I never had a passion for comics, cartoons or animation in general. Luckily my curiosity keeps me on the edge and  pushes me continuously to challenge my artistic taste buds. So in this case it did not kill the cat!

Last weekend we finally had the chance to watch the French animated film “Persepolis”.  The film is based on Marjane Satrapi‘s graphical self biography with the same name.  I heard a lot of positive reviews about the book and the film and in this particular case it does deserve every bit of acclaim it received, that’s of course according to Mac and me. The film received numerous awards and has been translated to many language (I wonder if Arabic was one of them?! naaaaaaahhh….difficult to do if you have God and Carl Marx in the same scene!) Read the rest of this entry »

Although I am far from being an expert on the subject, I did some work in the Middle East and had the opportunity to facilitate mixed groups of Israeli, Palestinians, Lebanese and others in their effort to dialogue and launch co-operation projects.

One of the good things about those project was that participants were ordinary people, mostly members of small NGO’s that had as a primary concern other issues than the ongoing conflict in the region. Talking to each other and starting a cooperation was in large part just instrumental to access public funding from international institutions.

Paradoxically, I think that particular mix of participants maximised the outcome in terms of peace building. The fact that meetings were not targeting peace activists avoided the “preach to the converted” situation, and the fact the issue at stake was not “peace in the middle east” prevented the discussion to reach a standstill (participants had to challenge only some of their beliefs in order to co-operate, and not all of them, all together). Read the rest of this entry »