Meetings, debates, cinema, reading and exhibition on the theme of Nature.

Based on the ideas of Jean Lacouture and Alain Rousset, President of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, the Centre François Mauriac de Malagar has been organizing an annual meeting since 1999, at the time of the harvest, around a cultural, literary and historical issue, philosophical or social. Symbolically named The Malagar Grape Harvest, this privileged moment has the ambition to propose real «Grape Harvest of the Spirit» in homage to the great journalist and intellectual François Mauriac.
Friday 16 September - Cinema Lux de Cadillac et Domaine de Malagar
10H // Only the earth is eternal
Documentary film directed by François Busnel and Adrien Soland, with Jim Harrison, France, 2022
The screening of the film will be followed by an exchange with Adrien Soland who co-directed the film.
14H30 // Introduction
Anne-Marie Cocula, President of the Centre François Mauriac and Marie-Sylvie Bitarelle, Director of the Centre François Mauriac_Readings_ by Camille Soulier, actress
«La chasse à la palombe du cousin», text taken from the Mémoires Intérieur of François Mauriac (Ed. 10/18, 2006)
“Bloc-notes - Saturday, March 14, 1964” by François Mauriac (Ed. Bouquins, 2020)
3PM// The day of the great fire in Mano
Anne-Marie Cocula, President of the Centre François Mauriac Formulated as an admission by Thérèse Desqueyroux at the end of the novel that bears his name, this precision seals the incandescent imprint of the great fires of the Landes in the work of François Mauriac. After a long lull, they are back, even more dangerous.
16H // Only the earth is eternal
François Busnel, writer and journalist
Adrien Soland, director and producer Only the Earth is eternal is a film about our relationship to nature and the necessary reconnection to the wild world through the eyes of a writer who is – I believe – the most important of contemporary American writers. [… ] I am a storyteller and cinema seems to be the place where you can tell the best, the strongest stories, while offering an original aesthetic and emotional experience. But the story I want to tell today is that of our relationship to the world: how to poetically inhabit the world? There are many answers in Jim Harrison’s life and work.” François Busnel
5PM// Nature and literature
Serge Joncour, writer
Jean-Claude Servais, screenwriter and cartoonist Novels and graphic novels, short stories or stories too long would be the list of works and authors who have made and make the most of nature. Sea, mountain, countryside, forest, fauna and flora, it appears in domesticated or wild literature, benevolent and nourishing or hostile and warrior, friend or enemy of the human race. Contemporary comics and fictions continue to explore this inexhaustible source of imagination and reflection and help us rethink our relationship to nature and our environment.
Saturday 17 September - Domaine de Malagar
10H30 // The Taste of Nature
Vivien Durand, chef of the restaurant Le Prince Noir
Philippe de Lur Saluce, co-director of the Château de Fargues The taste of nature is all that it has generously offered us since the dawn of time. It is also the talent of those who take it and give it to us to taste. But can we continue today to grow, cook and produce wine as yesterday and the day before? To what extent is environmental concern now on our plates and in our glasses? How do gastronomy and viticulture, the jewels of French good living, address what has become a social issue?
14H // Guided tour of the exhibition The Landscape of Jean Aufort
In the presence of his grandson Jean Aufort
3PM// Ecobiography of our lives
Jean-Philippe Pierron, philosopher We are all connected to nature not innumerable secret capillarities. Often, the encounter of an animal or a landscape opens up in us as a poetic and sensitive breach leading us to a new way of thinking, acting and feeling. Jean-Philippe Pierron conducts the survey among philosophers and thinkers of ecology and finds in it the premises of a radical transformation towards a more balanced relationship between man and nature. What if ecology starts with the first-person experience of nature?
15H30 // Hot snap of the...
Jean-Pierre Barouki, doctor and biochemist While the link between our physical/psychological well-being and nature has long been recognized, the question now arises of the consequences of global warming and the rapid degradation of our environment on our health. Certain inevitable effects are already emerging, such as repetitions of intense heat waves, lengthening of pollen periods, the spread of tropical diseases, the increase of UV rays and their harmful effects on the skin, invasive chemical pollution… Can we warn them and how?
5PM// Debate: The house is burning...
—and we’re looking elsewhere. Taken from the speech of Jacques Chirac at the Earth Summit in 2002, this observation remains twenty years later, of a disturbing actuality. While all indicators are in the red, given the slow pace of political action to fight climate change, how much weight can citizen engagement represent? If it is our duty and responsibility to seriously change our behaviour and way of life, what is, what will be the effectiveness of our individual efforts? Will they be enough to reverse the trend with regard to the urgency, scale and complexity of the challenge: to contain the global temperature to 1.5°C by 2050?
Matthieu Crépel, snowboard world champion, founder of Water Family, from snowflake to wave
Claire Pétreault, creator and president of the Green Nuggets
Éva Joly, lawyer and MP
Gilles Boeuf, Biologist and Regional Advisor