»FILM ART IS DEAD - LONG LIVE FILM ART

- CROSSING-POINT OF SOULS -

Interview with Fred Kelemen by Lasse Winther Jensen in Jerusalem/Israel on February 21, 2014

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Lasse Winther Jensen: What do you, and did you, originally want to accomplish with your films? Do you have any sort of cinematic vision?

Fred Kelemen: The second part of your question already started to be answered through my film artistic work and it still continues to be answered with what I'm doing. The first part of your question is absolutely impossible to answer. It's like when you come into this world, you don’t come with a masterplan. You just try to react to what happens and to follow occasions and you try to do the best you can do with your life and that’s exactly what I did with films. I found out that I wanted to do films and I did them in the way I thought they should be done. When I was in film school I wanted to find out what film is and what I can do with it. I had ideas and imaginations which I tried to bring into form and I didn’t think a lot about anything outside of this creative process. I didn’t have a strategy or the plan to make a certain kind of films or to be successful in this or that genre. I was pretty free and I was following my creative impulses, doing what I thought was right to do. And that’s still the only thing I can do. I try to follow an inner voice that tells me whether this is right or this is wrong and I try to do the right things and to avoid the wrong things.

LWJ: Have you found that a relatively easy way to go about things practically?

FK: On the one hand it's easy because you just have to be close to yourself and to be faithful to yourself, to a shining point inside you which is even deeper than yourself, and not to be afraid of what happens around you and you just have to jump over all the obstacles on your way. It's what life asks you to do. You are always confronted with certain obstacles but they want to make us jump and continue our way. So from a creative point of view it was not difficult. You just need to be close to yourself, close to this shining point, this diamond deeper than yourself, and follow what you imagine you want to do. And if you are passionate and in love with what you are doing it's a joy to learn to handle the practical and technical tools and to struggle to try to master the craft which every art is as well. It starts to be difficult when the world around you tries to act against you or to guide you onto the "right" way, but then you have to fight and to stay faithful to your vision and endure the pain which will surely hit you on your way.

LWJ: But that must happen all the time. The idea of what the artist thinks a film is and what the industry thinks a film is differs so much.

FK: You have to decide which spirit to serve. I never had doubts about it. From the beginning my decision was clear which star, which light to follow. I never cared much about what expectations others had and what they thought a film was supposed to look like. I loved films and I watched films and I did the films I was able to create. Of course one’s abilities are not completely developed from the beginning - and it can happen that they never will be - and when you start there are certain things you have to learn. But you can only learn by doing and the most important is to go on if you fail. There is a saying in the Talmud: "When you fall and you stand up you already made a step." It's most important to be faithful to the spirit that carries you and that is what I did from the beginning and that is basically not difficult, it only starts to be difficult when people enter your aura and try to disturb you and tell you what you have to do. So on the one hand it's easy. It's like a child playing. You just enter this area of vision and you do what you think is right to do and that is not so difficult if you are devoted to your spirit and inner most impulses. As long as you protect what you believe in, you are protected. The difficulty is to follow it and to be faithful to it and not to be disturbed and confused and not to allow the fear that others put on you to grow too much and distract you of your way, because we are living in a culture of fear. We are surrounded by fear. Educationally and as well politically, fear is used a lot to control people. We grow up with fear, people tell us what is incongruous and "dangerous" to do and what is promising and not "dangerous" to do but they make us afraid of trying things and they make us afraid of leaving traditional ways and opening closed exit doors. So there is a lot fear around and there is not so much belief and confidence. There is much obscuration and little light. The flavour of succeeding is not so developed and many people are more infected and poisoned by substance of stranding, by the idea that things can go wrong and that you can fail. There is a big fear of failing and there is not so much room for the idea that when you think of something you should just go and follow it and maybe it will be beautiful and powerful and authentic and it doesn’t matter if you fail in the eyes of others or even if you fail truly in this particular moment. It doesn’t matter. Maybe you gained something very important even if the resulting film for example is not very good but maybe on the way to doing it you discovered something very important that made you stronger and more aware and knowing. So, basically you cannot fail and all the fears, which are surrounding us and imprison us, limit us strongly. We are very limited by this fearful way of thinking and we are not using our creative potential and that is why it is so difficult to rescue your treasures through all these surrounding fears. But the easy thing is to have your vision, to know about it, and you just have to prevent it and defend it. So on the one hand it's difficult and on the other hand it's easy. It was not difficult for me to understand what I wanted to do and to feel what is right and what is wrong. But it's always difficult to defend it and to carry it through the lines of the enemies.

LWJ: So how do you, on a very concrete and practical level, screen yourself off from the majority and the fear?

FK: I just concentrate on what I have to do, what my inner voice tells me. It's like I said before: It's like a child. When a child is playing it's completely absorbed by the world, it's imagining and its inner voice. That is what I'm doing. I don’t think about how it can go wrong, how it can fail, what the others will say, that a film I'm creating could never be accepted in this kind of cinema business etc. For example when I made "Frost", which is a three and a half-hour film, I did not think; "If it's three and half-hours, no cinema will screen it and what will everyone think about it." I just had the belief that it was right to do and that it could not have been done differently and I did not think about the world outside of the creative world. And I'm convinced, that is very important, because otherwise we would just react permanently instead of acting and we would end up in a poor world of pragmatism. You have to follow a vision and not only walk behind what is practical or accepted or palpably promising. These are seductions of a mortal and illusionary world which spoil and darken the spirit.

LWJ: But that is so hard to do in films where you are constantly confronted by the capitalist mindset.

FK: If you look at my filmography you will see that I did not make a lot of films yet. But the ones I made I created with love and conviction and belief.

LWJ: But even when you get a chance to make a film, you must be confronted by it very frequently?

FK: I found ways to solve it with the filns I shot, but I didn’t find ways with other films. So there are some filns I didn’t shoot. So there are projects, films that I would have loved to realise but I couldn’t find financing.

LWJ: What we are very concerned about these days is the fundamental change in cinema that is taking place these days – the move from film to digital and the general digitalization of everything. I would very much like to hear all your thoughts on that change. Regarding the digitalization as such, there are certain advantages. Not so much in terms of creating films, but in terms of the availability. A big democratization has taken place in that regard. Today everyone can see everything and that has to somehow change the way we engage with film as an art form?

FK: I'm not sure you are right about what you say. If everyone can now see everything, that would mean they could see the good films that they could never see before and that could have an educational aspect. But that would mean that the films that are made today are better or more artistic as a result, but they are not. And that is an interesting phenomenon. The films that are shot today are not better or more artistic than previous films, so the film art did not develop. It's still very far away from the peak of its potential.

LWJ: But it's still a fairly new phenomenon.

FK: Yes, but film students who have studied in the past, let’s say 10 years, they all had this access and their films are not better, or more artistic or advanced, the knowledge about the art of film has not grown. And I think that is a very interesting thing to think about. If it would be true that the access to films has a positive influence, it should have an effect that would then be provable in a positive way. But it hasn’t. I don’t think that the fact that everybody can watch everything is leading to something good. Maybe everybody can watch everything, but the question is not how much we watch, the question is how we watch and what we really see. And you can watch a lot, but not see anything in the same time. So having access to all the films that fewer people had access to in the past did not lead to a growth of, and a deepened understanding of the art of film or to a different kind of cinema. The mainstream today is as conventional as it ever was. So I disagree with what you say. I agree that people today can watch films that people couldn’t watch decades ago, but I’m not sure that’s a positive thing. The question is if it leads to something positive. It's like with food: I'm sure that today people can eat more and eat a bigger variety. But do you think they live more healthy lives? Do they have a more developed sense of taste? I'm not sure. They can eat more, but maybe the result is just that they appreciate less, differentiate less and eat with less consciousness and just get unhealthy. So I'm not sure that your point about people now being able to watch the films they couldn’t watch before is a positive thing. I would doubt it.

LWJ: But there are the filmmakers and then there are the people who are just cinephiles. But many filmmakers don’t see any good films.

FK: I do not know what most filmmakers do. But for instance in Berlin when certain films are shown in so called "arthouse" cinemas where everybody can go - the cinemas are not hidden, secret places - often only few people come. And that’s the point. Obviously, the amount of films you can watch don’t lead to a different interest or a different knowledge of the art of film. I think that in former times when there was not this possibility of watching everything, when films were just shown as film prints in cinemas, when they were not available on DVDs or in the internet, the people who were interested, as today, went there and watched them. There was not less knowledge about film in the past, I assume.

LWJ: But you would have to live in a big city…

FK: Maybe, or close enough to go there. But this was the case in regards to any art. Nevertheless there are directors in the history of film who were not born in the big cities, but they made their way into cinema because they wanted to. It was their destiny let’s say and their passion. Their energy, their love was strong enough to lead them to what they wanted to do. And that, I think, is the point. When you can get everything very easily, you don’t have to invest any passion and effort. But if you cannot watch everything, you have to make an effort to watch what you would like to see and this effort immediately creates a strong energy and it creates a quality. And that is why I doubt your conclusion about the access to film having a positive effect. Maybe it’s the other way around.

LWJ: But still. To take an example, some of the films that mean the most to me are the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien and I have only been able to see them within the past ten years or so, and only because of the internet.

FK: If you have watched them in the internet, you have not seen them. Well, the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, for example, were never released in Germany as I know. But all of his films were released in France. So if you are French, you had the chance to watch them easier, and if you are not French, you didn’t have the chance to watch them easily. So lucky you, if you are living in France and not in Germany for example. Maybe it can be the first step in someone's filmmaking career, the fact that they were born in France and had the chance to see those films. But it was always like this. You are born into this world and you have certain opportunities other people don’t have and other people have certain opportunities you don’t have. Some things you have to fight for and some things are given to you as a gift. It's somehow a law of our existence. Your idea about having access to everything is a very consumerist idea and it's something that I doubt and maybe this creates an imbalance on another level. Having access to everything doesn’t automatically create quality and I think it could be possible that certain things have to be fought for. Certain things have to be received through an effort and this effort creates a quality in what you receive. So I wouldn’t say that it's necessarily positive that all things are available on DVD or Blu Ray now or that you can download them from the internet, which is even more crazy because watching a film on a screen and watching a film on a laptop are two very different things. When you watch a film on a laptop, you don’t SEE it, you just get certain pieces of information about how it looks like. But you cannot experience it. It's like watching a post card of a Van Gogh painting. You have to stand in front of the painting – which I did myself for many hours when I was in Amsterdam – and be very close to the painting and see Van Gogh's movement of brush, which is the movement of his hand, see all the little details and even smell it. Then you take some steps back and see the whole and then you go closer again. This is a real experience of the painting. The experience of the painting is not to have an overview of a small size post card. That doesn’t give you any experience. It gives you a little information, but no experience and I think that the basic thing is experience and not information.
I would certainly never use the word "democratization" about this process because there is no democracy in art. It's an individual and personal question, it's not a democratic question. Democracy is a political idea and art is not politics (even though it can be or is political). In the 90s when video cameras arrived everybody talked about that this was now the "democratisation" of filmmaking and I was always very annoyed. It was indeed another step on its industrialisation. Filmmaking will never be democratic. Firstly, in a small village in a poor country they still don’t have access to digital equipment. And they even don't have in a poor neighbourhood in a big city. Second of all, there is the question of distribution and of making the film seen. Even if you have a film and you are not part of a certain social class and if you don’t have certain connections and if you don’t have certain financial support, your film will not be shown. Even if you shoot it, almost everyone can shoot a film with their friends. The question is what you want: is it a private hobby and do you just want to have fun with your friends and a film or is it a professional art for you, something you want to be watched and something you want to work seriously with. Until today, the question of distribution has not changed. Even if you have a film, to distribute it is very expensive. The post-production is very expensive, so to have a small camera and shoot something is besides the point. Post-production and distribution costs a lot of money, so that problem is not solved. Even if we forget about all the ideas of distribution and just shoot a film and put it on the internet. That is possible, but that automatically means to forget the big screen, to forget the idea of an image in a dark room on a screen and to experience it. Films that are made for the internet will surely look different because small images on a laptop demand completely different visual solutions. It's a strong limitation of the cinematographic language and of film as an experience. So if you want the full richness of the possibilities and if you want to fully develop your creative abilities everything is the same as it always was and the boundaries, limitations and problems are the same as they always were. Film will never be democratic, it was never democratic. In earlier times, everyone could use a 16mm camera, it wasn’t expensive. There are many amateur 16mm films from all over the world. Not to speak of Super 8, there are so many home movies on Super 8, so this easy access that video brought is not exactly new. Before you could buy a Super 8 camera, edit the films at home, and be a hobby filmmaker.

LWJ: But today we have a situation where film will probably be extinct within a foreseeable future and where even some cinematheques are considering getting rid of 35mm screenings.

FK: Yes, that is completely stupid and deeply sad. It is evil. It shows you the all-embracing presence of evil in this world, the dominance of commerce.

LWJ: You and I can sit and have very specific ideas about what cinema is and what constitutes an image, but the rest of the world is barely conscious that there is a change. In 20 years I could not be able to explain, to someone who was born today, what is so special about analogue film. Why we care so much.

FK: But that happens all the time. Everything changes. In the future you will not be able to describe to someone what the difference is between the sound of a vinyl and the sound of an mp3. A little more than hundred years ago people were driving with horses and carriages, today we drive in cars. Even the sounds of the world were very different some hundred years ago. I'm not surprised that the visual technique changes to digital. And it would not be a problem if the industry was not trying to destroy film entirely. From the beginning it has been Sony’s aim that everything should be shot on Sony digital. They wanted everybody to use their cameras. Now, many labs are closing down. I don’t have any problem with digital film as a specific medium if it would in fact be used as a different kind of material with a specific aesthetic, but it's not being used that way. Most people who shoot digital want to make it look like film so we have a strong attempt to create fakes instead of using a different technique in a different aesthetic way, which still almost never happens. Digital film has to be approached as digital film. Like, if you are a sculptor and you make a sculpture out of wood, you work with that material. It has its own reality, which it brings to an artifact. If you do the same, but with marble, it's not the same sculpture anymore and the worst would be to make a sculpture out of wood and make it look like marble. It's a fake. It's a lie. It's what happens now with digital. Most people shoot digital and want it to look like film and even the industry itself is happy about that. They say, "with this new camera you cannot see the difference between film and digital anymore". But I want to see the difference! We need the differences. We need diversity. It's an expression of the richness and completeness of the wholeness. I want to see the film as film and the digital as digital. We have to fight for a variety of aesthetic possibilities and materials like in other arts. What happens in film now would be similar to someone in the world of painting saying, that they don’t produce oil paint anymore and that everyone has to paint with watercolor and that the best watercolors are the ones that look most like oil paint. It's crazy, but that is what happens in film. I'm not against digital, but I am against these kind of imperialistic politics of destroying film. And film is dying and this is very, very dramatic and people have to be aware of it. When we lose film, we lose more than just a material. We lose a whole way of thinking, a way of imagination and a way of watching and seeing, we lose the light because film is the only material that, due to the photo-chemical process is able to catch the light and represent the light. The natural light. Which includes also tungsten light for me because it's still a form of light that is not generated in a computer. It has to do with film’s ability to catch light. Light moves in curves like film moves in curves or waves. Digital has pixels, steps, so digital light is always a fake representation of a curve. In digital we lose the light, and if we lose the light we also lose the darkness, the black, and losing the black means losing the shadows. There is no real black in digital. If we lose this, we lose a lot. Losing the light means losing the soul in the end. So it's a dramatic situation when we lose film as a material. We lose more than just the material. I'm not against digital, but I am against destroying film. I'm for film. As Werner Herzog said: "In celluloid we trust."

LWJ: Can you try to talk a bit more about what you mean when you say that we lose the light?

FK: The soul. We lose the soul. We lose a very human way of aesthetics. We lose the texture of the film, something only film can give. Digital is super clean. It's cleaner than clean, it's cleaner than life. So it's something which is not natural anymore. I would say that film is more "human" and it has another aura. It's the difference between a real flower and a plastic flower. Even if a plastic flower looks very much like a real flower, it doesn’t have the same spirit. And that is what we lose when we lose film, we lose a certain kind of spirit, which is the spirit of life. The same we loose when we replace the real flower with a plastic flower. You could also say, what the hell do I need a real flower for if I can have a plastic flower, which looks like a real flower and I can even have a spray which gives it the same smell and it doesn’t die and I don’t have to water it; a plastic flower is better. OK, if you are that kind of person, enjoy your plastic flower. But I think a real flower is better because a real flower is life and it brings us into contact with life and with ourselves, because we are alive, and that is the big difference. It brings us into contact with the secret of life, with everything which made the flower grow and be, with the universe. And a plastic flower does not. That is what we lose.

LWJ: I completely agree with you, but so few people are aware of this…

FK: It doesn’t matter. What you are saying right now is exactly the point of the pragmatist. A few people or many people; it doesn’t matter. Even if we were to be the only two it would be important to fight for the real flower, which means for film. A truth doesn’t become more true just because more people are aware of it and the truth is not less true if only a few people believe it or know about it. It doesn’t matter if it's few or many, that is not a criteria. It's always few, because you yourself are few. You are just only one and you will always stay only one. You will be born as only one and you will die as only one. You will never be the majority so don’t expect to be. It doesn’t matter. You are few, the fewest. You are only one. You are alone.

LWJ: But film will disappear at some point?

FK: Probably. Like everything else. Cézanne said: "Everything disappears. We have to hurry if we want to see something." If film disappears then we would have to accept that it disappears and then at least it does not disappear because of the ignorance of the few. it's like a war. You fight a war and you lose, but at least you were fighting. And it's better to fight and to lose than not to fight. Maybe we will lose, maybe not. And if many ‘fews’ would think like this they would not be few. So it's not an argument. I'm admittedly surprised that not more cinema directors, producers and cinematographers are fighting for the film these days. Film dies because so many gave it up, abandoned it like a discarded lover. The film people themselves destroyed it because they followed the industry slogan of digital film. Too few fight for it now. I'm waiting at every bigger festival for some people to make a declaration or a manifesto for film. They don’t do it.

LWJ: But you must meet a lot of fellow cinematographers, what do they say?

FK: Some care, some don’t. Some think it's romanticism. "You are a romantic, you want a real flower in your house. Why? Take a plastic flower, it doesn’t die, it doesn’t need water, it’s cheaper". Many people think like that. But as I said, it doesn’t matter. Even if I would be the only one who believed this - and I'm still not the only one - I would not give up saying what I say. Because the truth does not change according to the number of people who believe in it. Because you will always be few, because you are only one, the only thing you can do is what you think is the right thing. Whether you succeed or not, it's important to do the right thing. And I think the right thing is to defend film and shoot on film for as long as possible. That is what I can do myself. And talk with other people about it and maybe more people will think like this. But in the end I'm only responsible for my own actions so you are responsible for what you do. You should act in the way that is most correlated to your thinking. That is the only thing you can do and if you do the right thing it does not matter if you lose. At least you tried. Maybe in the future film will be a rare thing and people will discover its preciousness. Today there are more and more people who try to process film themselves after some big labs have closed down and some places like museums are still very interested in showing 35mm – the MoMA in New York for instance just bought a brand new 35mm projector recently as I heard. So maybe we will return to the situation we talked about in the beginning where only a few people – the people who really want to – can watch and see things on film. Maybe we will travel a long way and we will be able to watch a 35mm print and it will be a wonderful experience and others don’t do it and then it's their bad luck. It's the same with paintings. You cannot watch a real Van Gogh painting everywhere; you have to travel to watch it. Maybe this is now the situation, after a hundred years since its birth, where film really starts to become an art. Maybe what we think of as terrible is actually a good thing. Maybe it will divide things so we can finally say that there is this kind of cinema which is the entertainment industry and then there is another kind of cinema which finally has a real chance to be art and finally can exist without the pressure of having to be a successful capitalistic product. Maybe these films will be very different, maybe it liberates the films. Maybe in the end the result will be that the films that are shot on the so-called ‘cheaper’ digital will be the mainstream films and the films that are more experimental and more avant-garde and closer to the peak of the potential of the art of film will be shot on film. That would be very interesting. It's the same in the rest of the art world: the mainstream always dies, but the real art works will survive for hundreds of years, because they will never stop talking to the people's minds and hearts.

LWJ: So if we turn away from filmmaking and to the experience of film; film watching, how do you think that the way of experiencing a film on film in a cinema – something that can be almost like going to church – will change?

FK: It's always like this: The people who are aware of this experience and who think it's a value they should defend it. You have to defend what you believe in, that is the simple thing. You cannot expect other people who don’t believe in it to fight for it. But if you believe in it, you should fight for it, to care for it. And you will find people on your way who will accompany you. Even if it's not the majority. You can only defend what you think is worthwhile and not give up on it. That is your responsibility as a human being. Not only in terms of film, but for any value you have in life. You never know if you will succeed or not or whether you will be supported by a few people or nobody. But you have to try. You simply have to do best you can do. The meaning of our lonely struggles are often not clear for us. But you never walk absolutely lonesomely. Every person we come across in a truthful way, which means a real encounter with another soul in this world, we do not meet by hazard. The strings of the paths cross, because they were leading to these cross-points of the encounters of souls. Our conscious minds often do not understand the meaning of these encounters and not the meaning of our paths. Because they have a meaning for the order of a "higher", more spiritual level. Without knowing, every individual soul is participating in the weaving of the big pattern of the wholeness. Every thread, every string - every soul - and every movement of it counts. At least, that's what I believe to know. And a film, like every piece of art, can, of course, be a crossing point of souls.
I think that a film has to be screened on film if it was shot on film. True, it can sometimes be better to watch something on DVD than not watch it at all. It's a dilemma that I'm aware of, but idealistically, a film shot on 35mm should be screened on 35mm. My films are not available on DVD, but they exist on film and they are shown every year somewhere in the world. In 1997 I had my first little retrospective in Lisbon and since then my films have been screened somewhere every year once or more times. So there is a presence of the films. It's enough. If you can only watch something once, you value it more and you are more attentive. If I visit a place once, I take more care and I'm more aware. Again, it's a consumerist idea wanting to watch the films as many times as you want. Why? We live, we are born, and we die. This life is a one-off chance and in this life we have many other small one-off chances. We meet people once and then we lose them again and if we fuck up the meeting once we might never be able to renew it. We visit every place once and even if we go back, we will not be the same as the first time we went there. Anyway, the idea that we can watch a film twice is an illusion because we will always be different. Even if we watch it again the next day we will be different and we will be in a different mood than the day before. So we have to be in the moment. The moment is incredibly different and incredibly valuable because it exists and vanishes and it's impossible to repeat. So why have access to films permanently? It's enough to watch it once if I see right and if I see it concentrated and attentively. If I open myself to it and give myself to it, once is enough. Like many other experiences in life that you only experience once. Your first kiss happens only once, there is no second first kiss, so why should it be different with other things? It's a simple truth of life.

LWJ: That is something that also happens in the long takes that you use in your films: You allow for a certain focus on the moment and an awareness of the moment.

FK: Yes, definitely. It takes time and time is a very important thing in our lives. For me it was from the beginning very important to work with time. It's also a kind of research. When I make a film, I'm researching. I try to catch something from the secret of life and using the long takes gives me this chance. And sometimes I touch the border of the secret of life by using the long takes, something I never could if I would do it differently. I'm not interested in films, I'm interested in something which is beyond films. And this happens in the long take.

LWJ: What is that?

FK: It's life. And life enters the film in the long takes because the long takes open the space for life to be present. I'm not a filmmaker, I'm a researcher.

LWJ: Of life?

FK: Of course. That’s what I’m in. That’s what I have to deal with. Including people, human beings. So it's an almost ethnographic way of thinking.

LWJ: Which also has a metaphysical dimension according to you?

FK: Surely, there is a concrete level and a metaphysical level.

LWJ: And what is that?

FK: It's the secret of life beyond the illusionary, dualistic appearances of this world. The real or true reality. Which contains everything that life contains, including so called death.

LWJ: Is there a religious dimension to it?

FK: Of course there is a religious dimension. Or, let’s say, a spiritual dimension. Every religion is a system or a concept and I think it's interesting to leave the concept and enter a different level, a metaphysical level. It's what we are, we are spirits. We have a body and we have a spirit, we have a soul, we have emotions, we have thoughts. We are not just a body, we are more and beyond.

LWJ: And cinema is a way of getting in touch with that "more"?

FK: I think that film is the most metaphysical art forms ever. It works with time, for instance, and with light, and it works with very concrete things. What you shoot has to exist in front of the camera. At the same time It's concrete and physical, but also metaphysical and something emblematic when you see it on a screen afterwards. It transforms the physical into something metaphysical, it transforms the concrete into the emblematic and spiritual. So it's the perfect art form for expressing the metaphysical. Even if it's not used in that way by most people. Film is a very, very rich art and very poorly used. There is still so much to discover. That’s why we should never give up fighting for it. It's too beautiful and too rich not to care for it. It should be defended against everything. There is nothing to be afraid of - except of missing the point of the true meaning of our life and to really and truly love.

................................................................................................................................................................... Jerusalem / Israel, 21 February 2014 (Published in "Krystalbilleder" / No. 5, Denmark, Autumn 2015)