The future of the past

 “Culture takes diverse forms across time and space. This diversity is embodied in the uniqueness and plurality of the identities of the groups and societies making up humankind. As a source of exchange, innovation and creativity, cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature.” This is what Article 1 of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity says, officially recognizing that this is a value to be protected. Facilitated by the rapid development of new information and communication technologies, the process of globalization is a challenge for cultural diversity and it creates the conditions for a renewed dialogue among cultures and civilizations. New cross-cultural approaches are emerging in order to understand diversity and now we are studying not only the flows of people, but also the flows of ideas, cultural goods and services.

Sunday, March 8, at the ex Aurum in Pescara, the third edition of the Oscar Pomilio Forum will focus on the value of diversity with an edition entitled "The future of our past: languages ​​and values at risk".

Special guest: the British photographer, Jimmy Nelson. The author of Before they pass away, an ambitious project of visual anthropology rotated around 31 isolated tribes. It is an aesthetically valuable photographic documentation, but above all an irreplaceable ethnographic archive of a world that is rapidly disappearing.

Along with Nelson, André Singer – documentary filmmaker and president of the Royal Anthropological Institute – who produced with Werner Herzog the award-winning The act of killing. This is the story from the point of view of the perpetrators of the anti-communist purge that between 1965 and 1966 led to half a million people death in Indonesia.

Recently, he directed Night Will Fall: commissioned in 1945 by the Allies and produced at the time by artists the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, the film gathers the first visual evidences of the horrors of the concentration camps after the liberation and it aired for first time on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day. The event will be moderated by Wolfgang Achtner, pioneer of video journalism, television journalist with over thirty years of working experience in some of the most prestigious American TV networks and also documentary filmmaker for the British networks BBC and Channel 4.