Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Why Belgium should stop to exist - or not ?

Last year Belgium was not represented as a country at the Cannes filmfestival. Instead the Flemish Ministery of Culture installed a booth to represent Flanders and the Walloon Ministery of Culture installed another booth to represent Wallonia. In the end most foreign journalists thought that Belgium hadn't been present at the festival. Some "Belgian" artists, forced to be present in one of the two regional booths, received mails afterwards with the question why they hadn't come to the festival and why Belgium wasn't present that year. A little survey of one of the attending artists reveiled that most foreign journalists didn't know the meaning of something called "Flanders" and something called "Wallonia". Most of them had never heard about Flanders and Wallonia before, and they hadn't certainly realised that both names represented 2 regions in Belgium.