Round-table
Coal, Black Gold, or the Future of the Past
Manu Riche is currently putting the finishing touches to Charbon, an autobiographical film about his grandfather, his father and himself, based on the past of fossil fuels. Indeed, Manu Riche’s grandfather was a mining engineer while his father was an oil merchant.
As a filmmaker, he is the last descendant of that generation.
The film Charbon is a journey into the future of the last century. A century marked by wars that spawned other wars and so forth. The drivers of these wars were coal and oil, energy sources that accelerated the future.
Manu Riche will be screening extracts from his film in preparation. Guy Gypens will then host a round-table discussion with the filmmaker and Mathieu Auzanneau, author of the book Or Noir. La grande histoire du pétrole, on the geopolitical challenges of energy and resources, and those of a post-oil world.
Matthieu Auzanneau is a former journalist and author who specialises in environmental and economic issues. He is also director of The Shift Project, an energy transition think tank dedicated to mitigating climate change and reducing the economy’s dependence on fossil fuels, particularly oil. In 2015, he published Or noir, la grande histoire du pétrole (Black Gold: The Big Story of Oil) which is the culmination of several years of research.
Manu Riche is a filmmaker. He has contributed several pieces to the Belgian documentary programme Strip-Tease. In the 1990s, he collaborated on several independent films. In 2009, he released his documentary Tempo of a Restless Soul, about Belgian rock musician Tom Barman. Problemski Hotel (2015) is his first feature film. Today he is working on several audiovisual projects, including Charbon.
Guy Gypens is currently Head of Performing Arts at the Brussels-based KANAL-Centre Pompidou. After earning a master’s degree in economics and an MBA in marketing and human resources management, he was the director of the Beursschouwburg from 1987 to 1991. From 1991 to 2007, he was General Director of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her dance company Rosas. From 2007 to 2019, he was the General and Artistic Director of Kaaitheater, where he launched Burning Ice, a series of artistic events addressing the ecological issues of our age.