Euromeditterranean Conference on Cinema:
Previous editions

This Conference, that has taken place for ten years at the Venice Film Festival in cooperation with the European Parliament and the UNESCO, has developed, through these years, the most burning themes about the Euro-Mediterranean integration process throughout the medias, following the tracks of Barcelona's agreements of 1995, with the participation of hundreds among the most remarkable exponents of cinema, culture and international institutions.

The High Patronage of Presidency of Italian Republic, together with UN Patronage, has sanctioned the international status of the demonstration, that now represents the primary forum about the Euro-Mediterranean cinema.

Euro-Mediterranean Conference about Cinema was born in 1995 during the celebrations for the Centenary of Cinema and the Barcelona Charta, that had decreed the creation of a free-trade market area between all Mediterranean countries for 2010.

“Cinema Dimension in new Euro-Mediterranean order” was the main theme of the first meeting, in which the primary objective appeared to be considering cinema as a common unifying language for all the different cultures of the world, even dramatically speaking, in order to build some new tolerance values in the project for Peace to affirm in that regions in which conflicts and socio-economical instabilities rule.

In 1996 the “Multimedia and Communication: the Mediterranean background” made us possible to obtain a very updated and surprising view of the speed with which these countries had being developed new technologies, in a gradually-integrating process both economical and cultural. This trend, although contrasted by racial intolerances and local fundamentalism, introduced an evaluation prospective about countries’ and cultures’ relationships, no more in terms of domination, but of interaction.

In the third Conference, in 1997, titled “Mediterranean Cinema: strategies of values” this concept, of overreaching the common technological parameters in order to face better the problems of content and their relative, linked, values, had been clarified.

The Mediterranean cultural matrix, mother of the modern western civilization, appeared in its whole world topicality: life conception and democracy conquests, freedom and human rights, are universal goals variously felt by the three big religions effecting more than half the world population, that became values and factors of social identification, beyond economic and cultural differences.

“Mediterranean Cinema between innovation and tradition” is the theme of the 1998 Conference that underlined the peculiarity both of the still living traditions that generate some, and very interesting, creative starting points for the public of the great technological innovations, and especially, social ones linked to immigration and tourism: those which give birth to a progressive integration process towards the introduction of a new figure: the Euro-Mediterranean citizen.

The Euro-Mediterranean citizen is better foreshadowed in the Fifth Conference discussion, in 1999 “Mediterranean Audiovisual and free-trade market area” in which the 2010 maturity, defined by the “Barcelona Declaration for Euro-Mediterranean free-trade market”, fixed a different regional view, no more separated from the sea but unified by it, especially for trade and socio-cultural exchanges.

Furthermore, Cinema, always playing in advance, gave birth to wonderful plays such as “Mediterraneo”, “Ulysses’ eye”, “Kadosh”, that contributes for the new Euro-Mediterranean consciousness to established.

In 2000, with the theme “Digital Revolution and the new culture” they dibated about the principal strategies, proposals and programmes, with particular attention to the European Parliament orientations for Mediterranean area, in order to encourage the Euro-Mediterranean cultural integration process throughout audiovisual communication and cinema, summoning all the protagonists of this watershed: Governments’ representatives, authors and directors, European supranational institutions, organisations playing in the cinema world, public and private broadcasting, telecommunication and internet companies.

The assertation of the common peace and tolerance values laid the foundation for the 7th edition of 2001: “Audiovisual communication and interactivity: for an intercultural dialogue”. The theme found its inspiration from the United Nations that, in 2001, declared 2001 as the year for international civilizations’ dialogue. The presence of more than 40 speakers, in particular the Commissioner Reading beyond the traditional one of the Cultural Commission of the European Parliament and the representatives from the Italian Government, allowed the Conference to underline how the audiovisual communication could be the most effective way to develop populations’ dialogue, permitting the creation of contents of great impact and, and Cinema is the main way to do it; it’s narrator of new myths and life ideologies for its wide capability of pervading people throughout its media-messages.

The programmes processed for fighting info-poverty together with the promotion of cinema, in the Mediterranean country, about the major integration with the television channel, and the empowering of facilities for high-quality movies, managed to give birth to a number of partnership actions on which the Italian CICT and the Observatory OCCAM, that it created, are completely involved.

In 2002 the theme: ”Digital cinema: which technologies for which culture” brought a wide multispecialistic discourage about the number of possibilities open by this revolution, conformed with the common Euro-Mediterranean dimension, but especially through this new expression of cinema, powerful instrument of mass communication that crosses every kind of frontiers, languages, ideologies and religions in order to rise the artistic evidence of every population or individual’s culture.

The accelerating widespread of broad band channels and satellite televisions, represented a very important opportunity for cinema to develop its markets and exchange system, foreshadowing the existing area of free exchange in the field of audiovisual communication that had been stepped up in the Barcelona Declaration in which were totally absent those rules that could aid that socio-political and economic back-slidings which the Declaration took inspiration from.

In 2003, the 9th edition dealt with the theme “Cinema and the new media between culture and market” and explored the new opportunities that the digital revolution had being opening to cinema, multiplying the creative and exploitation occasions for the great public that, always more, identifies this way to be one of the major component of our time. Media confluence tends to make it a day-to-day system and emphasizes the fusion between market and culture.