of ourselves, we have the Italian image, and so on and so on. And those images are based on historical culture. And also, especially after the experience of the 20th century, there is a lot of guilt and complexes.

The French are so afraid of being viewed from outside that they are not interested at all in the German point of view of them, or the Polish point of view. And it’s the same with the Germans. I did a movie which was one of the most popular German movies in the United States, called Europa Europa, which was a kind of philosophical tale, a kind of a Candide of the 20th century. The movie was very popular, received a lot of prizes, won a Golden Globe, and a lot of critics’ prizes. And the Germans were supposed to nominate it as the German entry for the Oscar, and they didn’t. Rather than nominating this film, they nominated nothing.

I never understood what exactly happened. In the States this was regarded as some kind of a German anti-Semitic reaction but I think it was much deeper. In some way my point of view, which was not specifically Polish or specifically Jewish, was very disturbing for them.

And I had a similar experience in France when I tried to present my point of view and not just to respond to some kind of notion they had about me, being from Communist Poland. I was living in a small apartment with my young daughter, a single woman, not speaking French at all at the time, from something like a “savage” country. I was a stranger for those people. So, in the first weeks they sent the police to my apartment three or four times. That was one reaction of my neighbours. Another reaction was this one guy who was extremely nice to me, every time we took the lift together, he asked me, “Comment va notre Pologne, si digne et malheureuse?” (laughter), meaning “How is your Poland, so full of dignity and so unhappy?” So they accepted me only after they turned me into some kind of kitsch. And when I tried to say: “No, I’m not this kitsch, my experience is much more complex; there are different layers of my culture, of my historical consciousness, of my destiny,” no one was really interested. That was the experience of most of the Polish intellectuals who happened to be immigrants after the Second World

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War in countries like France, Italy, and to a lesser extent also in the UK. And this shows that in some way Europe doesn’t want to open up to different perspectives, even those of its European neighbours.

And I’m not even talking about an Asian or an African perspective. I don’t know if you know that by the end of the Second World War, a lot of Africans from the colonies, British or French or Belgian, were taken into the army because it was the end of the war, and they needed the blacks. Black people from the colonies were practically unable to travel to Europe before the war. Very few of them did. So, their first view of white men, apart from the colonial, imperialistic rulers of their countries, was the concentration camps, the war battles, and so on... I think that this experience shaped their conscience very deeply. And 70 percent of the founding fathers of post-colonial Africa, who had been fighting colonialism, had been soldiers in Europe. This was their model of the white tradition, of democracy. The image they had wasn’t Der Himmel über Berlin; it wasn’t a beautiful angel, it was Auschwitz. And with this in mind I ask myself if the political and spiritual situation in post-colonial Africa is not our responsibility much more than we believe.

And coming back to the United States: I did several movies in America which are more American than you can imagine. I did a film, which I consider one of my most personal ones, called Shot in the Heart, about Gary Gilmore, Mormons, blood atonement, the death penalty and things like that. It was my point of view, even if it was an American script, and it was absolutely accepted. Not only accepted, but then I was offered the chance to do several episodes of probably the most important American TV series, which speaks about American life and American politics today, The Wire.

And then the same people who did The Wire asked me if I didn’t want to make a pilot for a TV series for HBO about life in New Orleans shaped by [Hurricane] Katrina, but shaped also by the experience of the 200-year-old culture. And I did it, quite successfully, it was picked up and it will be a TV series. It was a very important production for the local, especially the black community. They considered it the first time they were not regarded from a tourist perspective, or from the point of view of the tragedy of Katrina, where they are only victims.

And they wanted to show that they are not only some kind of tourist attraction or not some kind of victims, that they create some part of the fabric of life and culture. There was a black woman who was some kind of consultant for the community. She was on the set every day.

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And at some point she said to my daughter, who was doing second unit, that Spike Lee had actually wanted to do this pilot, and that he was really angry when he heard that I was doing it because I’m white, because I’m a woman…

And my daughter asked her, “What do you think?” She said, “Listen, what does Spike know about suffering? Agnieszka certainly knows much more.” This touched me enormously because I understood that she’s not regarding me as somebody who is limited by her origins.

She is judging me as a human being who can be open, who has a perspective that is interesting for them. And I never found this kind of attitude in Europe.

Fernando Trueba: Talking about the French or European attitude or the American attitude, I recall one thing which is very illustrative: the first thing that the Lumière brothers did after their first movies was that they gave a camera to a dozen different camera operators and sent them all over the world. One went to the pyramids; another to Niagara Falls... And one came to Spain and he did the first gay movie ever... (laughter). It’s a wonderful movie, 50 seconds long, of the Spanish army, all these guys in uniform with big moustaches, dancing very tenderly, embracing one another. I consider that the first gay movie. But that’s the European attitude, very open. For me, the beginning of American cinema is directly related to political manipulation. The Americans discovered that cinema was perfect to speak to this country where 50 percent of the audience didn’t speak English. So they started to produce new scripts. It was the newsreels of the Cuban war that brought people back to the cinema. And most of these images were manipulated. So, if today we are so surprised, so shocked by the manipulation of images on television during the World War, in Afghanistan or Iraq, that was all already done in the 19th century. The beginning of cinema is directly related to political manipulation. And maybe what we, what every director in America or in Europe has been trying throughout this century is to free cinema from that and to have a parallel or a free or alternative discourse.

But we were born like this; we were born manipulating reality and manipulating images.

PC: To some extent every image is an illusion.

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Fernando Trueba: Yes, in some ways, but I don’t agree with this statement that the French people don’t accept other people looking at their society. Because some of the French movies that have interested me most in the last years were the movies by Abdelatif Kechiche, who is an immigrant and who really has a very interesting vision of life in Paris today.

Agnieszka Holland: It’s accepted because he’s showing immigrant communities. If he would show the poor French French, believe me, it would be very different. If a Turkish director shows Turkish people in Germany, it’s accepted. If it were a purely German movie, it would be much more difficult to accept. I’m not saying that it isn’t slowly changing. There is change, but it’s very, very difficult.

Marjane Satrapi: Maybe the reason that we can easily accept American propaganda is that Americans are in a way much less complacent about themselves than Europeans are. You know, no matter what bad things they do, a couple of years afterwards they make movies about it. It doesn’t stop them from doing these bad things again, but the fact that they have recognised that they have done something bad, for me as a viewer, makes it easier to believe in all the rest of their stories.

In France, we are extremely complacent about the history of France. A movie like The Battle of Algier [La Battaglia di Algeri], a movie about French colonialism, was first shown on television only four-and-a-half years ago, and that was at 11:20 at night on Arte. It was forbidden to show this movie on television for forty years. So what Agnieszka said is true.

PC: I think you’re being unfair there because that’s not quite true. It was de Gaulle who tried to stop the screening of the film when it was launched in France in 1967, and Louis Malle led protests against this.

There were people in France who threw bottles of ink at the screen and so on, but there were a lot of French people who realised that this was bad and that these things should be shown. So it’s not quite fair to say...

MS: I know that. But in the end, they didn’t show it, you know.

FT: That’s true, but if we had a list of the movies that will never be shown in the United States, it would be incredibly long. I don’t want

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to be anti-American at all because I love that country and its cinema.

I think we are all the same. American directors are the same as we are. They only have to deal with a slightly different system. But I think our struggles are the same. Everyone just has to find a way to make the movie that they want to make.

Constantin Costa-Gavras: The worst thing about The Battle of Algier is that when the movie won the award in Venice, all the French critics walked out. So, it was not only de Gaulle, it was almost everybody. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze told me this, the creator of Cahiers de Cinema. He said, “Today I am ashamed to have walked out of the theatre because that movie is an extraordinary movie.” So, there was a crazy kind of nationalism in France against that movie. Of course, it was shown, like you said, but years later, thanks to Louis Malle, in a small theatre in Saint Severin – just one small theatre in the whole of France!

AH: We still don’t have a real movie about Vichy. There are some stories about individual people, about their experiences, but there is no movie which talks about this incredibly important experience.

So, I think that European countries have problems with their past.

And I think that this problem also blocks their openness to really be part of a unified Europe. There are too many skeletons in the closet to accept a point of view which is different from mine. Of course, the Americans have a lot of problems, too. I’m not the biggest fan of the American film industry and of American cinema, but on the other hand they have this kind of openness and some kind of honesty in relating to the audience.

Of course there is manipulation but I have to tell you that this manipulation has also had quite positive effects. In my opinion Barack Obama would have never become president of the United States if it wasn’t for popular American TV series like 24 or The West Wing. They first showed a black man as the president of America. And it really shaped the consciousness of the people; it became possible. It became possible because they’d seen it on television, in fiction, which is somehow much more real to them than the news.

So, we can have incredible influence on politics and on the change of consciousness. I read something about how Americans and Mexicans see gay people. And the change in the last ten years is incredible, from around 90 percent refusing to even live next door to

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them, to five percent now. And it wasn’t changed by speeches; it was changed by American series because in every series you now have a nice gay person, right? (laughter) István Szabó: We grew up or we were educated and socialised in a world in which film was an art. Then film became an industry, and now film is a very small part of the entertainment industry. When Agnieszka says that it’s over, it’s really over: the time when film as an art form influenced a huge mass of people, like in the 60s or in the 70s, when we started to work or started to learn to make films, is over. This is the most important thing.

We’re speaking about a very narrow one-way street because all the others think it’s a business. They make films like they’re making a chair. And let’s not forget: a chair is something to sit on. If I’m sitting uncomfortably, the chair is not good, so I will send it back to the factory or the store.

Yesterday the question was, “Who are you and what does Europe mean to you?” And I wanted to say I’m not a European, I’m a Central European, which is an enormous difference. It means that we lived in a kind of European Union 100 years ago – not myself, but my grandparents, and even my parents for a time – the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. And this Austrian-Hungarian Empire, this little version of the European Union, was composed of different people, different languages, different religions.

Agnieszka did a film in a small town in Hungary. As I was visiting, I had time to look around: there is a main square and around the square there are seven churches – a Catholic one; an Orthodox church; a Protestant one; a reform church; a Jewish synagogue; and on the other side, another Catholic church. And in the middle of the square is one building, built around the same time as the churches, a coffee shop – one coffee shop! Which means that the citizens of the city were able to meet after service, they came from the synagogue and the Catholic church and the Protestant one and the Orthodox one, and they drank coffee together, they played billiards and cards in one coffee shop.

This was a kind of European Union. And on the market of this little town, if you wanted to sell your potatoes or tomatoes you had to know how to speak Serbian, how to speak German, etc. You had to know the Jewish holidays, the Catholic holidays, what to sell to

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the Catholics on a Friday and what to sell to the Jews. So they knew each other. And all these people who, for different reasons, went to Hollywood, Adolph Zukor, who founded Paramount; Fuchs Vilmos – William Fox – who founded 20th Century Fox, Billy Wilder, William Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Lubitsch, had it in their blood how to sell potatoes and tomatoes to people who belonged to different religions, who had different languages, had different mentalities. And because 50 percent of those people were from intellectual families, their fathers were teachers and family doctors, village doctors or village lawyers, they knew how to speak, how to represent people of different mentalities, different religions, etc.

The founding fathers of Hollywood came from Europe. And because they spoke English like I now do in front of you, meaning that language was not their real talent (laughter), they found a new language. The new language was human touch, the simplest human emotions, the simplest stories, touching everybody, to sell to them, not tomatoes, not potatoes, but their idea, their poetry, their story.

And now, to come back to the problem of manipulation and propaganda: during World War ll the Hungarian Minister of Defence sent two or three filmmakers to the Russian front to shoot newsreel footage. When they came back, the Minister of Defence didn’t accept the footage they had brought because it was too sad, too dramatic, not fit to show to the audience. So they decided to create a village 20 kilometres from Budapest where there was forest a bit similar to a Russian forest. They built a Russian village, they used some Russian prisoners of war, and they shot newsreel footage there. These filmmakers later became some of the most important propagandists for the Communist Party!

It’s easy to manipulate the audience. And if we’re speaking about teaching people to understand the pictures, we have to also teach people what is behind the pictures. Because the picture as it is has nothing to do with the truth. The picture has something to do only with reality.

PC: Johanna, you just made a film where you had 24 cameras on you, right? What was that like?

Johanna ter Steege: It’s a monologue, one take of 74 minutes, in a car that I’m driving myself. There were 24 digital cameras, in and

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outside of the car, because it was also to be shown as an installation.

And if you have 24 pictures, you can choose, you can choose to follow the road, 73 minutes of asphalt, or maybe you choose the face, and look 73 minutes at this face.

The film was shown at the festival in Rotterdam. Half of the audience really, really liked it very much. And 50 percent of the audience didn’t like it at all.

When he asked me to do this, I immediately said yes because for an actress it’s the most beautiful thing to do, 73 minutes, one take. For me the most important thing is to tell a story. And we are never able to tell the truth. Because the truth does not exist; it’s too complicated. We can show what we feel, we can show our emotions, we have to speak with our soul and with our heart.

Labina Mitevska: At the end of the day, we do what we do, but we do it for the audience. And I think European audiences, for sure, are interested in our stories. They are interested to hear, to listen, to experience these stories. And I think that at the moment we are trapped in a system that we don’t understand, trapped between the sales agent, cinema owners and distributors. So we create a good piece of art, a good piece of cinema, and after that you are trapped with at least three filters you need to pass so your film gets into the cinema.

I think we are underestimating the European audience. Every time you go and you have discussions with the audience, you see they want to see films, but we don’t give them a chance. I don’t think that there is a “death” of anything. Because there can never be a death of something that is good. It can be a new beginning. We need to fight for the audience; we need to fight against the system which we created.

Wim Wenders: A few amazing thoughts have been expressed here over the last hours. And I’m utterly impressed with the utopia that István told us about, the Central European utopia that turned into American cinema.

And even today, when we talk about American cinema, that means there’s a Polish or a Hungarian cameraman, and a director of Italian descent... It’s still made of all these European ideas, but it became something very powerful. It used to be something very powerful in Europe, and I’m very impressed that Agnieszka said “it’s over” because that’s the fact: It is over.

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And I’m very impressed with what Labina said, that we have all this wealth. Yes, that’s also true. We have this incredible wealth in Europe. We have a fantastic wealth. I teach, and I see lots of students’ films, lots of young films. There is an amazing wealth of stuff that nobody sees. All these young people who run up against a wall, and they’re not the first. Please remember, with his last three films Fellini ran against a wall. Antonioni’s last movies were not seen by anybody. Godard, who made these magnificent films in the 60s, has an audience you can count in hundreds. I mean, that sort of cinema, that sort of European cinema that once had a similar power to what American cinema has today is over.

Part of what I was hoping we could do here today is thinking about how to overcome that. And thinking about how this incredible wealth we have in Europe, this generation that is full of enthusiasm, fantastic ideas, can again present their emotions, their images, their ideas of their own cultures, or their visions of the world, because they travel to other countries. How they can connect again. And part of the problem we’re facing in Europe is that we’re not connecting.

I mean, it’s hard to show emotions to your neighbours. It’s hard to show a German film anywhere in Europe. It’s hard. It’s almost impossible. One or two, yes, but that’s it. There’s a hundred more being produced that are not being shown. And I see fantastic films from the eastern countries, from Romania, amazing movies, from Bulgaria...

When I travel, I see these films, and nobody’s ever heard of them.

And of course the audience sees them, festival audiences or some art-house audiences. And they’re blown away, but it doesn’t have any consequence. It used to have consequence. European cinema had consequence. It doesn’t today.

But I don’t think that is cemented. I don’t think it has to stay this way. I totally agree, we have to find a way out of that. We have to find a way to connect again. And I don’t think it’s impossible. It was possible. István confirmed it, really. I still think that we have all the ingredients. We have the most multi-cultural continent that ever existed on this planet. Nothing like this ever existed, nothing like Europe today.

And we have all the tools, we have all the talent... But we don’t have the coffee house. István, you’re totally right. We don’t have the coffee house that allows us to become global. So we stay in our tiny little cultures and we defend them and we suffer from our own past...

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PC: What about the Internet? You think the Internet is the coffee house of today?

WW: Maybe the Internet is the coffee house. If the coffee house is no longer represented by the movie theatres, we’ll go somewhere else.

We have to invent something else. We have to re-invent the coffee house in Europe.

Agnieszka Holland: Of course, I am pessimistic, as I always am, but, as somebody said, pessimistic intellectually and optimistic in action. So, I can be intellectually pessimistic, but at the same time optimistic in action. I spent more time in Poland in the past three, four years, which has been a mixed experience. But I try to wake up the filmmakers from the younger generation, which is very lethargic.

And there are certainly some talented people, but their self-esteem is very low. That means there’s this mix of the pretentious feeling that “only I am important,” this kind of a narcissistic feeling which a lot of young European filmmakers have, and at the same time, it’s “I really don’t matter,” “I cannot really succeed.”

In the late 70s, Wajda, Zanussi, Krzysztof Kieślowski, myself and several others, we did movies that were shown in Poland. Even though the distribution was limited by the Communist regime, still there were millions of people who wanted to watch them, and we had the feeling that we are important not only to the artistic world, but to the nation. And they were also shown outside of Poland and had some influence on how people saw our lives and our points of view.

That’s not the case anymore, that is, we have the impression no one is interested in us. Movies are being produced but the reception is extremely limited and the feeling of the filmmakers is, “no one really loves us and we have to be very low-key to survive.”

Roman Polanski was asked in the 70s or 80s how it happened that so many talented filmmakers came from a country like Poland.

And he said, “It’s very simple, you know: It was a Communist country and freedom was very limited. And the only place where I could execute my power and my hunger for power or my independence was on the movie set.” So the people who would normally have gone into business or politics came to the cinema, and suddenly it became a very important group of powerful people, not only talented, but also charismatic people with the energy and the need to communicate.

But now those people are not going into cinema anymore. If

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they are artists, they go into theatre; we have very talented theatre directors. Or they go into art, doing installations and video. And those things, exhibitions or theatre productions, have better audiences than Polish movies. Ambitious Polish movies have on average audience of 30,000 people. And good, ambitious and avant-garde theatre productions made by Warlikowski, Jarzyna or Lupa, people of the highest artistic quality, can have 100,000 spectators. And it’s limited only by how many people can fit into one theatre.

When you have an audience that is not coming to the movie theatres anymore but to theatres or galleries, you get this audience by creating events. And these events are mostly festivals. In Poland there are two huge festivals of ambitious cinema: one is in Wrocław; it’s called Era Nowe Horyzonty, “New Horizons”, and the other one is the Warsaw Film Festival. Each of them shows about 300 to 400 movies: extremely ambitious movies – sometimes even obscure – but also more mainstream European movies, American, Asian movies. And they have incredible attendance numbers like 300,000 or 400,000 people only for one festival. But when you try to show these films outside of the festival circuit in a regular theatre, nobody comes.

So, somehow the trust of the younger audience in the movie theatres is very low. If they go there, it’s for entertainment only. If we really want to do something, we have to create events. I was thinking that maybe we should take the movies from the European Film Awards and create real festivals with people who have the passion and talent and are able to create events which will attract people in one country, and afterwards travel to another.

PC: Thomas, have you got a solution to this? Because you partly come from the commercial side. Is there a way of staging events or taking a travelling collection of European Academy films around and presenting them in a way that would circumvent this?

Thomas Høegh: The answer is yes. I think we have to define the context a little bit more before we can hone in on the solution. Yes, there are 6,000 films made per year, with 300 perhaps that are of high ambition, 100 that are of quality, maybe ten that are really important. The problem is that the audience today has not only access to those films, but to the prior years’ production as well.

And to some degree I’m part of the problem in that some of my companies provide everything. You can see every film that’s ever

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been made. On Lovefilm in Britain, there are 60,000 films, everything from a documentary about canals in Northumberland to early silent films. It’s basically everything that’s ever been released. And it’s astonishing to see that in a normal week almost every title is rented by someone.

On top of that there are heaps of quality television productions being released on DVD – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Then there’s the unofficial publishing through digital distribution, legal or not. The piracy problem is a phenomenal problem that is raging around Europe.

We are no longer in the film art world, or the film business. We are stimulating eyeballs, and we are competing in the stimulation of eyeballs with an almost unthinkable amount of competition. So the signal-to-noise ratio, relative to available ways of stimulating our eyeballs, has exploded, and therefore the peaks are fewer and further between. So no wonder, in Poland in the 70s, there was an opportunity to win an audience, because the alternatives were so limited.

There weren’t 15 Polish television channels, and then another 50 European television channels available in pretty much every household.

There was no Internet where you had billions of pieces of content you could watch at the click of a mouse.

You know, YouTube is filled with lots of rubbish but it’s also filled with lots of interesting things. And there’s many other YouTubes out there. So, we have a privilege in the film industry, in that we actually do produce things that matter, things that actually influence people, much more than you think.

One of our cinemas in London has a cinema next to it which is owned by a church. And these people are relatively religious people, and they write in their programme notes about family values and so on. It was a real eye-opener to all of us when they played Brokeback Mountain. To me, that was sort of a monumental event because they really opened the door to something that they would never have opened the door to two, three, four, five years earlier. And it’s not just that area. What’s happened with street children in Mumbai after Slumdog Millionaire and the attention that’s getting is something that no other medium could have done. CNN would not have been able to produce that type of attention. Look what’s happened with Rwanda. Rwanda was forgotten. You know, fact of the matter is that the rate of killing was twice the speed of Hitler. Yet it was just like a little footnote in history – until they started to make films about it.

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So, I refuse to accept that film as a medium to move people is over. The signal-to-noise ratio is alarmingly negative in our disfavour, so the peaks are very few. It’s not a coincidence that shocking your audience has come to the front because that’s the only way you get attention. So Lars von Trier’s latest film is sort of an extreme example of that. I don’t believe in that but I think it’s one counterbalance to the desperation. As for the solution, we need to celebrate and to move with the forces that are killing our industry, by doubling up on it. We as content owners have a very important role to play, and that is to deal with the whole issue of rights, to make international rights clearances simple, so that at least the people who want to see stuff can see stuff.

I think that what we can do as an industry is to accept that we have to compete for eyeballs, in normal, competitive elements, and not be pretentious and arrogant, but humble. And, whether we like it or not, we have an obligation to work much more closely together, through the whole value chain, and stop disregarding what happens to the next guy down the value chain.

PC: Michael, I’d like to ask you, as a working critic: What’s your interface with the audience that you are writing for, compared with, say, five, ten, 15 years ago? Do you find there is a reaction from the public to what you write about quality films? Or do you find that there is a kind of lethargy as István is saying, that, you know, this is past?

Michael Althen: Well, as a critic you can always just influence the people who are interested in reading film reviews and knowing what there is to know about cinema. When I was working in Munich for Süddeutsche Zeitung, there were maybe three or four cinemas where you could measure the influence of an article you wrote. I guess all German film critics together don’t reach much more than, let’s say 20,000 people. My only way to measure that is when from time to time there is an American movie with stars everyone knows but somehow not part of the mainstream. And if every German critic writes a positive review, but the public somehow doesn’t get the feel of it or whatever, it usually ends up with 20,000 viewers, that’s about it. Which is okay, I mean, I didn’t start writing about cinema to influence a huge amount of people.

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Circle 3:

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Barbara Gessler

Albert Solé

Kujtim Çashku

Marjane Satrapi

Barbara Gessler: I wanted to present you very briefly with a couple of opinion poll results because they tend to express what European citizens’ concerns are, and, if we talk about audience, I don’t think you can just wipe that away. It becomes clear from these opinion polls that Europe is in a crisis. We’ve heard this before, it’s a crisis of self-confidence in particular. Of course, economic concerns are currently at the top of the agenda for everybody and that shows in the opinion polls that we have done lately, on the occasion of the European Parliament elections. What is new is this: in Europe we used to take our common challenges very seriously – be it climatic change, demographic change, fight against terrorism, etc. Today individual concerns have taken over, individual worries like “Will I lose my job; will I keep my job.” Of course, this also has a very strong effect on the notion of what solidarity is. I think resolve at the moment on which everyone can actually build is that the key thing that people ask of the European Union is solidarity among its member states and solidarity with each other.

We’re celebrating 20 years of the fall of the Iron Curtain now.

And in the European Commission we were actually preparing a clip on the enlargement celebrations. And we had the same discussions, about things like ownership – where did the revolution start? Was it in Hungary? In Austria? Poland? Or was it in Berlin? How much space do you give to the Berlin Wall in this clip that the European Commission produced? Can you tell the story of a young man in Berlin or do you have to use a larger picture?

Celebrating the enlargement isn’t always easy. It’s controversial. If we are more countries, we will have more cultural diversity.

But the people don’t always see it like that. On the contrary, there’s a slight majority of citizens, particularly in the old member states, that say that too many cultures are actually threatening their own

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culture. And you will see that there is a direct link to what we want to talk about now – education – because at the same time last year we made a call about intercultural dialogue. And it became very clear that younger people were much more open to cultural diversity. The older people got, the more they were afraid of losing their own culture. The younger people on the other hand, particularly when they were well-educated, knew that they would keep their own cultural identity, their local, regional, national identity as well, and shouldn’t be afraid of somebody else. So there is a very clear link between openness, tolerance, and democracy participation and education.

Since movies are vehicles for dialogue, there is a clear necessity to talk about education in this respect. In this survey we also ask what creates the strongest feeling of having a European identity: the Euro. It’s the common currency that people feel makes them a European citizen!

Education, just like culture, is not per se a European competency, as we call it. It is carried out by the member states. In Belgium, for example, by the communauté [française] or the Vlaamse gemeenschap, in Germany, it’s the Bundesländer. So there are certain limits of what the European Commission can actually do.

The education ministers have created a framework of key competencies that everybody should have. Language training, economic competencies, but also intercultural competency. And the European Parliament is currently fighting for media literacy and media competency to be included in this list. It is something like a curriculum that says what should be taught in European schools so that afterwards an individual can go out into the world and find a job.

Constantin Costa-Gavras: Why does the majority of Europeans watch American movies? Because that is all that is being offered to them, there are only American movies, we are used to American movies. In Korea, for example, it was decided years ago that on 120 days per year all Korean theatres should show only Korean movies.

And the Korean audience got used to that. That’s what created the Korean cinema, a very strong cinema, something like 50 percent of the audience go to see Korean movies.

Another example comes from French radio: For years, on French radio you could only listen to American or British music. It was a small tragedy and there were complaints and the government finally decided that 40 percent of the radio songs should be French.

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Since then, French music has been strengthened, there are more performers, more songs. French people started listening and liking French music. Why? Because they become used to it which means that a certain kind of quota is necessary to help our cinema around Europe. And, of course, in school children should watch movies and analyse movies so that they get a better understanding of what’s behind the pictures because our world is full of images.

BG: Yes, I think that’s going to be one of the main topics of today’s discussion. Søren, you are running a film school. Do you see realistic chances of including this into the European curricula?

Søren Høy: First I have a little anecdote to tell: When the European Film Awards were held in Denmark last December I decided to make my own little test with the community where I live. It’s a very small community with 7,000 people. I screened and introduced and discussed 15 of the nominated films and I took only one euro per ticket but you had to buy the whole package, 20 euros to see 15 films. And 300 people turned up every time. Ok, had I taken the standard fee of 10 euros per ticket, nobody would have come. But they saw Delta, one of the weirdest Hungarian films I’ve seen. And they saw Tulpan, they saw films that they didn’t know anything about. They didn’t know the director, they didn’t even know where they came from. But they trusted me, so 300 people came and eventually, when we showed the European Film Awards Ceremony, 300 people came and watched it on TV. They had never seen the awards show before. But that just showed me that in a little community, there are people who are interested in what goes on beyond their world.

But to get back to the teaching: I have started an initiative across Jutland with three basic main stations for audio-visual learning. And it turned out that it would take about eight years to make this work because we need to educate the teachers first. And recruiting teachers is difficult. It’s hard to find good teachers.

Albert Solé: You were speaking about building an identity and how the Euro was probably the best tool for that. But there is another thing which works perfectly, the Erasmus programme. It brings a lot of exchange and this is really creating a European conscience in a perfect way.

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BG: Well, the bestseller for European communicators in the last years was L’Auberge Espagnole and Russian Dolls [Les poupées russes, the sequel to that]. They show young people who are curious to go out and use these European opportunities. And everybody loved these films because, you’re absolutely right, they create this kind of common feeling.

Thomas Høegh: I’d like to say something about the schools. Beeban Kidron, a director in Britain, started an initiative about three years ago now, Film Club, which works in secondary schools and started with maybe 20 schools. They train teachers and then the teachers are given free subscriptions to Lovefilm and with the students they can pick films to see. This is voluntary for the students, but it has been brought into the curriculum so it’s partly in the curriculum and partly outside. The trial was very successful and then she got funding from the government. They have now installed it in 1,250 schools with the plan to roll out to another 7,000. Each week they have 35,000 kids watching films and they think that it will grow to about 250,000 students per week seeing the archives of classic films. What’s important about it is that it is embracing both the teachers and the students and there is a whole online community where the students write reviews and blogs about films.

Peter Cowie: When you say classic films, are there any restrictions? I mean, are they limited to European films or foreign language films?

TH: No, this is about getting people excited about watching films.

Many of these kids have no history at all of watching films, something like 50 percent of them have never been to a cinema. And I think that if you can get people to get passionate about seeing movies, the road is shorter to seeing European films. If you insist that they have to watch European films from the beginning, you might put them off.

PC: The role of the teacher then becomes very important – not imposing, but suggesting, maybe showing a great classic film and showing those kids that there are other films.

TH: Obviously. And another very important part of the programme is industry participation. So there are members of the industry, from

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every part of the profession, who go out to the schools. Actors and actresses, directors, cinematographers, gaffers and electricians, you know, anyone who can speak passionately about film, and they go out to the schools and speak to the students about why they got involved and what their favourite films are and so on.

Marjane Satrapi: I think if we made a festival of European film, for example with the movies that have been chosen for the European Film Awards, after a few years people will get used to seeing these movies. Once they have seen a classic movie and a Hungarian movie and a Romanian movie, they will also get interested in another sort of cinema. As Agnieszka said, it’s nice to have a big event that attracts people. And it could take place in different European countries at the same time.

Labina Mitevska: But there are so many festivals already! And there is this European Cinema Day when for 24 hours they show European films in 20 cities around Europe so it’s nothing new. I think it’s more important to consider producing DVDs for distribution to the cinemas, where big directors talk about their five favourite films from different countries. I think that’s more productive because this kind of festival already exists.

Agnieszka Holland: There are several festivals but there is no real co-ordination. The reality is that the only theatrical distribution for most European films is festivals. They are not shown outside of the festivals. These festivals exist in every country, mostly programmed by interested, passionate, and knowledgeable people. But at the same time they are not leading to a contact between the production and the distribution because no one is making money out of those festivals. And when I produce my own small movies, at some point I will refuse to do that because I cannot afford to send prints out for free all the time. At the same time somebody is making money on those festivals. It is a question of creating a different way of distribution, not the traditional way in the multiplexes, where we are – except for a protective country like France – pretty much always losing against the American or local blockbusters. So I think that we have to translate what now happens in a very individual way into some kind of system and take advantage of this new generation which is used to watching movies as part of a big event.

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BG: This is also coming back to what was said this morning about the creation of a public sphere, where people can actually debate all of these issues and the films they see together.

Kujtim Çashku: I think the identity of a place is important! In my country, I see what is happening: there are huge shopping centres and multiplexes so people can shop and watch a bit of a movie and shop a bit more.

It is a way of putting everything together in one place and neglecting the necessity for a landscape of human nature; for places where people can identify themselves with in a different way – like they do with art. In Greek amphitheatres, for example, people get together, they love and hate together, realising some form of catharsis.

We miss this in today’s Albania. Now, everything is about the commercialisation.

I would like to suggest that perhaps we can create centres of European films in different European cities; a network with a direct link to the European Film Academy. They can serve as good antennas for culture and art in Europe.

Thomas Høegh: Who is responsible for the identity of the European Union, the brand identity? Who is ultimately responsible? Someone must be responsible for the brand identity!

BG: No, because there is no such thing as a European brand. Diversity is the motto.

TH: Well, then let’s put it that way, that’s a brand.

BG: Diversity is the brand, OK, that could be.

TH: I think there is an opportunity for film to play a role for the European Union to brand itself. I was part of the building of a brand for a short film distribution company called Atom Films. Atom had no money. We couldn’t spend money on advertising so we did a partnership with Intel because Intel couldn’t figure out how to tell consumers why they should buy bigger computers. They figured out: “Actually, with bigger computers people can watch films”. This is now eight years ago. So they used Atom Films as their poster child for why people should buy faster chips, and they spent millions of dollars promoting

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Atom Films. And, lo and behold, we had an audience that we could only have dreamt of as a consequence. And they had a very positive brand association with something that was an innovation from their perspective. I think we could do something similar with film as a way of illustrating what Europe is through the creative kind of collective that exists.

Agnieszka Holland: To get back to education: it was said that there are some efforts to create a general level of education in different areas, to allow the exchange of people and ideas. So, that means that people have to achieve a certain level to be able to communicate on the same level in another country and work there and so on. But with the audio-visual sector, at least as far as I can see in Poland, there’s something like a new illiteracy, an audio-visual illiteracy. We have three possibilities to really teach people how to read more complex or more complicated audio-visual messages. The first one is school, the normal school education system. Then there are the different kinds of initiatives like cineclubs and cultural centres and so on. And the third one is through public television, which I think is most important in countries like Poland. But for the last 15 years on Polish public television you can watch only garbage. And when I show a more complicated message to the average young Polish audience, they cannot decrypt it. Their attitude is that they want to be entertained – it has to be quick, but not too quick, and it has to be very simple. Because the only things they are used to, they have watched when they were younger, were second-rate American movies or series and Polish soap operas. So, even if you show to them something like the series 24 hours, where the action is quick, they cannot follow. They are just not educated on this very basic level and they don’t watch European movies because these are way to slow for them and the message is not simple enough, so they are unable decrypt it.

The big problem is that we don’t really have the people to teach and we don’t have the people to explain and we don’t have the places to teach. Together with the Minister of Culture and the Polish Film Institute we have now started a programme teaching cinema in gymnasium [secondary school]. They started to teach children between 12 and 16 years old a bit of the history of cinema and some more complex things. They actually prepared a very good package and I hope that maybe it will be the beginning of something. But I’m

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also afraid that maybe it’s too late. Except for those people who go to festivals already, maybe they are simply unable to read, like they are unable to appreciate classical music, like they are unable to read literature.

BG: There’s a UNESCO convention on the protection of cultural diversity, where the European Union actually stands together because it has a common interest. And Europe is not alone in this. There’s Mexico, for example, that is completely dominated by the US, or Canada.

They have no chance whatsoever of surviving without some means of protection. What is currently being discussed is how to fill this new convention with life because it actually puts cultural diversity as the richness and the one thing that Europe actually has to offer at the same level of its possible trade interests.

Volker Schlöndorff: Well, isn’t it very comforting to see what a multitude of initiatives there are! From the Danish small town and Tirana to the Days of Cinema in Brussels and all over Europe, and all the school initiatives, there is a continuous effort and we’re here to encourage initiatives like cinema in the schools. I think that is something everyone seemed to agree on.

I think we all feel that European film has had a renaissance, the films triumph at festivals and on their national markets but they don’t circulate within Europe. We have been working on this with the MEDIA Programme, but it still should be improved. A way of improving the situation is a festival of European film which should be available to almost every community in Europe. That would be a fantastic programme because it would create a European consciousness and at the same time be very beneficial for our films, a festival of European film like a travelling circus around Europe, slightly adapted to each territory, to each culture and followed by filmmakers.

The quota is an interesting point you raised, Costa. I’d separate between a quota for television, especially state-owned and paid for either by tax money or by a forced contribution. I think these programmes in Europe should have a quota. Not like the Télévision sans frontières, which is a big cheat because it says you have to show, let’s say, 40 percent of European films, but in fact of these 40 percent 99 percent are national films of each country. So, a true political decision to create European unity would be a quota for

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European, not national films in each country. And that is a perfectly legitimate quota. It is not protectionist or anything. It’s a common European cultural and political decision, and it would concern only public stations. Quotas for cinemas is a completely different thing.

It’s been tried, but it doesn’t really seem to work.

István Szabó: I don’t question the European Union, I think for Europe this is a fantastic idea and maybe the only possibility. But thinking about European identity, I ask myself: “What is it? What gives Europe its identity?” If I asked an American: “Where are you from?” The answer would be: “I’m from North Carolina” or “I’m from California, US”.

And if you ask me, my answer is also: “I am from Hungary, Europe” or “She is from Poland, Europe”. So, first comes the country. So I ask myself if we put our landscape, our feeling, our country in the middle, then what is common in Europe?

Last year I was invited by a very small Austrian film festival, and some members of the European Parliament were there. During a discussion I heard one of them say, “Culture is not a European issue”.

Behind this answer lies the idea that culture is always local so the member countries have the right to decide about it. But I don’t think that’s really true and that’s why I ask myself: “Does European culture exist and what is European identity?” And, of course, I can find some very important common things as a basis, like Greek mythology or the way of thinking following Roman law and, of course, the Bible. The whole of European culture is based on the Bible. All our experiences are based on the Bible, from the Inquisition to the Renaissance and even, I’m sorry to say, until Auschwitz. So, the basic in every European country is the same. The question is: what is the difference? And the difference between the countries is only how we understand our past, our history, our experiences. How we understand our mentality.

How we understand things like liberty and democracy. But what does identity mean? For example, identity means that I love my country.

Yes, but how? Because I can love my country, which means that I hate everybody who doesn’t like my country. So I am nationalist and I am able to kill people. But I can love my country with a patriotic idea, which means that I love everybody who loves his or her own country because it means we are different and we can accept each other.

One of the most important parts of the European identity to me is the feeling of diversity. Not the knowledge of diversity: that we know

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that French people are French and Italian people are Italian. Not the knowledge, but the feeling to enjoy the diversity, to feel it.

Another part of the European identity is faithfulness, fidelity.

Is the frame my country or is it Europe? Is it a big frame, a fantastic mosaic with several different colours?

And the third thing that I found as a very important part of the European identity is quality. So what does it mean to be faithful to European quality? Quality is our heritage but this is a living quality.

Not a quality like the pyramids or the Aztec or Mayan culture. Our heritage is also our enormous experience from the 20th century: the experience of Nazism, of Communism, of all the dictatorships that came from Europe. And this is our problem because if you are an artist, you have to be honest. If you are honest, you tell stories that you experienced or your parents experienced and you feel that you experienced them, too. But what is it that we experienced? Falling down.

All our stories, all of our great stories are stories of people who lost something, they lost the battle. This is a reality. I am not negative. I am only speaking about our reality and when we tell those stories, those very sad stories, we would like to share our experience. We would like to say, “be careful, people, don’t do it! We did it once.” This is the catharsis. This is what we can give.

I think the European Film Academy should create a new prize. It should be only something symbolic for the film heritage of the year, which means that the board or a group of people has to decide which classical great film should be the heritage of the year. I had this idea because a couple of weeks ago, I was invited to give a one-week seminar at university. I proposed for the students to see some films and analyse them. And I had to realise that after three years of studying film and media, the students hadn’t seen Eisenstein’s Ivan Groznyy I; Ashes and Diamonds by Andrzej Wajda; Citizen Kane by Orson Welles... All these titles I showed them for the first time in their lives.

So I think we have to start to think about the heritage.

I understand that there is no legal basis to support European culture because the culture belongs to the states. But why can’t the European Union give a certain percentage of its yearly income to culture?

And the last thing I would like to say is about education: I don’t think there exists a school in Europe that doesn’t mention the name of Dante or Goethe or Cervantes or Shakespeare or even Tolstoy or

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Dostoyevsky. What we have to achieve is that some names like Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang should be mentioned in school as well.

BG: Another big policy area is the question of rights, which must be simplified and must be actually made lighter in order to allow films to travel. And I think all of you have had this experience of when it comes to conquering another market. It’s not only a language problem, it’s also a question of copyrights.

Thomas Høegh: That’s a very complicated area because there are sort of two sides to this. On the one hand you want to protect the rights territories because if you are a small distributor in Austria and you start having to compete with someone who can buy pan-European rights, you are washed out. At the same time, you don’t want to make it too complicated so you spend all your money getting the film up on the screen and no money on the marketing. What’s more complicated is the exploitation of catalogue rights so that one can get as many films out in front of audiences as possible.

And another very important issue is that we need a European Union-led initiative on piracy. The French stuck their neck out a few weeks ago and sort of put a stick in the ground. Very brave. I don’t think it’s a perfect solution, but at least they made a big bold move and it’s incredibly unpopular. Most governments don’t want to do this because the young voters are against it. It’s deemed to be an anti-libertarian position. No one should monitor my internet traffic to see if I am stealing films or not. It’s a very complicated issue, but it’s probably the most important issue for the survival of the film business.

Constantin Costa-Gavras: Yes, but it’s not impossible.

TH: No, but the human rights lobby is incredibly strong in opposing it.

CCG: But it has nothing to do with human rights!

TH: It does, because the technology that is required to monitor internet traffic means that I can also know if you are writing e-mails with the word “Jihad” in it. I can basically monitor everything you do. I’m not proposing exactly what the legislation has to be. I just think that there needs to be co-ordination at the European Union level. That something happens, because it is the biggest threat to our industry

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at the moment. Between 20 and 40 percent of potential revenue is lost and the further back you go in the catalogue, the worse it gets.

BG: There is actually a highly disputed policy initiative at the moment, the Content Online Initiative – which also shows the importance of the issue in a way.

CCG: We should really think of piracy as an attempt against the film industry which can lead to a situation where one day we won’t have any money to make movies the way we like to make them. So I believe that in the coming years the different governments will end up accepting the law we have in France, or a different law close to it because economically, and even ethically, it is impossible not to act.

Peter Cowie: Somebody said to me as a justification for downloading, for example, Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, that the people who had made it had already sold 20 million tickets and therefore they were plenty rich enough so that they wouldn’t miss another 2 million, but you don’t go into a sports store and pick out a pair of Nike shoes and walk out the door because Nike is making 200 million. It is a matter of law.

Marjane Satrapi: The thing is that it has been turned into an argument about freedom. People say that it should be free. But there is no freedom for stealing people’s work. Maybe it doesn’t need to be exactly this law, maybe the people who have internet access have to pay an extra fee to be distributed between artists, I don’t know, but there should be a law one way or another...

Volker Schlöndorff: Just to focus: the industry is doing everything they can to move the United Nations, the European Commission and whatnot. We don’t have to get into the piracy issue today, it is so important and so big that a lot of people take care of it. It shouldn’t be our priority.

MS: I know, but when the video cassette, the VHS, came out they made a law that for each cassette that was sold, a part of the profit had to go into creation. I don’t think it is directly my problem but indirectly it will be our problem.

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VS: No, of course it is our problem, but I mean it is not our problem today, here, in this room.

MS: Absolutely.

Kujtim Çashku: I’ve been meaning to make this suggestion for some time. Now, with more than 100 years of cinema, shouldn’t there be film collections of the big directors of Europe? The European Commission should set aside a special budget for creating this kind of library, in all languages. It is difficult to find such collections and they tend to be only in the original language. If you go to Spain, for example, you won’t find films subtitled in other languages. Perhaps the European Film Academy can pioneer this kind of activity all over Europe, utilising existing universities and academic institutions.

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Wim Wenders: Sehr geehrter Herr Präsident der Europäischen Kommission, dear José Manuel Barroso, We are grateful for your presence here among us during these stressful days just a week before the European elections. We’re honoured that you are here and that you followed the invitation by Volker Schlöndorff and myself, in the name of the European Film Academy. The EFA organised this meeting, it was financed through the help of North RhineWestphalia and we thank Professor Gorny, the Creative Director of the European Cultural Capital RUHR.2010, in the Ruhr Metropolis in the very centre of which you are right now. Our thanks also go to Michael Schmid-Ospach and the Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

The first impulse for this exchange of ideas between European politics and European cinema came one day, more than a year ago, when we realised in one of our Academy board meetings that there was a weariness among Europeans, a certain lethargy and lack of emotional response towards Europe.

Europe had an “image problem”, so to speak, a lack of branding maybe, a crisis of self-confidence or of solidarity. And that was the case with our own images as well, European cinema. We offered our help, not concealing that we also needed help, and you graciously accepted to listen.

Our THINK TANK has been doing what we were supposed to do, we have been thinking and talking about the IMAGE of EUROPE, as well as about European images and their impact.

Doing so, we were confronted with lots of different visions of Europe, highly optimistic ones and rather bleak ones, realising soon that there were as many images of Europe in the room as there were Europeans. You must know that phenomenon from your own work in Brussels…

Our diversity, we had to experience, is our blessing, but also our curse as well. We will pass on to you and your office the transcripts of everything that has been said.

My summary right now has to remain a bit personal and, of course, cursory. Sometimes, I must admit, during these two days I felt I’d rather be a foreign visitor to our think tank, not a concerned party. I felt

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I might have seen clearer – so I took that point of view for a moment.

I travel a lot. I worked in Africa lately, I lived in the US, I visited South America several times last year, I spent a long time in Asia. So, assuming all these perspectives I saw one thing distinctly: Europe is seen with great respect, all over the world, often even with a certain longing. It represents a bastion of freedom, equality, diversity; it is a stronghold of culture, briefly: It is seen as a civilised place, a realm of ideas and of human rights that our entire modern age is relying upon; a promise of happiness. And it is more and more seen as tolerant, with a lot of respect for minorities, accepting differences, able to solve situations through dialogue. It is seen in a strange way like the melting pot that America once represented – from outside, that is.

You come home to Europe and you realise it’s not quite so. That was also brought to our attention in our gathering yesterday and today. Europeans are often insecure, scared, paranoid, slightly xenophobic or even outright racist, clinging to old ideas…

They live in paradise, but they somehow don’t appreciate it.

Which brings us to the problem of THE IMAGE OF EUROPE. What’s happening to it, and to them, our European films? Each year, at the EFA, we look at a huge amount of European movies – we feel we see them all, or most of them – and each year we’re blown away by their talent, their inventiveness, their courage, their social awareness…

We’re blown away by the image they give us of our continent.

This cinema comes mostly from a new optimistic generation that is moving freely across Europe, seeing a lot of this borderless Europe and its richness. They travel – travel is no longer a privilege – only their brilliant cinema doesn’t travel that much. Neighbours in Europe know much less about their neighbours than we’d ever want to admit.

The most powerful image producers in the world, the American film industry, learned everything from us Europeans, so to speak, István [Szabó] reminded us of that, from the Austrians, Hungarians, French, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Polish, English, Germans. Talent came over to expand their visions and their talent. Hollywood embraced them and integrated their diversity into the most powerful language, the lingua franca of the planet, cinema.

Maybe we have to re-appropriate that language and learn from scratch again what we once invented ourselves.

Because here we are today, we have everything: the culture, the regional and national industries, and they are thriving, the quota

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of national productions is growing and growing! We have the talent, the vision… But we are strangely fractured, even insecure, and in the incredible competition for attention out there – Thomas [Høegh] called it “catching the attention of the eyeballs” – we often feel irrelevant.

I’m afraid we can’t present you a whole new concept for a NEW IMAGE OF EUROPE yet. But plenty of ideas are on the table to develop it, to explore the future and to overcome the past.

We would need more time, not just a couple of days. And we would like to continue this work, analyse the situation deeper and help finding the competence for solutions. We therefore want to extend our offer and we, the Academy and its filmmaking members, would gladly take a more active part in the future as advisors to the European Commission.

In order to create a more positive and useful IMAGE OF EUROPE our own image industry and culture will have to be cutting edge in the near future. It will have to anticipate what will happen to “cinema” in that transition from analog-photomechanical to a fully digital tool. It will have to anticipate what will have to happen on the way from two-dimensional to three-dimensional representation.

It will have to anticipate how our movie theatres (and cineplexes) will turn into new kinds of venues. It will have to anticipate how traditional storytelling will be changed to adapt to new forms of transportation and exploitation. It will have to anticipate how the reception and understanding of imagery can be taught and learned and studied, especially at an early age.

Which leads me to the two ideas that were discussed concretely: a) European education Teach Europeans at a young age, in school, about cinema so they learn better how to see and differentiate and are in a more educated position to understand and digest the global visual language.

With Sweden taking over the European presidency soon, we feel this would be a very good moment to bring this request to the attention of our governments: The audiovisual language and grammar as an integral part of the school curriculum. Our children should not become cinema illiterates.

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b) Spread the word about European films Festivals and all sorts of events involving European cinema are utterly successful, wherever they are properly promoted. We have to do much more in this field, with a plentitude of new ideas! We have to bring our heritage, not just new films, to our neighbours, introduce us to each other’s film culture in new imaginary ways. The European Film Awards have done a lot in their 21 years of existence, but they can be used in much larger ways. Our films have to travel again, not just our young Europeans. We have the greatest film schools in Europe, but for what film landscape do we educate our students if their high aspirations don’t have a chance to cross all borders?

European cinema is still largely composed of national industries. Yet national ideas are shrinking more and more, in the global age, while local and regional impulses continue to thrive and give people the roots they so badly need in the global community. These regional roots are the very strength of our “European Cinema(s)”and of our story-telling. Nobody does it better than we.

We tend to think of our diversity as our handicap. On the contrary! In the future it’s going to be our biggest asset! That Europe of the future will not exist in the minds and hearts of its people if it will not continue to project its own imagery and stories with confidence, emotions, guts, attractively and convincingly, at the height of the available technology, as state of the art, both in industrial and cultural terms.

The “European Film Academy” as the only body that unites all the industries and creativity from all European regions (in the widest sense of Europe) could have an enormous role to play in the future.

Use us as a tool, dear José Manuel Barroso, to shape that IMAGE and those IMAGES OF EUROPE. Let us help you, or better: Help us… to help you, José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission of today, and hopefully of tomorrow, too, help us to help shaping the future brand of Europe, its image and its identity.

Thank you for your attention!

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José Manuel Durão Barroso, President of the European Commission: Sehr geehrter Wim Wenders, my dear Herr Dieter Gorny, Friends, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am delighted to join you here in Essen in this workshop organised by the “Image of Europe” think tank, an initiative I very much support. I would like to thank the co-organisers of this event: the European Film Academy, the Land of North Rhine Westphalia, the Filmstiftung North Rhine-Westphalia and the European capital of culture, RUHR.2010.

I am very pleased to have the opportunity to meet the players of the European film sector representing very different film genres, disciplines and cultures.

I believe it’s a great opportunity for me to have during two, three hours this possibility of discussing with names that I know for so many years. I have already said to Costa-Gavras that for my generation his film Z in Portugal before the revolution was so important.

I’m a great admirer of you, Wim Wenders, of you, Volker Schlöndorff, of many of you. So, for me it’s indeed a privilege. So I’m thanking you for this invitation.

Following years in a very difficult situation, fact is that European cinema is now going up. I know about the problem of distribution but in 2006, Europe was the second film producer (883 films) behind India (1,016 films) and in front of the United States (485 films). In 2008, Europe was the third largest cinema market in the world (926 million cinema tickets sold). In the 27 Member States, annual box office sales should reach the one billion mark by the end of the decade. European cinema’s share of the box office is also rising in the EU, and currently stands at 28.4%.

The Cannes Film Festival ended just a few days ago. The 2009 event was a very European affair, indeed a very European Community affair, with 17 films supported by the European Union MEDIA programme, including 10 of the 20 films in the official selection.

I am very proud that the European co-production (Austria-Germany-France-Italy) The White Ribbon to which the “Palme d’or” was attributed has been co-financed by the MEDIA programme, as well

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as A Prophet and Fish Tank, which were also respectively awarded the Grand Prix and the Jury prize, to name just the top awards of the Cannes Festival.

The selection of all these MEDIA supported films by the Cannes Film Festival proves two things: first, Europe is encouraging quality films, and second, the visibility of European cinema is increasing.

Supporting the distribution and promotion of European films in the EU, the MEDIA programme has become a powerful driving force for the European film industry. Of every ten non-national films circulating in Europe, eight are supported by the MEDIA programme.

The most remarkable thing of all is that MEDIA is doing all this with a budget of only 755 million â‚Ź spread over seven years, in other words a smaller annual budget than that of an American blockbuster! However, European films are still not enjoying the success they deserve on major cinematographic markets, such as the very dynamic South American and Asian markets. Our multifaceted, rich and inspired cinema, which is a cornerstone of European culture, must indeed be projected beyond our borders. There is a problem of distribution, outside and internally.

That is why we need to expand the distribution of European films on the global commercial circuits. Their average market share in non-EU countries is approximately 4%, which is of course insufficient.

In a bid to strengthen the external dimension of the European audiovisual policy, we have just launched a programme called MEDIA Mundus, which follows the preparatory action, MEDIA International.

We will be running a test phase from 2011 to 2013, with a budget of 15 million â‚Ź, before going on, no doubt, to develop it more fully.

With this huge international co-operation programme we will intensify commercial relations between the European film industry and artists in non-EU countries. Our goal is to offer more diverse cultural goods on European and international markets to meet the growing demand for audiovisual content.

We also intend to step up cultural relations between the European film industry and creative talent in non-EU countries, starting, of course, with our neighbours, but also outside of Europe. We want to offer new prospects to audiovisual professionals in Europe and throughout the world.

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Co-operation between professionals is a very important aspect, which we are encouraging through the MEDIA programme.

However, there is another policy aspect which I also regard as very important and that you just mentioned, and that is film education.

Today’s children and teenagers have grown up with the 21st century audiovisual revolution. But can they read the language of film images? Do they know how this medium, which is so familiar to them, is constructed?

The viewing habits of audiences are indeed dominated by American and domestic blockbusters.

The European audiovisual industry suffers from that. I’ve presented you with the figures of European production but in fact, how many films from other European countries do we see?

So I think film education is also a very important instrument to consider when we speak about promoting European cinema. Primary and secondary schools should give young Europeans the means to acquire the skills allowing them to decipher the cinematographic language.

Film education and awareness-raising activities are of paramount importance to create and develop a taste and a thirst for European films ; to promote also European values and heritage; to increase knowledge of Europe’s history; to encourage artistic education and cultural exchanges; and to step up intercultural dialogue. In short: to project a self-image of Europe.

Our film heritage must be made accessible to young people.

Film industry professionals such as yourselves can transmit the knowledge and know-how which is needed to further nurture and develop a film culture in Europe.

The European institutions are taking this essential dimension more and more into account: you probably know that the European Commission is now finalising a Council and Parliament Recommendation on Media Literacy.

Education to cinema is generally included in “Media education”, which includes photography, film, video and computer animation for example. Media is not commonly included as a compulsory subject in arts curricula at primary or secondary levels of education, with a few exceptions in our member states.

I think that we should encourage widespread introduction of such schemes in European curriculums.

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At the political level, Sweden, that will hold the European Council presidency as of 1 July, intends to focus its work in the field of culture on issues related to the relation between youth and culture. It will cover links between education and culture as well as the prominent role of images in the cultural practices of young people. So I’m sure that the results of your think tank will bring a valuable contribution to this important reflection.

I think that as European filmmakers, you could usefully promote both European films and European values through Media Literacy initiatives by actively promoting your works and ideas in schools, festivals, events and all sorts of forums.

As you know, this is not the first time that I’ve met the founders of Image of Europe, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff and Marion Döring. We have already exchanged views on the contribution which images – and hence cinema – make to the European identity and to the way Europeans identify with this great project of peace, of freedom that is Europe.

According to Wim Wenders, the younger generation is not dreaming the European dream because, at a time when the image is all-powerful, Europe no longer believes in its own imagery and its own mythology. You explained, Wim, that this lack of dream power exists because Europe presents itself mainly as an economic union.

I agree. I agree that we have to concentrate more on the emotional side of Europe. Of course, we have to do it in an intelligent manner. We need Europe to accept cultural diversity. How can we respect diversity and at the same time have a European coherent approach?

This is not only an intellectual problem, it’s a political problem. You said, “is diversity a blessing or a curse?” I think that diversity is a great asset. But at the same time we need to have a coherent way to explore this diversity.

I feel that, although based on a common market, Europe is very much a political project, cemented by culture. Culture plays a central role in our history. My teacher and friend Denis de Rougemont used to say: “Europe without culture is nothing”.

I think that Europe has every reason to be proud of what it is. It must identify fully with the image it projects of itself and lay claim to it. This is the very meaning of the EU’s approach to culture.

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You just spoke about the way we are seen outside. And in fact this is what I sometimes ask myself. Why is there this distance between the image we get from outside and the self-image of Europe? […]

After the negative vote on the constitutional treaty we were discussing the reference to the European flag and anthem, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. It was removed, it is no longer in the Lisbon treaty because it was considered too constitutional! By coincidence at that time I went to the Asian summit, and I was received with the European flag and anthem. So, we may have doubts about our symbols but I can tell you, they look at us as Europe.

Europe has achieved after World War II the most important success story for at least many centuries: the reconciliation of a continent and peace among former enemies.

Fully respecting your cultural and creative independence, I think that you can really help Europe, not the European Commission, but Europe. You can help us to create an emotional relation. Cinema is, as you said, the lingua franca, and it can reach also people who cannot read. So, through cinema we can indeed speak about and develop the European dream.

I think it can be a great contribution to the image of Europe, the self-image of Europe, and also to promote the values that we think are important, and that shouldn’t be only European, namely the values of peace, freedom and solidarity.

Thank you very much!

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EFA Think Tank 2009 Participants: Michael Althen film critic / director / writer, Germany

Ademir Kenovic director / producer, Bosnia & Herzegovina

Kujtim Çashku director and principal, Marubi Film & Multimedia School, Albania

Labina Mitevska actress / producer, FYR Macedonia

Constantin Costa-Gavras director, France Peter Cowie film historian, UK Marion Döring Director of the European Film Academy Barbara Gessler European Economic and Social Committee Dieter Gorny Artistic Director “Creative Economy” RUHR.2010, Germany

Marjane Satrapi director, France Volker Schlöndorff director, Member of the EFA Board, Germany Michael Schmid-Ospach CEO Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany Albert Solé documentary film director, Spain Johanna ter Steege actress, the Netherlands István Szabó director, Hungary

Thomas Høegh CEO Arts Alliance Media / Lovefilm, UK

Fernando Trueba director / producer, Spain

Agnieszka Holland director, Poland

Wim Wenders director, President of the European Film Academy, Germany

Søren Høy principal, European Film College, Denmark

ORGANISATION EUROPEAN FILM ACADEMY: Concept: Marion Döring, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders Finances: Rainer Pyls Press & PR: Pascal Edelmann Organisation: Nikola Joetze, Klaudia Matschoss, Stefanie Röders

The EFA Think Tank 2009 was organized by the European Film Academy with the support of North Rhine-Westphalia, Filmstiftung NRW, and the European Capital of Cuture RUHR.2010 “Essen for the Ruhr”.

IMPRINT EUROPEAN FILM ACADEMY e.V., ★ Pascal Edelmann (editor) ★ graphic design: Andres Castoldi

Founded in 1988, the European Film Academy (EFA) now unites more than 2,000 European film professionals with the common aim of promoting European film culture. Throughout the year, the EFA initiates and participates in a series of activities dealing with film politics as well as economic, artistic, and training aspects. The programme includes conferences, seminars and workshops, and a common goal is to build a bridge between creativity and the industry.

These activities culminate in the annual presentation of the European Film Awards.

EUROPEAN FILM ACADEMY e.V. Kurf端rstendamm 225 10719 Berlin GERMANY www.europeanfilmacademy.org