News in English     | 08.12.2019. 17:17 |

Olivier Py: Each generation has its own struggle

FENA Nermina Omerbegović

SARAJEVO, December 8 (FENA) - French theatre director Olivier Py has been awarded with the "Susan Sontag" Award for Critical Thinking, presented by "Sarajevo Fest - Art and Politics" and Susan Sontag’s son, the author David Rieff.

Olivier Py is French theatre director and director of the Avignon Festival, one of the most important theatre festivals in the world. Olivier Py is a thinker, a critic of social events and phenomena, as well as an activist. He has published numerous texts in French newspapers protecting the rights of minorities. He writes and speaks against racism and police brutality. In his texts, he defends migrants. He is also very vocal in protecting the rights of sexual minorities and a ferocious opponent of the extreme right-wing politics. Throughout his entire professional life, Oliver Py has exemplified critical thinking, exceptional artistic creativity, and human decency.

Festival Director Haris Pašović emphasized that in July 1995, Olivier Py organized a series of protests by French artists demanding that the French authorities immediately intervene in Srebrenica to protect Bosnian Muslims. Together with his two colleagues, he continued his personal protest by going on hunger strike against the French politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Pašović stressed that Py is an important European figure.

In his addressing after the award ceremony, Olivier Py pointed out that the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was first and foremost a war between those who wanted democracy and those who did not. It was not, Py thinks, an ethnic war, but a war for democracy.

As he says, staying in Sarajevo, he had the opportunity to understand this because he met some wonderful people.

Even now, twenty years since then, some young people may think that they no longer need to fight political struggles, but they are always needed, Py stressed. And each generation has its own struggle.

"There are fights you can enjoy, but in some you don't, it doesn't always have to be a sacrifice. Sometimes you are not even aware that what you are doing is a struggle. Don't give up on life, live your life," Oliver Py, the first Susan Sontag Award winner, said in Sarajevo yesterday.

Susan Sontag was one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century and an uncompromising critic of political and social events. Sontag came to help Sarajevo people during the siege, and wrote about it in newspapers and other publications around the world. During the siege she directed the play 'Waiting for Godot' by Samuel Beckett in Sarajevo.

(FENA) A. B.

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