European Commission - Culture - Interviews - Laurence Auer talks to Lucy Lethbridge

Laurence Auer talks to Lucy Lethbridge

Laurence Auer in front of the French Institute in London The task of spearheading the promotion of French culture in Britain would seem an enviable task, and Laurence Auer, Cultural Counsellor and Director of the Institut Francais in London, has taken to it with characteristic gusto and imagination. Mme Auer, who until she took up her London post in 2006, was the Deputy Spokesperson of the French Presidency, wears what she calls "two hats" in her work: the first is her work as a diplomat with the French Embassy, and the other is her job running the French Institute which has a staff of 110 people and attracts 40,000 visitors a year to its famous cinema, the Cine Lumiere, and its screenings of French films.

Mme Auer tells me that the coming year offers a host of opportunities for imaginative artistic endeavours which showcase not only the best of French creative work in all the arts, but fruitful Franco-British cultural relationships and the rich diversity of arts within the European Union member states. "The opportunities are really so good in London", she says, "The sense of culture here is so dynamic that our artists are in strong demand". In the field of popular music alone, she told me that the number of French artists performing live in London has doubled over the last year; and, at the time of our interview, she was delighted to point out that the French pop singer Camille "had gone to No. 1 in the UK charts".

The French Institute in South Kensington is a London landmark, with an average of 87 people attending each film performance at its Cine Lumiere and 7,000 students on French courses at all levels. A list of its current screenings (including a retrospective of the films of Marcello Mastroianni) and its celebrated Sunday "French Classics" is available from the website www.institut-francais.org.uk. Can you tell us of any forthcoming highlights?

At the moment, we are in the middle of our commemorations of the fortieth anniversary of 1968. All Power to the Imagination! is a series of films, newsreels and documentaries, as well as talks and other events about that extraordinary year and its legacies. In June, we are running our third annual Spanish Cinema Festival, as part of the European Cinema Network initiative. This will bring to London many Spanish films that will never be shown anywhere else in the country. The last time ran a Spanish film festival, it attracted the largest number of people that we saw for any other event that year. In 2007, for example, Britain only bought one Spanish film, so the Institute is the only place where new work from Spain can be seen at the moment.

But the Institute is not only about films. You also run talks, debates and other activities.

Yes, on 1 May, we have a discussion, part of a four-day Psychoanalysis Symposium, on the work of both Jacques Lacan and the Briitsh psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott - speakers will be Lisa Appignanesi, Catherine Vanier and Darian Leader. Under the auspices of the form for European Philosophy, Professor Norman Geras will be talking about Richard Rorty and the Sources of Moral Solidarity on 22 May. And in November, we are holding a one-day debate at the Goethe Institute on "publishing literature in Europe in the twenty-first century". Leading European editors, publishers and translators will share their experiences, exploring their similarities and differences at a time when the publishing industry in Europe is experiencing profound transformations.

The European Union of National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) was established in September 2007 and pulls together 11 European cultural institutes in London. Their aim is to organise a cultural event, festival or week of culture every year, working together with a single aim. What will be coming up this year?

This year we have a Festival of European Contemporary Dance from 19 to 21st of September, on the South Bank. The French Embassy, to mark the French presidency of the European Union, proposed to the EUNIC signatories that contemporary dance would be a way to showcase the diversity of approaches and aesthetics to be found within Europe - and which are rarely shown in the United Kingdom. The British choreographer Russell Maliphant will be the patron of the season. And we will see the effect of the EUNIC initiative also in the work of the French Institute - where, for example, we will be holding more premieres and festivals specialising in European cinema. Our general objective is really to transfer this cinema to the cinema of European diversity.

There will also be a major Franco-British theatre festival taking place this autumn. Can you tell us more about it?

In September, we will launch a season celebrating "British and French Visions of Contemporary European Theatre". One of France's most famous actresses, Juliette Binoche, will be our honorary patron and among those involved in the season are some of the most important names in Franco-British theatre - including directors Peter Brook and Declan Donnellan and Ariane Mnouchkine, the visual artist Anish Kapoor, Declan Donnellen, and the French choreographer Joseph Nadj. There will be theatrical events at 50 theatrical venues all over Britain.

The season will be launched with a major event, a world premier, at the Royal National Theatre on 10 September which will feature Juliette Binoche reading texts she has written for the occasion and a dance performed and devised by the celebrated British-Bangladeshi dancer and choreographer Akram Khan. We are very excited about it. It is hugely symbolic because it is a French woman and a British man, so it is therefore symbolic of a dialogue that is developing between our two countries.