Edouard Gaudot: A former minister of the environment in the Czech Republic, a former elected member of the regional parliament for the Paris region – you both have political backgrounds. What prompted you to foray into the world of culture? 

Lucile Schmid: Culture and literature are my original areas of interest. When I entered politics, I was struck by how time consuming it was, making it absolutely impossible to read a book, go to the movies, see a play, or enjoy culture in general. It seems that being in power and doing the task of representing people eventually disconnects you from culture and creativity – and that the culture of power somehow pulls you away from cultural issues. I find this deplorable. Representing society and offering a vision for the future in these difficult times demands a stronger connection to culture and its complexity. 

I believe that being connected to culture is the only way to understand the dynamics of transformation and ongoing social crises, because culture is about learning a new vocabulary and coming up with novel ways to express the world. I felt that I could contribute more to this endeavour if I left Paris, party politics, and the usual political circus and engaged more in creating cultural projects. This is why I established the Prix du Roman d’Écologie. 

Ladislav Miko: My path was quite different. When I was young, I lived in communist Czechoslovakia. There, being involved in politics basically meant collaborating with a totalitarian regime. My engagement with culture began when I was a student of science. During this period, I staged plays as part of a student group. This was our way to express our messages to society and the community and to circumvent the communist grip on daily life. It was the first time that I felt the power of art in bringing people together and carrying political messages – even in a highly complex environment. 

It was the Velvet Revolution – and later, the separation of Czechia from Slovakia – that finally brought me from the field of science into politics. I remained a scientist, but when I started to work in politics, I remembered the importance of communicating through culture, which allows you to directly connect with people and bring them together. For example, while serving in the European Commission as Director for Nature in Brussels, I launched a “Czech Fun Club” with my wife to bring together compatriots from the European institutions, along with artists and public figures, to spend time together and exchange ideas. When I left politics, I was offered to take over the direction of EKOFILM, Europe’s oldest international environmental film festival, created by the Czech Ministry for the Environment 51 years ago. It is an institutional tool that can be used to create cultural connections, and I have been involved with it for more than a decade. 

Lucile Schmid: For me, it was also very striking to see that mainstream political agendas rarely put the ecological transformation at their centre. Usually, these issues don’t enter political debates unless there is a crisis or popular mobilisation. You can see this in France today, where green issues have completely disappeared from the political agenda. But with cultural events like ours – film festivals or prizes on green literature – we have a way to intervene in political discussions and make these topics more prominent. 

When we created the Prix du Roman d’Écologie [a literary prize that aims to nurture green themes in French literature] with writers and leading green figures, we had two objectives in mind: first, giving visibility to issues that were absent not just from politics but also from mainstream literature. Initially, people were sceptical. They believed that nature and landscape writing were something for English- language literature and American culture. But we wanted to show the relevance of transformation and green values. Our second goal was to highlight the complexity, tensions, and contradictions that are intrinsic to any agenda of change. Politics is about conflicts, but too often, political agendas tend to overlook that complexity and dismiss internal contradictions. Movies, books, and other artworks don’t shun these aspects, so we wanted to showcase them and give them some kind of political meaning.

 Politics is about conflicts, but too often, political agendas tend to overlook that complexity and dismiss internal contradictions.

In France, literature is very much seen as something purely aesthetic. A true artist should not be engaged, and a good writer is not supposed to convey political preferences or meaning. But we have helped new writers emerge, and people now recognise that young and up-and-coming authors have a different outlook because of the times we live in. And they can be very good writers. This is not limited to new writers; established novelists increasingly include references to environmental issues and their impact on our lives. 

Another goal of the Prix du Roman d’Écologie is revisiting history and imagining how it could have been different. This is something that, for example, Sibylle Grimbert achieves with her Le dernier des siens (“The Last of Its Kind”), which tells of the friendship between a naturalist and a great auk in 1840. In the novel, the bird happens to be the last of its species. But its friend, the naturalist, does not know this. 
 
It was one of our aims to show people that culture can be a political commitment. Quite different from you, Ladislav, since you used to live in a country where the lack of democracy made art into a subtle form of political engagement that people recognised. 

You both touched on the relationship between the arts and political institutions. Would you see a danger in the institutionalisation of art and culture? 

Ladislav Miko: The simple answer would be, yes, it can be potentially dangerous. But it’s also circumstantial. As far as I’m concerned, with EKOFILM we have complete freedom, and this is enabled by institutional support. The certainty and stability of the funding are liberating. In fact, one specific condition for the festival is that there cannot be any politicisation, and when ministers and politicians are invited, it’s only as part of the discussion in the spirit of a pluralist community. In the 2024 edition, one of the most successful conversations featured the last eight Czech environment ministers in a roundtable discussion on environmental issues from different points of view. Such a programme would be impossible in a partisan environment. 

The content of EKOFILM is determined by the festival itself, not by the institutions. People come because of its substance and pluralistic approach. This is, in my view, very political – but in the right way. 

Lucile Schmid: I remember a debate in France between a government official and a group of scriptwriters, where the artists confessed their uneasiness at being solicited by the government. This underscores both the necessity and difficulty of bridging the two worlds. Another telling example is the way France’s current culture minister treats and addresses artists. She accuses them of being disconnected from society and urges them to leave Paris and go to the countryside and other parts of France. She speaks of artists in an antagonistic and populist manner, as if she were leading some kind of culture war. 

Indeed, culture has now become a real battlefield. Certain elected officials, including regional council presidents, are slashing budgets and trying to discredit, silence, or even destroy the bits of culture they disagree with. They claim to be doing this in the name of sound public finances and European standards of a balanced budget, but that’s a pretext. It is, of course, hard to generalise since policies change depending on who is in charge, but it seems that many public institutions believe culture must serve their political purpose or renounce its public funding. This is a problem because culture can only be a tool for positive transformation if it is free and without strings attached. 

Ladislav Miko: The trends Lucile describes are also visible in my country, and we have populist parties attacking culture and trying to defund artists. However, I still haven’t seen a Czech minister of culture who would act the way you mentioned. Our historical legacy reminds people what culture meant to them in totalitarian times. I hope it will remain so. 

Books are solitary, intimate experiences, whereas movies are more collective. Can the tension between collective and individual practice be resolved in festivals and public events? 

Ladislav Miko: For me, the fact that people are coming to see movies about the environment is only a starting point. What truly matters is the creation of a lasting community of people who come together every year to each festival. The 

festival is about much more than two hours of watching a movie and then two hours of discussing it. We also have many “post-festival activities”, with events in various towns, schools, and universities, where locals gather to see a film. The movie itself is just the start of the story. The most important part is the social and cultural connection it provides.  

I find it much easier to achieve this with movies than with books. In my view, literature might be less conducive to forming a community and connecting people. 

Lucile Schmid: You’re right. With books, it’s certainly more difficult, but they can still contribute greatly to creating collective culture. When we decided to establish the prize, we selected a large jury of 20-25 people. Half of them were students and younger people from various schools who were working on the issues related to our work. Now, eight years later, there is a real community of people dedicated to the initiative and committed to enlarging its outreach. We have created what we could call a deliberative mini-public. In a sense, it’s a democratic exercise. 

Another point worth mentioning is that we have managed to establish our reputation strongly enough for novelists and scriptwriters to seek our advice on their own practices. For instance, I’ve been contacted by an association of screenwriters to help them identify biases about green topics in their work on mainstream series. What I know for certain is that our prize provides a great opportunity to explore the tensions between generations, social issues, and green topics. 

Cinema, movies, literature, or theatre – I think we should make arts interact, refrain from decreeing what is popular and what is elitist, and aim to make complexity a part of politics. Today, there are many festivals that focus on green issues or transformation, and mainstream events increasingly provide opportunities for such interactions between politics and the arts. 

I think we should make arts interact, refrain from decreeing what is popular and what is elitist, and aim to make complexity a part of politics.

We can say that the opposite is also true: political events are increasingly taking on the form of festivals. A striking example is France’s Fete de l’Humanité – historically connected to the Communist Party – but also many green-minded festivals focused on degrowth or alternative futures. Political events use culture to attract participants who don’t necessarily share their cause. Does this imply that people are more willing to engage with culture than politics? 

Ladislav Miko: There is a very important point here, which is again related to the experience of living in a former totalitarian world. Literature and books were the best way to sneak culture into a closed country. If you had a book, you could read it, translate it, distribute it, and disseminate its contents. This is how we learned about different realities beyond the Iron Curtain. On the other hand, movies, albums, bands, theatre pieces, and other cultural objects were only allowed when selected by the regime. Books helped create a democratic feeling. They contributed to bringing people together and helped make a demos, a society, emerge. They can play a real, subversive role. 

Today, the challenge is much more difficult: books have to compete with a variety of other offers such as social media, the Internet, TV, etc. I think festivals and their crowds are responding to this situation. 

Today, societies are increasingly aware of the urgent challenges they face, yet this awareness is not always reflected in the choice of political leaders. Why is this sense of urgency, which is so visible in your festivals, lacking from voting behaviour as well as political agendas? 

Ladislav Miko: Our aim is not to influence how people vote. We are primarily providing them with facts and information about the urgency and scale of the problems we are facing and also about the many potential ways of addressing them. You can encourage movements, action, and the desire to act, but the moment you push for a specific solution or pick a political side, you risk creating polarisation, and you narrow your audience to those people who are sympathetic to your perspective. I still believe the priority should be to speak to the broadest possible segment of society. 

The moment you push for a specific solution or pick a political side, you risk creating polarisation.

Lucile Schmid: The idea cannot be to advocate for one political party. Yet if the public does not see meaningful action despite its growing awareness, it may get frustrated. That said, this awareness hasn’t so far fully translated into voting behaviour, and this is mainly due to the democratic crisis and the perception that politicians lack the power they claim to have. So we should start questioning political systems rather than culture and the outreach of festivals. 

What’s certain is that culture lives within language and words, and if politicians had the ability to capture the complex and contradictory conditions we are facing and stopped oversimplifying, they would have more credibility – and thus more power. Unlike political storytelling, culture – including books, movies, and series – has the ability to tell intimate, contradictory stories that people see and live every day. 

Currently, a lot of popular and influential green figures are receiving millions of views from young people on YouTube and other social media, but they leave them with a sense of despair and the conclusion that there is no solution, exit, or possibility to change anything. I’m not arguing that these scientists, artists, or writers should promote one party or another, but it’s also important to show people that there are solutions and that they are not doomed. 

Words matter, and so does culture. We should use our cultural influence to show that there is a way. To recall that democracy is ours. So I believe people who have the ability to influence public opinion have the responsibility to take and defend a future-oriented perspective. 

Ladislav Miko: I agree. And I believe that neither culture nor science are bound to remain outside of politics, commenting and providing ideas and data. They must also be a source and an inspiration for politics and politicians. They can provide a link and a sense of community. We need more scientists and artists to take on their political responsibility and go into the arena to fight for their ideas.