Mexico
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Discours prononcé en anglais. Texte original, non traduit.
Filmmakers, Guests, Ladies and gentlemen, It’s my great pleasure to open this filmmakers roundtable as part of the Black Canvas festival. I’d also like to greet the festival director, Claudio Zilleruelo, and of course to the Swiss guests at the festival, filmmakers Andrea Staka, Cyril Schäublin and Mauro Müller.
Cinema is a hugely important means of cultural cooperation for us. Now more than ever, we need audio-visual production to create a living heritage, a mirror that makes us reflect on who we are.
Looking back at the history of cinema, it all started with the invention of the first motion picture projector – the Cinématographe – by the Lumière brothers in the late 19th century. Then came the era of the silver screen in the 1930s to 1950s, which paved the way for what cinema has become today: an art that is celebrated at festivals across the globe, and a universal medium that crosses borders and promotes dialogue between peoples.
Mexico is a country with a long cinematic tradition, which Switzerland can take inspiration from. Over the last thirty years, filmmakers such as Iñárritu, Del Toro, Arau, Cuarón and many others have inspired and delighted audiences. And both in Mexico and in Switzerland, there is a young, dynamic and independent filmmaking scene that is keen to collaborate to tell stories and shape the image of both our countries.
We wanted to encourage the creation of shared stories by Switzerland and Mexico and we’re delighted to have signed a bilateral agreement on cinematic co-production in 2017 – the first agreement between Switzerland and a Latin American country.
This agreement allows us to co-produce films for movie theatres, as well as series and other narrative formats. The idea behind the co-production agreement is to collaborate with a focus on quality rather than quantity.
This year, one of the first major feature-length co-productions between Mexico and Switzerland was filmed in Yucatan, Mexico. The film ‘Cosmos’ tells the story of 75-year-old Leon, an illiterate fisherman and caretaker at the village cemetery, who meets a beautiful woman named Lena, a 72-year-old widow and writer. This is the tale of a meeting of two worlds and two societies, which explores the gap between outward appearances and emotional depth, between the profane and the sacred.
We are happy to see this film on the big and small screen. Roundtable sessions like today’s are where these stories are born. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you have some interesting and fruitful discussions here today.