The Pop Up Wake Up Europe! Film Festival
Europe and the existential threat of climate change
Dates To Be Confirmed
Patron: Trudie Styler
Watch ! Discuss ! Act !
“An informed citizenry is the basic requirement for our survival as free people”.
Thomas Jefferson
“There is only one Earth. Humans must do everything they can to conserve Earth’s environment now. There is no Planet B.”
Mike Berners-Leigh
“Polycrisis” has become the defining word of our time. The climate crisis. The geopolitical crisis. The crisis of trust and legitimacy that is weakening our liberal democracies. All these crises are ‘intersectional’: all connected, all reinforce one another, all affect different groups in different ways, and all challenge our ability to understand and—above all—to act.
Our Pop Up Wake Up festival and events want to help audiences to make sense of all these crises through the lens of the longest-term, most existential threat of all: that of a change in our climate that threatens the very survival of humanity.
Geopolitics harms our ability to deal with it collectively as a planet; lack of trust hurts democracies’ ability to sustain climate responses; the pandemic we have just lived through was evidence of our biological challenges but also of our difficulties in responding.
At the heart of everything stands climate. It affects us all, yet also divides us.
By harnessing the power of great documentaries and combining them with high level debates we want to help Europeans to understand what is going on and to motivate civil society to think, to discuss and to act. Together.
What the Pop Up Wake UP festival is
The Pop Up Wake Up Europe Florence Film Festival is an innovative concept which combines great films, mostly unreleased in Italy, with high-level debates all in front of a diverse, international audiences.
Everywhere, the showing of the movies is free of charge.
The aim of the festival is to use the power of documentary film to pose questions about where we Europeans are going, how and why, helping to foster a European civic consciousness. The debates that accompany the showing of the films are an integral part of the project, creating opportunities for reflection and understanding.
From Florence, a cultural laboratory and hub of European thought and innovation since the days of the Renaissance, the “mother” Festival aims to sound its wake-up call through Tuscany and Europe to all the cities who want to join in via independent events, internet streaming and the sharing of digital content on social media. It will bring together students and scholars from a wide range of top universities.
In the minds of the founders of the Wake-Up Europe Festival—Bill Emmott, former editor of The Economist and globally renowned author; Annalisa Piras, award-winning filmmaker and journalist, and their new partner John Hooper, Florence resident, author and Italy correspondent of The Economist—high quality creative documentaries change perceptions, cultures, conversations and, potentially, the way we see the world.
The first edition of the festival under the patronage of the Cinema Museum and the University of Turin in 2019 had an overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception and spread its message to 10 satellite festival events in:
- Edinburgh
- Manchester
- Canterbury
- Brussels
- Berlin
- Stockholm
- Bratislava
- Cologne
- Plovdiv
- Hameenlina , Finland
See:
https://www.theweproject.eu/events
The WUE Festival was created in 2019 by The Wake Up Europe Foundation, an educational, non-profit, conceived by Piras and Emmott, on the strength of the success of a decade of experience of screenings with debates throughout Europe, in academic institutions ranging from Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, Edinburgh, Dublin, Universitè Catholique of Louvain, European University Institute, LUISS and Ca’ Foscari, to civic institutions such as city councils in Finland or the Italian Parliament.
Support and Patronage
University of Florence Department of Philosophy
The European University Institute
The Fondazione Sistema Toscana
Movies
A Selection for Reflection.
The theme of the 2024 Pop Up Wake Up Festivals is the climate emergency and its interconnected crises. How can European civic societies act together to implement the radical revolution needed to reach the 45% CO2 emissions reduction by 2030 to keep the planet safe? Only seven years left. The countdown has started.
The films which are selected by a high-level international scientific committee, must meet three fundamental criteria:
- Artistic quality and innovation.
- Information quality and ability to stimulate debate.
- Urgency of the topics dealt with in defining the common challenges of our present.
Priority will be given to quality films unreleased in Italy which are unlikely to find a way to be distributed to the public.
The Scientific Committee
Trudie Styler
Award-winning documentary producer and director
Kim Campbell
Former Prime Minister of Canada
Bill Emmott
Author and former editor of The Economist
John Hooper
Florence-based author and Italy Correspondent for The Economist
Annalisa Piras
Award-winning documentary maker and journalist
Festival Artistic Director
Francesco Grillo
Director, Think Tank Vision
Barbara Biemann
Award-winning Documentary Producer Ard Public German Tv
Richard Sambrook
Professor of Journalism and Director of the Centre for Journalism at Cardiff University. Former Director of Global News at the BBC.
Claudia Bucher
Award winning Documentary Producer Arte Franco German Public TV