Allow me to address and welcome separately my dear friend Costas Gavras. Dear Costas,
it is really very important, especially honorable, your presence here tonight at this event for Cypriot cinema. The presence of an emblematic figure of French and Greek, or rather European and international cinema, not only honours this event for Cypriot cinema, but gives encouragement and moral support to our creators. Thank you for being here with us and for what you so aptly and wisely said to us a short while ago.
Please allow me to personally congratulate and thank the President of the Cypriot Community of France, brotherly friend Evagoras Mavrommatis (although I must assure you that the choice of the film "The Vow of Evagoras / Le voeu d'Evagoras" in the programme, with his name in the title, is a pure coincidence!) We have a very close personal relationship, but again this does not affect my judgement: I congratulate and thank him both for this honouring of our cinema and for all the other things he does for Cyprus in France. We owe thanks, of course, to all his colleagues in the Community, as well as to our friend Katerina Xyla of the Greek Cultural Centre, without whose help we would hardly be here tonight. Warm thanks also to the Cinema Le Grand Action screening room, which is hosting Cypriot films this weekend. I would like to take this opportunity to assure our Community in France that their efforts are well received. We will support and establish this event on an annual basis. We will have such Cypriot Cinema Days in Paris every year.
But I must also note the presence here with us tonight of two of our creators.
Dear Elias Demetriou and Andreas Panji, I am delighted that you are also here, invited by the organisers, to talk to the audience and about your work.
In my capacity as Minister of Culture, I would like to express my great satisfaction with this event. It is truly an important step of extroversion and promotion of the work of the Cypriot film community. This event tonight, rather modest but certainly very important, is indicative of the cultural radiance that our country can radiate. I would like to take this opportunity to note that last Sunday I was in Vienna for the annual Cyprus Concert. That event is another great opportunity for cultural promotion, which we owe to another dedicated Cypriot patriot, the well-known baritone Kyros Patsalides. Who together with the Cypriot Cultural Centre of Vienna put Cypriot music creation in the famous Wein Musikverein. The presence of several well-known soloists from Cyprus, Greece and Austria, as well as the Cyprus Youth Symphony Orchestra and the choir of the Paphos Music School was truly outstanding. It is also a great opportunity and experience for young artists as well as our students to meet and perform in this temple of music. It was a very nice and successful musical event.
I consider it very important that both our embassy in Vienna and our embassy here in Paris have valuable supporters, a kind of parallel cultural ambassadors in civil society, such as Cyrus and Evagoras.
Dear Ambassador, dear George Siakallis, we are fortunate, both the embassy and you personally and all of us, to have here first of all the special presence in the world of Gastronomy, with our distinguished chef, Andreas Mavrommatis - whose presence here I welcome - but, also the support of this active Community, with Evagoras, who, among many other things and his admirable efforts to make Cyprus and our national theme known in France, is now establishing Cypriot Film Days. It is as if we have both a gastronomic and a cultural parallel embassy! But I could not fail to thank you and your colleagues at the embassy for your efforts and your contribution.
Dear friends,
Let me also say, on a somewhat personal note, that those of us who once, a few decades ago, as students, used to live and hang out in these very areas of Paris, frequenting cinema halls like this one on Rue des Ecoles - and I see many of us from back then among us tonight - all of us, well, we could not have imagined that there would come a time when we would meet again with French friends, present at a screening of Cypriot films in these same neighborhoods, in the center of Paris, near the Sorbonne, the Collège de France, the Pantheon, and just down the street, Notre Dame, a place teeming with cultural references and the life of the spirit. And yet it is a fact.
The cinema, the cinematography of Cyprus is here in Paris tonight! At a very, very appropriate moment, because, as we know, the always very close relations between Cyprus and France have been further strengthened in recent years and are at their peak.
I am glad that, after postponements and the painful experience of the pandemic, we are now making it, still hesitantly, but hopefully steadily, back to normal life and we can give the cultural activity the place it deserves and deserves. These very days, after many efforts and expectations of years and even decades, the Government's proposal for the legislative framework that will create a Deputy Ministry of Culture in Cyprus is before the House of Representatives. Some postponement was given and I must admit that there was unfortunately some resistance. However, the time is coming and I believe that very soon we will have what in countries - such as France, Greece and others - has always existed. We need a separate governance structure for culture. I believe that we will then have a new beginning for a more coherent, comprehensive and better targeted policy. A policy that will cover both cultural creation and cinema and music and visual arts and everything else, as well as cultural heritage as a whole. So, hopefully, next time, at the second annual edition of the Cypriot Film Days in Paris, we will have the Deputy Minister of Culture with us (and I say "we will" because I promise you that I will be present). Today it is known and unquestionable. Yes, and it does exist and we have important examples to show. I am glad that we are going to show them to a French audience.
In the selection of the films to be shown, I noticed that there was a composition, including a dramatized documentary and films that cover the last twenty years in order to give a typical sample, up to a film of our days, "The Senior Citizen" by Marinos Kartikkis. I would like to point out that, particularly in recent years, we have had a very remarkable, dense and enriching presence of young creators, with important works. This is very encouraging. But we must also find ways for the state to encourage them. I would like to return to the very correct observation made earlier by Costas Gavras, namely that in Cyprus we also have a significant number of remarkable short films. I hope that next time there will be an opportunity to include a number of short films.
But I need to clarify one more thing. This event may be the first organized presentation of Cypriot cinema to a French audience here in Paris, but it is not exactly the only opportunity to screen Cypriot cinema to a French audience. After participating in the International Organisation of Francophonie (OIF), our country presents a Cypriot film every year at the FIAP European Festival. Thanks to the efforts of our representative here, Professor Andri Michael, whom I thank for acting as a cultural liaison through our embassy.
No one could dispute another very important truth we heard earlier from Costas Gavras. That because of its practical specifications and its nature, the state must particularly support film activity and cinema. Within our Ministry, in the Cultural Services, efforts are being made. With the available means having been strengthened a few years ago - although they always remain limited - and the activity of only one or two people! Indeed, it would be an omission here not to mention the help given for tonight's event from Cyprus by Diomedes Nikita, who functions - if I may say so - more or less as the "cinema man" in our services. I hope that with the autonomy of the cultural policy body and the functioning of the Ministry of State, opportunities will be given to do more - as we ought - for cinema and other forms of cultural action.
Such a moment of entertainment and joy, in a warm cinema hall, however, does not let us forget the drama unfolding a few thousand kilometres to the east, but within the European continent itself. Yesterday afternoon I had a meeting in Nicosia with the Ambassador of Ukraine, as part of our efforts to prepare as much as possible for the reception and hospitality of Ukrainians who will flee their homeland in persecution and end up in Cyprus. Like all EU member states, Cyprus will implement the special decisions for the reception of Ukrainian displaced persons and we in the Ministry of Education are taking measures especially for students and children who will have to continue in our schools. I will also reiterate the position we took two weeks ago in Angers, with the joint Declaration of the "27" Culture Ministers: to condemn the Russian invasion and support the Ukrainian people and, in particular, from our side, artists, journalists and cultural and audiovisual workers and the strong demand for an immediate end to the war.
On the part of Cyprus, a country that has suffered and is still suffering from a similar attack, I also express the hope that the Ukrainians will not have to find themselves in our position, as for 48 years now we have been calling - unfortunately without response - for an end to the Turkish occupation, for the restoration of our country's sovereignty over all its territories and for international law to prevail in Cyprus. I really hope that the Ukrainians do not find themselves in this same position.
The dramatized documentary "Beloved Days" that we just watched earlier was a very good introduction to the development of film production in Cyprus, but also to the open national problem of our country with the Turkish occupation. The great, almost "crazy" expectations created by that Hollywood production with Raquel Wells, in the early 70's in Karmi and on the slopes of the now occupied Pendadaktylos, were followed by a long period of desolation, mourning, silence... But in recent years, despite the fact that the makers of that film, who revisited the same places for the needs of the documentary, found foreign occupation and despite the fact that we don't have big studios, a remarkable cinematographic creation has been recorded in Cyprus.
As Costas Gavras also noted, with cinema we are somehow talking about the "private life of peoples". Such a very touching, but also very apt and tenderly realistic, approach to the reality within life and the friction of people with great personal dilemmas, and their sharing between the country, their own space, and the "outside", as well as the intersection of time and generations, can be seen right now in the film "Fish n' chips". It's about the Cypriot diaspora in Britain, those of our people's relationship with their homeland, and has much to tell us, with a distinct poetry of imagery.
But while waiting for the curtain to rise, I will close this intervention. Enough has been said. It is the time for cinema, images, sounds and the magic of the stage!
Apologizing for being rather long-winded, I thank you for your attention and wish you good viewing!
(NG)
Contents of this article including associated images are owned by PIO
Views & opinions expressed are those of the author and/or PIO
Source
