Health in images: Take 9!

Health is a vital concern that we all share. Without our health, what becomes of our plans, our personal, family or social life? Health is also a vast professional sector, made up of doctors, nurses, chemists, associations and health insurance firms in permanent contact with each and everyone.

Promoting better health, promoting new techniques and new attitudes, advancing health knowledge and science are therefore important and even paramount objectives. They are also the goals of the ImagéSanté festival, founded in 1994 and in its ninth edition this year, which will be deploying its growing number of increasingly diversified activities in and around the city of Liège.

Over nine editions, ImagéSanté has taken on a leading place and built up an international reputation, becoming a reference in terms of festivals devoted to health, both at European and world level.

The distinctive feature of ImagéSanté is images. Consequently, it is mainly through short and medium length films that ImagéSanté addresses many enthralling themes. The very heart of the event is a genuine festival of cinema, showing more than two hundred films from all over the world, some in competition and others viewable on request. An international grand jury, working within several different sectors, as well as, we hope, a large audience of professionals and people interested in the theme will discover, often as advance showings, original productions that are never banal and always thought-provoking…

The main new feature of the 2010 edition of the Festival concerns the organisation, on Thursday evening, of a world-first advance showing: the live broadcast at the Sauvenière cinema using fibre optics and in 3D of a surgical operation taking place at Liège’s University Hospital. New 3D technology has made this challenge possible and will allow, through better vision of operations, major progress in the quality of work and training of doctors.

In addition to the film competition, a vast programme of conferences, workshops and event evenings will be organised, because whilst a festival has a heart, it must also have a soul, a spirit made up of friendliness and human warmth thanks to all the contacts and interactions that will occur on the different sites. The heart of the festival will be beating in the lecture theatres of the University Hospital, host to projections of the main films and the juries judging them, but ImagéSanté will also breath life into the heart of the City, in the University’s Academy Rooms where the operations will be broadcast live (one of the main original features of the festival), at the Congress Centre for a grand conference chaired by Axel Kahn, at the Le Parc Cinema in Droixhe for the opening evening and the health insurance firms’ gala, once again the Sauvenière cinema for several leading cultural events, at the Prince-Bishop’s Palace for the award ceremony gala, amongst many others…

ImagéSanté, an opportunity for debate and interaction, will also be hosting many workshops for young people and, for the first time in the festival’s history, for the elderly, whose health is a major concern.

ImagéSanté will even pay witness to two original extensions to its programme: firstly, the third installation of a WebTV service, accessible during the Festival on ‘www.imagesante.be’, allowing viewers to follow at any moment the highlights and fringes of the festival (extracts of films, interviews with jury members and directors, news features, surgical operations with live commentaries, etc.); secondly, several weeks after the festival, a ‘Best of’ evening will be presented at the Le Parc Cinema, during which the prize winning films of the festival will be shown.

This year, the organisers of ImagéSanté have confirmed their strong desire to widen the festival’s impact. Their aim, during an edition that sees the festival’s maturity grow, is to clearly consider ImagéSanté not only as a means for viewing films but also as a tool for selecting the best new films about health in order to ensure a wider distribution for them after the festival. Such wider broadcasts will be possible in particular thanks to the close and rewarding cooperation set up on the one hand with various networks of schools, and on the other hand with all the health insurance firms. These continuing partnerships will provide the prize winning and selected works with another lease of life, for a longer duration, promoting the goals of the Festival, thanks also to the publishing in September of a DVD containing the main works discovered during the festival.

We would already like to bid a warm welcome to all the directors and producers, from Belgium and abroad, who, during the space of a week, will come to Liège to get the pulse of ImagéSanté racing with films and debates. We would also already like to express our thanks to the members of the jury who have accepted to lend their skills and energy to our Festival. Thanks must also go to all the private and public partners who, through their active support, have helped ImagéSanté to broaden its horizons further than ever before!

ImagéSanté will take you on an enthralling journey through images of science and the science of images: don’t be left out, come and experience and enjoy ImagéSanté 2010!