These and other questions will be answered by the French internet expert and sociologist Dominique Cardon, director of the MediaLab at SciencesPo in Paris and the author of numerous academic publications. The names of Czech guests will be confirmed.

The debate will take place in French and Czech, with simultaneous translation provided.

Organised by the Václav Havel Library in cooperation with Prague’s Institut français.

Within a few minutes the demonstrators were set upon and arrested. The Czechoslovak flag was destroyed and their banners confiscated. The detainees were sentenced to jail terms of several years, spells in labour camps or psychiatric clinics or internal exile…

In connection with the presentation of the Gratias agit award by the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, participants Pavel Litvinov, Tatyana Baeva and Viktor Fainberg have accepted invitations to the Václav Havel Library.

A discussion on the distant anniversary as well as current events will be helmed by Adam Hradilek (Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes) and the director of the Václav Havel Library, Michael Žantovský.

Guests: Mircea Dan Duta (RO) / Katarina Gomboc (SLO) / Markéta Hejná (CR) / Milan Hrabal  (CR) / Barbara Korun (SLO) / Andrej Makuc (SLO) / Hana Mžourková (CR) / Jani Oswald (A/SLO) / Jurij Paljk (IT/SLO) / Ana Porenta (SLO) / Simona Racková (CR) / Jan Štolba (CR).

The evening will be compered by Lenka and Peter Kuhar.

Other events taking place during the Stranou festival can be found at www.festivalstranou.cz

Everybody Can Change the World
Václav Havel completed his own work but how do we approach the world around us?

The pre-premiere of Everybody Can Change the World, a series of educational video lessons focused on human rights through the prism of the life and work of Václav Havel. The 10-minute lessons will be screened one by one, with one shown every 30 minutes. The lessons are presented by Emma Smetana and the dancer Yemi.
 

Read Havel
Have you ever read anything by Vaclav Havel? No? Try it with us!

Short video excerpts from the work of Vaclav Havel show just how contemporary his texts remain. Come brush up your knowledge as a reader! You will encounter KOVY, Do Thu Tang, Janek Rubeš, Adam Mišík and others on screen.

Our permanent interactive exhibition will be open the whole time.

The paradox of 2017 was that while the EU failed to solve the crises that were tearing it apart the previous year, the interplay between them created the conditions that helped the bloc to survive. The union is as fragile as ever, but its chances of enduring are much better than they were a year ago.

Although none of the problems that have fractured the union have gone away, over the course of the year, European economies grew, unemployment declined and opinion polls across the continent registered restored trust in Europe’s future. Unexpectedly, in 2017, it was the pro-Europeans who took the initiative.

How has the EU succeeded today in recovering its appeal, while failing singularly to solve any of the crises that threaten to destroy it?

Ivan Krastev is chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. He sits on numerous boards and is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.

Organised by The Vaclav Havel Library in cooperation with the Bulgarian Embassy in the Czech Republic. The discussion will be held in English and simultaneously interpreted into Czech.

Among the invited guests are researchers into the forced sterilisation of Roma women in Communist Czechoslovakia and academics focused on discriminatory practices against Roma women at the Europe-wide level and the current situation. Another key topic of discussion will be compensation for victims, which is why we have invited both representatives of lobby groups and victims themselves.

Confirmed participants: Gwendolyn Albert, Celia Donert, Elena Gorolová and Angéla Kóczé.

Simultaneous interpretation into Czech/English provided.

Herbarium for Something Worse, a collection from the illustrious contemporary poet and prose author Petr Borkovec, is something between an atlas and a rubbish dump. 

The short story collection Lido di Dante takes us to a small resort a few kilometres from Ravenna in which the streets are named after characters in The Divine Comedy. It’s a spot that is dazzling and gorgeous (the sea and the beach, water birds in lagoons, an institute for the study of dunes and a wonderfully sunny coastal pine forest) and also dark (an ancient nudist beach, aggressive naturists, oil drilling, transvestites, prostitutes, bars full of thieves and the scary pine forest in which Dante wrote The Inferno). Twelve texts create a small guidebook to a spot in which light and shade alternate a tad faster than we are used to.

In the landmark year of 1599, in which Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet, the Globe theatre opened, the Earl of Essex was sent to Ireland and the whole country feared another clash with the Spanish Armada.

Kateřina Hilská, the book’s translator, and Professor Martin Hilský, who has translated all of Shakespeare’s works, will discuss “timeless Shakespeare”.

These and other issues related to ethnic and religious diversity, migration and transformation will be debated from both a historical and contemporary perspective by international experts Stathis Kalyvas (Oxford University), Elmira Muratova (Tavrida National V.I. Vernadsky University/Crimean Federal University), Paul A. Shapiro (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) and Christian Voss (Humboldt University of Berlin).

The event will be moderated by historian Kateřina Králová (Institute of International Studies FSS CUNI). The discussion will be held in English.

For many women, parental leave means abandoning the labour market for a lengthy period. Many lose touch with their field. Their level of qualification declines, as does their chance of full reintegration, a situation that is in part due to the inflexibility of the Czech labour market. Some women therefore put motherhood off, decide to have fewer children or don’t have any at all. There are models that claim to know how to enable the woman or both parents to decide themselves how to combine professional and parental needs and ideas, depending on what is possible for individual families. What form do those models take, how successful have they been abroad, what are their drawbacks, are they beneficial to parents alone or also to children, and what are their chances of working in the Czech environment? These issues will be the focus of our discussion about combining family and professional life.

Guests: MP Markéta Pekarová Adamová, Jana Spekhorstová of the Czech branch of the European Union of Women, Marie Oujezdská, director of the National Centre for the Family, economist Filip Pertold of the think tank IDEA at CERGE-EI.

The debate will be chaired by Jaroslav Poláček, an analyst with the TOPAZ political institute.

Organised by the Václav Havel Library in cooperation with TOPAZ.