“Nothing is more dangerous in diplomacy than to talk about peace as an amateur! Whenever the desire for peace has reached a certain intensity and could not be contained, we have had war!”
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), 1933

Dear friends, dear spectators, dear partners,

This is the seventeenth edition of the festival Europe around Europe with always the same mission and desire: “to present to everyone wonderful films that no one has seen”, as formulated by Henri Langlois, the legendary founder of the Cinémathèque française.

From disaster to disaster, from fear to dread, here we are with the hope that the films of the festival will reveal to us some aspects of contemporary reality and will give us, perhaps, through cinematographic art, and this is quite ambitious, some keys to the understanding of the future of our planet. How infinitesimally small it seems compared to the announced end of a world.

Come and see or see again the films gathered around the 2022 Festival theme, Black and White, whether it be the history of cinema, cinematographic writings or the question of racial discrimination; European masters Otar Iosseliani, Ingmar Bergman, Henning Carlsen, Knut-Erik Jensen, Alexandre Petrović, Manoel de Oliveira; the Mostra Imaginaires Coloniaux, which presents mostly unshown Portuguese films that since 1920, and up to the present day, have dealt with the long history of the “Empire”; the intense and melancholic trilogy Welcome in Vienna by Axel Corti …

And above all, be curious, come and see the films of today’s European cinema talents, come, and meet their authors who, from all over Europe, will come to Paris, support the creators and the cinemas that are finally open.

Sixty years after the signing of the Oberhausen Manifesto on February 28, 1962, the text is still relevant today. Like its signatories, filmmakers from Germany, we believe “that the future of cinema belongs to those who have proven that they speak a new cinematographic language”. And that: “This new cinema needs new freedoms. It must free itself from corporatist conformism, from the influence of commercial partners, from the tutelage of interest groups.”

Wonderful screenings and meetings,

Irena Bilic
Founder and Artistic director

28th February 2022, Paris