Hay Festival 2018: “the Woodstock of the mind”
On September 10th, the annual Hay Festival officially commenced for the thirteenth time in Segovia. IE University once again opened the doors for more than two hundred keynote speakers, who analysed and discussed the following topics: the future of Europe, gender-equality and co-existence.
The Hay Festival was created in 1987 by Peter Florence and his parents, originally set in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. Nowadays, keynote speakers are gathered on numerous places throughout the world, earning the status of being considered as the ‘the Woodstock of the Mind’, according to President Bill Clinton.
Renowned speakers such as film directors Stephen Frears and Isabel Coixet, authors Ken Follet and Giles Tremlett, Olympic champion Saúl Craviotto, and the actress Vanessa Redgrave, shared their past experiences, thoughts, future projects, and anecdotes with a fascinated crowd composed mainly of IE students and faculty, as well as travelling passersby.
Peter Florence, who founded the Hay Festival back in 1987, mediated the discussion with Stephen Frears – renowned British film director, creator of My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity, The Queen, Philomena, and Florence Foster Jenkins. The guest speakers discussed the long career of the film director, his casting techniques and preferences, and the Hollywood tendencies of blockbuster movie-making. When asked about the budget-quality correlation in the film industry and the director’s willingness to make a comic book film, Frears laughingly replied: ‘Bigger the budget, the more frightened I get”.
The best-selling British author of thrillers and historical fiction – Ken Follet – presented his newest novel A Column of Fire, the third book of the Kingsbridge series, at the Hay Festival. During Follet’s monologue, topics such as his daily working routine (elaborated on the techniques of fictional writing) and the importance of research were addressed by the author. Finally, he gave the audience a few tips about plot-making and character-development. Additionally, autographed copies of Follet’s novels were available for purchase on campus.
Geoffroy Gérard, the General Director of the IE Foundation, mediated the discussion between four-time Olympic medallist in kayaking Saúl Craviotto and fashion model Teresa Baca. The guest speakers talked about the hardships of their respective fields of work and people’s judgements and perceptions of these. They shared with the audience how the beginning of their careers unfolded, and elaborated on the importance of gradual development through hard-work and passion. Craviotto, who won the title of the Spanish Sportsmen of the Year and the MasterChef Celebrity competition, in 2016 and 2017 respectively, is nowadays serving at the National Police Corps, while Baca, Master of Strategic Management of the Luxury Industry from IE Business School, is pursuing a career in sports journalism.
During the first part of the event the documentary Sea Sorrow, marking Vanessa Redgrave’s debut as a film director, was displayed to the audience. The film reflected Redgrave’s personal war-time evacuee experience, alongside with Lord Alfred Dubs’s story as a child refugee from Czechoslovakia living in Great Britain. Redgrave finally discussed nuanced parallelisms with the ongoing refugee crisis, while depicting the hardships of African and Syrian refugees at Calais Jungle camp in Northern France.
The screening of the documentary was followed by the discussion among the British artist Kate Daudy, the former member of the British Parliament and refugee campaigner Lord Alfred Dubs and Carlo Nero – Vanessa Redgrave’s son and producer of the film. Keynote speakers discussed the power of art on the global political environment, the impact of the refugee crisis, and the violation of Human Rights, and elaborated on the distance between people’s modern perceptions towards migration. The discussion was mediated by Elena Pita, renowned author and journalist.
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