Wim Wenders is the first Ambassador for this year's European Arthouse Cinema Day • CICAE

The first Ambassador of this year’s European Arthouse Cinema Day (17th November 2024) is none other than legendary Filmmaker Wim Wenders. Fresh off the success of his last film “Perfect Days” last year, he is joining Arthouse cinemas all over the world to send an audible message for democracy, tolerance, and respect and to celebrate the diversity and freedom of the European cinematographic landscape that will resonate around the globe. 

The recent European elections have once again shown us:
We are politically in a precarious situation.
We stare in horror at the election results and seek answers.
Why do so many people follow the empty promises of populists,
why don’t they question what these populists are trying to sell them?
Hasn’t history long since reduced their nationalistic “solutions” to absurdity?

If there is anything that can protect us from cheap and dangerous populism, it is education and culture. An important, but still underestimated by politicians, part of this, are films — stories that tell us about our own and other cultures, life concepts, and experiences. And just as important is the cinema itself as the place where we, together with others, immerse ourselves into those very worlds that help to broaden our horizons and to experience other perspectives, but also history itself.

I am very serious when I say that the role of cinema is still completely underestimated by politics. Film education, in a world dominated by moving images, should have long been an integral part of school curriculums just as visual arts, music, and literature have been for a long time. Adolescents need to master the alphabet of seeing and the grammar of images, for only then can they recognize when they are being manipulated, and nowadays, this happens more through images than words.

The “European Cinema Day” rightly sees itself as the “Global Day of Action for the arthouse movement.” For me, it is the day when we must understand ourselves as cinema activists to collectively advocate across all geographical, political, and social boundaries for the expansion of our horizons and viewpoints: with the intelligent, exciting, and moving stories, and the history that (arthouse) cinema has to offer.