Europe-Mediterranean, artists' speeches

with Charif Kiwan, Syrian filmmaker

Thierry Fabre, creator of the Averroes' meetings and responsible for programming and international relations at MUCEM

moderated by Arnaud Laporte

Listen to the encounter 

© Jean-Claude Carbonne - Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2012

 The situation in Syria is both one of the most worrying and one of the most gridlocked in the Mediterranean basin. The regime's position on the regional political chequerboard, the complex links uniting Syria and its neighbours and the religious question, all these elements make this country the focus of everyone's attention. In Syria, more than elsewhere, artists and intellectuals have taken a dominant place in the revolt underway, through an engagement that leads on a daily basis to life-or-death questions. That is why the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence wished to invite the film-maker Charif Kiwan to the Rencontres européennes. Cofounder and spokesman of the Abou Naddara collective, which brings together young self-taught documentary film-makers and whose site hosts short films showing the situation in Syria from one day to the next, Charif Kiwan, a recent refugee in France, has devoted himself since March 2011 to producing short films on the Syrian revolution. He will dialogue with the writer, journalist and political specialist Thierry Fabre, editor in chief of the review La Pensée de midi. Founder and organizer of the Rencontres d'Averroès, created nearly 20 years ago, and currently responsible for the programming and international relations of the MUCEM (Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations), Thierry Fabre is one of the sharpest observers of Mediterranean artistic and intellectual life.