The Great European Disaster Movie Screening

Speaker(s): Dr Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of Research
Speaker(s): Bill Emmott (Executive Producer), Annalisa Piras (Director, Producer, Writer), Dr Jody LaPorte (Departmental Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government)

5pm Screening, 6.30pm Panel Discussion, 7.15pm Drinks Reception

This event is open to the public, to attend the event please sign up on the registration page.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the Blavatnik School of Government will be hosting a screening of The Great European Disaster Movie.

After the screening there will be a panel discussion with Bill Emmott (Executive Producer), Annalisa Piras (Director, producer, writer), Dr Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (Research Director, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism), and Dr Jody LaPorte (Departmental Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government).

Following the success of the acclaimed Girlfriend In a Coma, director Annalisa Piras and former editor of The Economist Bill Emmott bring us a new, hard hitting creative current-affairs documentary about the political, economic and identity crisis facing Europe.

In an artfully constructed depiction of how Europe is sleepwalking toward disaster, starring Angus Deayton in fiction scenes from a post-EU future the film pairs an imagined view from a dystopian future with insightful, cross- national analysis by ordinary Europeans and high level experts on how and why things are going so wrong.

Piras and Emmott in an authored piece of committed journalism argue powerfully that while economic crisis and popular anger are pushing Europe dangerously towards disintegration, the EU is in need of major reform but well worth saving. Subtle, moving, thought-provoking and witty, The Great European Disaster Movie is far more than a political film but instead frames Europe through the eyes of those who are most important to its success: the Europeans themselves.

Through the educational charity they founded, The Wake Up Foundation, Piras and Emmott have now launched a European campaign to promote a transnational debate on the themes of the film. Wake Up Europe! makes the film available to anyone who wishes to organise a debate on Europe, anywhere in Europe.

Film synopsis

35,000ft, sometime in the not-so-distant future. Eight year old Jane Monnetti sits aboard an aeroplane which is flying through a menacing storm, heading for Berlin. But all is not well at ground-level.

The European Union has collapsed, and countries that had collaborated happily at the beginning of the 21st Century are regressing into the fractious collection of competing nation-states that existed before the EU’s formation. Scared by the turbulence, Jane strikes-up a conversation with an English archaeologist sitting next to her: Charles Granda.

He is about to give a lecture on the EU, an entity she had never heard of. In his suitcase he has 5 artefacts which evoke 5 lost European values. To distract Jane from the increasingly menacing storm he tells her 5 stories about what the EU was, why things went so wrong, and what has been lost since its collapse. We rewind to 2014 and through 5 different European stories – in Britain, Sweden, Germany, Spain and Croatia – the film creates a unique, choral portrait of the “European dream” and how it could be lost forever.

Using beautiful photography, expert interviews, personal stories, and archival footage, Piras constructs a unique picture of a Europe that is worth fighting for, but which, if things carry on as they are, looks destined for disintegration.

The positive achievements of a Union that has created prosperity, stability and the most advanced welfare states in the world, while preventing major wars on the continent, come to life and underpin the case for urgent major EU reform.