Pierre-Olivier Bardet: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing ?

synopsis

French producer Pierre-Olivier Bardet (1953) is a co-founder of the Idéale Audience production company. Films that he has co-produced include Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse (2009) and National Gallery (2014), as well as Alexander Sokourov’s Francofonia (2015) or Wang Bing’s Mrs. Fang (2017), this year’s winner of the Golden Leopard in Locarno. The title of Bardet’s lecture is a question formulated by G. W. Leibniz in the late 17th century, which Bardet believes perfectly captures every producer’s starting dilemma. In his lecture, which he will open with a practical example – a description of his own activities while producing the Israeli-French film Hotline (Silvina Landsmann, 2015) – Bardet will ask what the point of “producing” is and what it actually means.