of individuals who are curious about the world and open to new ideas
about the most important challenges the Western societies must face in the 21st century
based on a premise of offering a creative space for representatives of culture, business, and public life
which is the largest and most important event organized by the Liberté! Foundation
2.2
mln. viewers
398
speakers
2.5
days of lectures, discussions, and meetings with authors
10th
edition
27 November 2023
27 November 2023
1 September 2023
28 August 2023
20 December 2022
Jonathan Littell - a Franco-American novelist and filmmaker. He is the author of the bestselling novel The Kindly Ones, a story of the Holocaust as seen by a Nazi SS officer. The novel, originally published in France as Les Bienveillantes, won the coveted Prix Goncourt and the Académie Française’s Grand Prix de Littérature. Littell has also reported on the wars in Chechnya, Syria, and Ukraine. His other works include the film Wrong Elements (2016), the essay Triptych: Three Studies after Francis Bacon (2013), and the novel Une vieille histoire (2018).
Photo: Francesca Mantovani - éditions Gallimard
Anne Applebaum is a journalist, a prize-winning historian, a staff writer for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she co-leads a project on 21st century disinformation and co-teaches a course on democracy. Her books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Her most recent book is the New York Times bestseller, Twilight of Democracy, an essay on democracy and authoritarianism. She was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and a member of the editorial board; she has also been the deputy editor of the Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, among many other publications.
Toomas Hendrik Ilves – served as president of Estonia from 2006-16. Ilves is renowned for making Estonia one of the most digitally advanced nations through innovative policies that invested heavily in the future.
Ilves was born to Estonian refugees and raised in the United States. He holds a BA from Columbia and an MA from the University of Pennsylvania. He moved to Munich in 1984 to work as an analyst and researcher for Radio Free Europe, eventually becoming Director of the radio’s Estonian Service. From 1993-96 he served as Estonia’s ambassador to the United States. In 1996 he was appointed country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, a post he held until 1998, and again from 1999 to 2002. In that time he successfully steered Estonia into the EU and NATO in 2004.
He ran for the presidency of Estonia as a joint candidate of the Social Democratic, Conservative and Liberal Parties and was elected in 2006 and re-elected in 2011. Ilves used his office to further to the country’s leadership in digital governance as well as in cyber security. Since leaving office Ilves spent three and a half years as a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University and the Center for Advance Study in the Behavioral Sciences, while lecturing all over the world on the digitization of governance and public services. Most recently he is also advising the WHO-Europe on technological solutions to the Covid-17 pandemic and cross-border health more broadly while teaching at Tartu University in Estonia.
Anda Rottenberg – exhibitions curator, art historian and critic. Employed in the Polish Academy of Sciences 1973-1986. Founder of the EGIT Art Foundation, 1986; Warsaw Soros Center of Contemporary Art, 1992; Institute of Art Promotion Foundation, 1997. Director of the ‘Zachęta’ National Art Gallery in Warsaw 1993-2001.
Art writings published in many languages around the world, curator and co-curator of many international exhibitions such as: I-st Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Aspects-Positions 1949-1999, 50 Years of Art in Middle Europe (Vienna-Budapest-Barcelona-Birmingham 2000); L'Autre Moitie de l'Europe (Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume 2000/2001, Paris); Where is Abel, Thy Brother (Zachęta Gallery, Warsaw), 1995; Forgetting, Weseburg Museum, Bremen, 2000; Continental Breakfast, Belgrade 2004; Warsaw-Moscow
(Zachęta Gallery, Warsaw/Tretiakowskaya Gallery Moscow) 2004/2005; Side by side. Poland-Germany, 1000 years of history in art (Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin) 2011; VOID, Nowy Sącz City, 2012; UNI/JA-UNI-ON, Open Air, City of Lublin, Poland, 2013; Progress and Hygiene (Zachęta National Gallery Warsaw) 2014, Adolescent Perspective, Silesia Museum, Katowice, 2018; Difficult Age, OM Museum Vilnius 2021. Curator (1993-1995) and commissioner of the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 1993-2001 and the Sao Paolo Biennale 1997-2007. Author of the novel Here you are (2009); diaries Berlin depression (2017) and List (2019); essays on art: Art in Poland 1945-2005 (2005), Draught (2009), Close-ups (2020), From Poland
with Love (2019), Dispersion (2023) and cookbook Social and emotional cuisine (2022). Author of the personal weekly radio broadcast Andymateria as of 2012 and the Culture Editor of “Vogue Polska” magazine (as of 2017). Acting also as a freelance art writer and curator.
Born in Canada, educated at the University of Toronto and Harvard, Michael Ignatieff is a university professor, writer and former politician.
Between 2006 and 2011, Michael Ignatieff served as an MP in the Parliament of Canada and then as Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition. He is a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and holds thirteen honorary degrees.
Between 2012 and 2015 he served as Centennial Chair at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York.
Between 2014 and 2016 he was Edward R. Murrow Chair of the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Michael Ignatieff was until recently the Rector and President of Central European University in Budapest. He stepped down at the end of July 2021, to stay as a Professor in the History Department.
REBECCA MAKKAI’s last novel, THE GREAT BELIEVERS, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels THE BORROWER and THE HUNDRED-YEAR HOUSE, and the collection MUSIC FOR WARTIME—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada University and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. Her new novel, I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU, is forthcoming in February 2023.
Oksana Zabuzhko (b.1960) is the author of more than twenty books of different genres (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, criticism). She graduated from the department of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University, obtained her PhD in philosophy, and has worked as a research associate for the Institute of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In the 1990s she lectured in the USA as a Fulbright Fellow. After the publication of her novel Field Work in Ukrainian Sex (1996), which in 2006 was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence”, she has been living as a free-lance author. She has also established herself as one of Ukraine’s leading public intellectuals. Since 2013 she, along with her partner, artist Rostyslav Luzhetsky, have operated a small publishing house promoting quality non-commercial literature.
Zabuzhko’s books have been translated into nineteen languages, and brought her numerous national and international awards, including the Ukrainian National Award the Order of Princess Olha (2009), Angelus Central European Literary Prize for the best novel of Eastern and Central Europe (2013), Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine (2019), Krakow City Council Award Stanislaw Vincenz (2022), and so on. The war launched by Russia in Ukraine caught Zabuzhko in Poland, where she was on a book tour. Her recent work, a book-long essay on her war experience The Longest Journey (2022), has won the Book of the Year in Ukraine and has been translated into eight languages.
Photo: Agnete Brun
Ewa Ewart is a journalist and an award-winning filmmaker who specialises in ground breaking and influential documentaries.
She was born and raised in Poland, but she has spent most of her career based at the BBC TV in London, England.
She has travelled and worked in many countries, producing and directing programmes ranging from investigations, political to social observational documentaries.
Her films have revealed new information about issues such as corruption in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, the secret prison camps in North Korea, civil war in Colombia or secret and illegal CIA extraordinary rendition programme for people suspected of terrorism.
Her documentaries told some of the most memorable stories like the tragedy in Beslan, made for the first anniversary of a terrorist attack in which more than 170 children got killed. In the second film she highlighted the trauma still suffered by many child survivors five years after the atrocity.
For the last few years she has been the presenter of an international documentary strand on TVN24 and TVN24Bis, American owned commercial channels in Poland.
Most recently she has been a motivational speaker talking to varied audiences about her experiences, which she described in a book “ I witnessed”
Ewa is fluent in Russian, Spanish, Polish and English.
Writer, columnist, diarist. Graduate of a male Catholic high school and Polish studies at Warsaw University. For more than a quarter of a century, he was an editor and reviewer for Gazeta Wyborcza, as well as a columnist published in Duży Format. Since the end of 2020, a full-time columnist for "Newsweek Polska". He is currently working on a travel-history story about Normandy and Brittany. He lives in Warsaw.
Photo: Mikołaj Starzyński
She graduated from the Film and Television Department of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague in 1971. She returned to Poland and began her career in film as Krzysztof Zanussi's assistant. She joined the group of promising young Polish directors, creators of the cinema of moral anxiety, cooperating with her mentor – Andrzej Wajda.
Her films often revolve around political themes or closely related to Poland. Holland’s body of work often reflects her Jewish and Catholic roots, dealing with issues of faith and mysticism. Award-winning director of films such as Provincial Actors, Olivier, Olivier, Total Eclipse, Mr. Jones. She was nominated for an Oscar three times for: Angry Harvest, Europa, Europa and In Darkness.
Since January 2014, she has been the president of the European Film Academy in Berlin.
Photo: Jacek Poremba
Maciej Stuhr – born in 1975. He graduated in psychology from Jagiellonian University and in acting from the Krakow Academy of Dramatic Arts (PWST). He began his on-screen career at the age of 13 in K. Kieślowski's "Dekalog X." For many years, he has been a prominent actor in Warsaw theaters, notably starring in productions of the Nowy Teatr. On-screen, he often stands out with distinguished, varied roles. He is a two-time recipient of the „Orzeł” award for leading roles in the films "Pokłosie" and "Powrót do tamtych dni". This fall, he can be seen in the new season of the TV series "Belfer".
photo: Tomasz Tyndyk
Writer, columnist, critic, architect by education, winner of the Passport of Polityka 2022 for the book "Gdynia Promised. The city, modernism, modernization 1920-1939". Author of books: "Indestructible. Bohdan Pniewski - Architect of Salon and Power" (2021, finalist for the Upper Silesian Juliusz Literary Award), "The Best City in the World. Warsaw in reconstruction 1944-1949" (2020, final of the Nike Literary Award; Literary Award of the City of Warsaw, Architectural Award of the President of the City of Warsaw, Kazimierz Moczarski Historical Award), "Sanator. Career of Stefan Starzyński" (2016; Literary Award of the City of Warsaw). Pragmatic idealist.
Photo: Fot. Laura Bielak / WAB
Dr. Katarzyna Kasia – she graduated from Warsaw University, with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Italy she completed her Ph.D. at Turin University. Thanks to the Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship, she was a visiting scholar at Princeton University (2015), where she participated in the Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities (IHUM). Currently she is an assistant professor at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts at the Department of Visual Culture. She specializes in modern aesthetics and the history of ideas, she is interested in the relation between hermeneutical and phenomenological thinking, in particular in their approach to the question of experience. She is an author of essays and books Formative Craft. Lugi Pareyson’s aesthetic of formativity, Aesthetic Experience and The Community of Spectacle She is also a translator of Gianni Vattimo, Luigi Pareyson and Eugenio Barba. Under actual circumstances, political involvement became a very important part of her activity, which results in number of press publications, participation in the radio and TV shows.
Expert on corporate communications and the media market. For many years a journalist and editor-in-chief of leading Polish business journals such as Gazeta Prawna, Puls Biznesu, and Newsweek Polska; A joint architect of modern business media in Poland.
In July 2009 Jarosław was appointed to the Management Board at KI One, responsible for overseeing corporate communication, investor relations, marketing, and public affairs. He is a graduate of the Institute of Journalism at Warsaw University and has also studied at the prestigious IESE Business School, part of the University of Navarra in Barcelona, and at the Higher School of Insurance and Banking in Warsaw.
A member of the Warsaw Stock Exchange Information Governance Council and the Capital Market Leaders Academy Program Council. Jarosław Sroka is also a member of the Supervisory Board at the Civil Development Forum, a member of the Council of Patrons of the POC, a member of University Councils of the Wroclaw University of Economics and Business, Member of Executive Education Advisory Board of Leon Kozmiński Academy, President of PGA Poland.
Małgosia Szumowska said that his is “a truly cinematic face that shimmers with different colours of emotion in front of the camera lens.” Krzysztof Krauze thinks he carries some kind of secret; others added that “he has great range and […] is always fresh and real.”
Andrzej Chyra – a multi-talented theatre and film actor, as well as theatre and opera director. He studied acting and directing at the Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Higher School of Theatre in Warsaw.
Following his debut in 1993, the 1999 part in Krzysztof Krauze’s film Dług brought him wide acclaim and recognition.
Since Chyra’s career took off, he has starred in over sixty films and collaborated with the most prominent Polish filmmakers. He carefully chooses the parts he takes on, always looks out for new challenges, and takes part in non-mainstream projects. He has appeared both in large international productions and independent art projects.
At the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, he was awarded for his part in Feliks Falk’s film Komornik [The Collector] (2005) and W Imię [In the Name of…] (2013). In 2019, he received the Zbigniew Cybulski Award for lifetime achievement.
In the theatre, Chyra performed in plays by Jerzy Grzegorzewski, Agnieszka Glińska, Grzegorz Jarzyna and Krzysztof Warlikowski. Since 2008, he has been a member of the Nowy Teatr ensemble in Warsaw. He also received the Aleksander Zelwerowicz Award from the editorial office of the monthly “Teatr” magazine (2006/2007 season). He has twice appeared in leading roles at the Odéon theatre in Paris alongside Isabelle Huppert.
He directed three theatre productions and later made his opera director debut with the staging of Gracze [The Gamblers] based on a libretto by Nikolai Gogol, with music by Dmitri Shostakovich at the Baltic Opera in Gdańsk (2013). At the request of the International Theatre Festival Malta he staged The Magic Mountain, for which he was awarded the Konrad Swinarski Award.
Deputy editor-in-chief of "Gazeta Wyborcza". Gdansk citizen. He graduated from law school. Belonged to the opposition Young Poland Movement. Arrested under martial law. Member of the editorial board of "Solidarity," an underground magazine of the Gdansk region, the first issue of which was published in the Gdansk Shipyard in August 1980. He worked for the Spanish news agency EFE and the Gdansk Weekly. He was a spokesman for Lech Walesa. In opposition to the "war at the top," he resigned from his job. He published Wodza, a political portrait of the chairman of the "S" against the background of the events of the time. He has been a columnist for "Wyborcza" since January 1991, and its deputy editor since 2006. He hosted political talks on Polsat, TVP and TOK FM. Author of essays on Raymond Aron Peace with a View of History and the biography Jan Nowak-Jezioranski. Courier of Freedom. Officer of the Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta and Knight of the Order of the French Legion of Honor.
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard in the 1960s as an economist, she has written twenty booksand some four hundred academic articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, statistical theory, feminism, ethics, and law.
She taught for twelve years at the University of Chicago in the Economics Department in its glory days, but now describes herself as a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, ex-Marxist, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian classical liberal.”
Her most recent popular books, for example, are Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (Yale University Press, 2019) and with Art Carden Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: The Bourgeois Deal(University of Chicago Press, 2020). Also in 2019 the Chicago Press published a third edition of her classic manual on style, Economical Writing, and a 20th-anniversary re-issue of Crossing: A Transgender Memoir, with a new Afterword. But she’s technical and quantitative, too. For example, with Stephen Ziliak in 2008 she wrote The Cult of Statistical Significance, widely praised, which shows that null hypothesis tests of “significance” are, in the absence of a substantive loss function, meaningless. The point, made long before McCloskey by a few statisticians, is becoming widely accepted, for example in the American Statistical Association, though not yet in economics and medicine.
Her latest scholarly book again from the University of Chicago Press, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016), was the final volume of the Bourgeois Era trilogy. It argues for an “ideational” explanation of the Great Enrichment of 3,000 percent per person 1800 to the present in places like Britain and Japan and Finland. The accidents of Reformation and Revolt in northwestern Europe 1517–1789 led to a new liberty and dignity for commoners—ideas called “liberalism” in the proper sense—which led in turn to an explosion of commercially tested betterment, “having a go.” The second book in the trilogy, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010), had shown that materialist explanations such as saving or exploitation, don’t have enough economic oomph or historical relevance to explain the Enrichment. The alleged explanations that do not focus on the new ideology of “innovism”—her name for the ill-named “capitalism”—are mistaken. And the Enrichment did not corrupt our immortal souls. The inaugural book in the trilogy, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), had established that, contrary to the clamor since 1848 of the clerisy left and right, the bourgeoisie is pretty good, and that commercially tested betterment is not the worst of ethical schools. In short, the trilogy looks forward, if populism does not spoil the prospect, to a world of universal dignity and prosperity created by liberal innovism.
Marta Frej – visual artist, illustrator, president of the Kulturoholizm Foundation. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź. She has participated in many group exhibitions and had around 50 solo exhibitions.
She is the winner of the 2015 Glasses of Equality Award, awarded by the Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka Foundation, in the category of women's rights and counteracting gender discrimination for artistic work committed to defending women's rights and gender equality.
Co-author of the book "Memes and Graphs" with Agnieszka Graff, author of the herstory comic strip "Dromaderki", and the book "150 faces of Marta Frej".
Her most well-known works are captioned paintings with feminist themes and sociological premises. They illustrate the contemporary life of women in Poland. The works, which have taken the form of paintings, have been exhibited in various galleries throughout Poland. Her memetic strategy has been scientifically analysed by Justyna Budzińska in terms of diagnosis (the way in which the subject was chosen), creation (the choice of method of execution) and, most broadly, the choice of remedy. Marta Frej's work was also used by Paweł Sarna to describe the performative aspect of memes in terms of selected interpretative frameworks during his research on the role of internet memes used as rhetorical messages.
In 2017, she was awarded the O!Shining-Cultural Awards by Onet for giving memes the status of an artistic work; for feminist art on the internet, which - thanks to its topicality and uncompromising nature - has real power. She co-organised the Arteria Festival of Contemporary Art in Public Space in Częstochowa Arteria.
She has worked at the Centre for the Promotion of the Young in Częstochowa and at the Centre for the Promotion of Culture "Gaude Mater" in Częstochowa. Since August 2020, she has lived and run a studio in Gdynia. A regular contributor to the Polityka weekly, as well as to Gazeta Wyborcza.
Professor Adam Bodnar – professor and dean of the Law Faculty of the SWPS University in Warsaw, visiting professor at the University of Cologne; member of advisory boards of International IDEA, Liberties, World Organization Against Torture and World Justice Project; advisor of domestic organizations, including Tour de Konstytucja; former Ombudsman of the Republic of Poland (September 2015 - July 2021); columnist for Polish daily 'Gazeta Wyborcza' and internet edition of 'Polityka'.
Photo: Jacek Poremba
Agata Buzek – Polish theater and film actress, vegan, human and animal rights activist. In her work, she focuses on discovery and learning. She also enjoys writing, drawing, crocheting, gardening, dancing and, above all, helping those most in need, people and animals. Her home is home to refugees and three adopted dogs Helena, Joseph and Rocky. She will arrive together with her beloved Helena.
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Freedom Games 2019 are now over. One of the final speeches in the Atlas Arena in Lodz, Poland, belonged to Lech Walesa, a former president of Poland. When he entered the stage wearing a t-shirt with Constitution written on it, the audience stood up. People were applauding.
Freedom Games are a meeting of people open to dialogue, new ideas, and fun!
(…) the sixth edition of Freedom Games is about to start.startuje szósta edycja Igrzysk Wolności. WThis unique event gathers intellectuals, scientists, and artists – people of ideas who by engaging in a constructive conversation help better understand the reality.
– The PiS party wishes to hide away Freedom Games by organizing its own party convention. One of their members called Freedom Games “games of hate”. It is nothing of the sort. We intend to flood them with love and freedom – stated Leszek Jazdzewski on Twitter.
What hovers over the entire conference (…) is a spirit of optimistic and creative freedom, of searching for solutions, as if no authoritarian government existed in Poland.
Radio program by Karolina Lewicka pt. “Jak umierają demokracje?” – which is the leading theme of Freedom Games 2019
A grassroots forum created by an NGO, which brings together people who share such values as liberal democracy, open society, and the rule of law.
A meeting of representatives of the sectors of culture, business, and social lifespotkanie ludzi kultury, biznesu i życia społecznego z publicznością, who believe in the ideas of liberal democracy and open society has just began. Freedom Games are held in Lodz for the sixth time.
– For the sixth time, the city of Lodz decided to co-organize a leading intellectual and cultural forum of ideas in Poland – a meeting of renowned scholars, representatives of culture, science, and activists, as well as entrepreneurs and politicians – stated Hanna Zdanowska, the Mayor of the City. – We intend to create the best forum of ideas in the country.
Freedom Games are an extraordinary agora where thoughts and ideas can clash without an artificial divide between that which is political, social, or artistic.
Can we feel good in a country where the winners of the election refuse to respect the rights of the losing side? It is a crucial matter also for the supporters of the current government – because at one point the winners might become the losers. An interview with Leszek Jazdzewski and Blazej Lenkowski, the organizers of Freedom Games.
Author's meeting
Oksana Zabuzhko (b.1960) is the author of more than twenty books of different genres (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, criticism). She graduated from the department of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University, obtained her PhD in philosophy, and has worked as a research associate for the Institute of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In the 1990s she lectured in the USA as a Fulbright Fellow. After the publication of her novel Field Work in Ukrainian Sex (1996), which in 2006 was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence”, she has been living as a free-lance author. She has also established herself as one of Ukraine’s leading public intellectuals. Since 2013 she, along with her partner, artist Rostyslav Luzhetsky, have operated a small publishing house promoting quality non-commercial literature.
Zabuzhko’s books have been translated into nineteen languages, and brought her numerous national and international awards, including the Ukrainian National Award the Order of Princess Olha (2009), Angelus Central European Literary Prize for the best novel of Eastern and Central Europe (2013), Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine (2019), Krakow City Council Award Stanislaw Vincenz (2022), and so on. The war launched by Russia in Ukraine caught Zabuzhko in Poland, where she was on a book tour. Her recent work, a book-long essay on her war experience The Longest Journey (2022), has won the Book of the Year in Ukraine and has been translated into eight languages.
Moderation: Weronika Gogola
Partner: Wydawnictwo Agora
Speeches:
Host: Olga Brzezińska – program director of Leadership Academy for Poland, lecturer at UW, UJ and AT in Warsaw, president of the City of Literature Foundation.
Lecture
Leszek Jażdżewski – originator and editor-in-chief of “Liberté!”, co-founder of the Freedom Games. Europe Futures Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (IWM) – 2019/2020, Policy Fellow at the European University Institute – 2020/2021, Graduate of the Marshall Memorial Fellowship. One of the 25 leaders for the next 25 years selected by the “Now Poland” association. Currently at the University of Oxford.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Piotr Buras – political scientist, journalist.
Partner: European Council on Foreign Relations
Lecture
Mark Galeotti – one of the world’s leading experts on Russian security affairs, which may explain why Moscow banned him last year. He read history at Cambridge and took his doctorate in government at the LSE, and after a stint with the Foreign Office has been a scholar and thinktanker in London, New York, Moscow, Prague and Florence. He heads the UK-based risk consultancy Mayak Intelligence and is an Honorary Professor at UCL and a senior associate fellow with RUSI, the Council on Geostrategy and the Institute of International Relations Prague. He has been consulted by individuals from prime ministers to CEOs and bodies from the British Foreign Affairs Select Committee to the US National Intelligence Council.
A prolific author, his most recent books include Putin’s Wars (Bloomsbury, 2022), The Weaponisation of Everything (Yale, 2022), We Need To Talk About Putin (Ebury, 2019) and The Vory: Russia’s super mafia (Yale, 2018).
Path: ELF HUB
Co-organizer: European Liberal Forum
meeting: Meeting
THE MEETING WILL NOT BE STREAMED ONLINE
Partner: Polityka Insight
Lecture
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey – Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard in the 1960s as an economist, she has written twenty books and some four hundred academic articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, statistical theory, feminism, ethics, and law.
She taught for twelve years at the University of Chicago in the Economics Department in its glory days, but now describes herself as a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, ex-Marxist, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian classical liberal”.
Lecture
Michael Ignatieff – born in Canada, educated at the University of Toronto and Harvard; is a university professor, writer and former politician.
Path: ELF HUB
Co-organizer: European Liberal Forum
Between 2006 and 2011, Michael Ignatieff served as an MP in the Parliament of Canada and then as Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition. He is a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and holds thirteen honorary degrees.
Between 2012 and 2015 he served as Centennial Chair at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York.
Between 2014 and 2016 he was Edward R. Murrow Chair of the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Michael Ignatieff was until recently the Rector and President of Central European University in Budapest. He stepped down at the end of July 2021, to stay as a Professor in the History Department.
Author's meeting
Jonathan Littel – a Franco-American novelist and filmmaker. He is the author of the bestselling novel The Kindly Ones, a story of the Holocaust as seen by a Nazi SS officer. The novel, originally published in France as Les Bienveillantes, won the coveted Prix Goncourt and the Académie Française’s Grand Prix de Littérature. Littell has also reported on the wars in Chechnya, Syria, and Ukraine. His other works include the film Wrong Elements (2016), the essay Triptych: Three Studies after Francis Bacon (2013), and the novel Une vieille histoire (2018).
Moderation: Maciej Nowicki
THE MEETING WILL NOT BE STREAMED ONLINE
Concert
Misia Furtak – musician, author and activist. Together with her band Très.B, she was awarded the Passport of Polityka for “skillfully combining strength and delicacy in music that is both independent and upbeat.” Her professional path realizes this prophetic justification. Misia meanders between gentle compositions, distorted guitar and a blunt, ironic message. But she also combines the roles of leader and artist, educator and activist, drawing attention to the need for change in the music industry. She reconciles creative collaborations with representatives of the alternative, jazz and modern classical scenes with guest appearances with Jan Rapowanie. For Jan’s album titled. “Buffer”, in the creation of which she participated, as well as for the album “Chaos Full of Ideas” by Wojtek Mazolewski’s quintet, on which she makes a guest appearance, she received gold records. In addition, she is the winner of, among others, the Fryderyk Award and the City of Toruń’s Grzegorz Ciechowski Award. In 2019, she released the album “What Will Come?”, written in collaboration with Hania Rani, which was included in the lists of the best releases of the year of “Polityka Weekly” and “Gazeta Wyborcza”. November 2021 saw the premiere of the album “Elections,” co-created with a team of international collaborators (including Christian Balvig – Efterklang, Gareth Quinn Redmond – Bell X1, Albert Karch – Ichiko Aoba). Bartek Chaciński wrote about her, “One rarely hears such delicate protest songs (…) Furtak has found her tone: it’s deep and bitter irony in a haze of delicacy and poetic reverie,” and Lukasz Kaminski asked on the front page of Gazeta Wyborcza, “Why do thousands of people listen to 33 seconds of silence online?” and described the silent track “Agata” as “the loudest half-minute of silence in Polish music in recent years.” Misia’s voice can also be heard, among others, in the trailer for the game “Darkwood” prepared with Wojtek Urbański, in the “Eagles” nominated music for the film “Happiness Walks in Pairs,” or on the authorial debut of Alex Baranowski, a Tony-nominated British composer of illustrative music. Misia Furtak has also been involved in educational activities for young musicians for many years. In 2022 she was elected to the prestigious Keychange network, a pioneering international organization dedicated to supporting women and gender minorities in the music industry. Also last year she headed the Polish branch of Music Declares Emergency. In 2023 Misia became a mentor in Keychange’s “we grow” program, but she also founded her own organization, “Like a Girl.” As one of only a dozen male and female professionals in the European music industry, she was selected for The European Music Business Task Force program, where, with a team of specialists, she will work for the next 1.5 years to develop a strong, sustainable and transnational music market in Europe. She has played hundreds of concerts in Poland, Europe and Japan, alongside the likes of The National, Arlo Parks, TV On The Radio, and many others.
THE MEETING WILL NOT BE STREAMED ONLINE
Discussion panel
Discussion panel
Moderation: Anna Ayvazyan – Senior Project Coordinator at the Tbilisi-based office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Russia and Central Asia in Exile.
Partner: Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom
Discussion panel
Moderation: Ewa Raczyńska – journalist, Onet.pl.
Discussion panel
Discussion panel
Moderation: Renata Kim – journalist.
Partner: Strajk Kobiet
Discussion panel
Moderation: Szymon Bujalski – Journalist for the climate.
THE MEETING WILL NOT BE STREAMED ONLINE
Partner: Roślinniejemy
Discussion panel
Moderation: Olga Wysocka – political scientist, cultural manager.
Partner: Warszawskie Obserwatorium Kultury
Discussion panel
Moderation: Anne Applebaum – journalist, historian, writer.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Hanna Cichy – senior economic analyst at Policy Insight.
Partner: IKEA
Discussion panel
Moderation: Karol Tokarczyk – digital economy analyst, Policy Insight.
Discussion panel
Polish novelist, literary critic, essayist, literary historian.
Born in 1949 in Gdansk; son of a Vilnius resident, an economist, and a Warsaw resident, Aleksandra (née Celińska), a nurse, a nurse of the Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising. He graduated from the High School of Fine Arts in Gdynia-Orlovo. In December 1970, he witnessed the pacification of Gdansk by the militia and armored units of the LWP. In May 1971, he got married. In 1973 he defended his master’s thesis (Gombrowicz and the Polish Form, written under the supervision of Prof. Maria Janion) at the University of Gdansk with honors. In 1973 he was hired at the UG Institute of Polish Philology as a trainee assistant. In the 1980s, he was a member of the team editing the publishing series Transgressions. In 1994, on the basis of his dissertation entitled Literature and Betrayal. From Konrad Wallenrod to the Little Apocalypse, awarded an individual prize by the Minister for outstanding scientific achievements, he received a doctoral degree.
Moderation: Maciej Robert
Discussion panel
Moderation: Krzysztof Iszkowski – economist, doctor of sociology, one of the founders of “Liberté!”.
Path: Zielone 100 dni
Partner: European Climate Foundation
Discussion panel
Moderacja: Maciej Fijak – a journalist for the SmogLab.pl portal.
THE MEETING WILL BE NOT STREAMED ONLINE
Partner: Polish Smog Alarm
Author's meeting
Grzegorz Piątek – writer, columnist, critic, architect by education, winner of the Passport of Polityka 2022 for the book “Gdynia Promised. The city, modernism, modernization 1920-1939”. Author of books: “Indestructible. Bohdan Pniewski – Architect of Salon and Power” (2021, finalist for the Upper Silesian Juliusz Literary Award), “The Best City in the World. Warsaw in reconstruction 1944-1949” (2020, final of the Nike Literary Award; Literary Award of the City of Warsaw, Architectural Award of the President of the City of Warsaw, Kazimierz Moczarski Historical Award), “Sanator. Career of Stefan Starzyński” (2016; Literary Award of the City of Warsaw). Pragmatic idealist.
Moderation: Rafał Jaśkowski
Discussion panel
Moderation: Witold Gadomski – Polish journalist, columnist for “Gazeta Wyborcza”.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Alicja Bachulska – China analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
Partner: European Council on Foreign Relations
Discussion panel
Moderation: Ricardo Silvestre – Senior Political Resercher at Movimento Liberal Social in Portugal.
Path: ELF HUB
Co-organizer: European Liberal Forum
Discussion panel
Moderation: Katarzyna Pisarska – political scientist, social activist.
Moderation: Karol Tokarczyk – digital economy analyst on the Policy Insight team.
Partner: IKEA
Discussion panel
Moderation: Paweł Marczewski – sociologist, historian of ideas, publicist.
THE MEETING WILL NOT BE STREAMED ONLINE
Partner: The Batory Foundation
Discussion panel
Moderation: Olga Brzezińska – program director of the Leadership Academy for Poland, lecturer at UW, UJ and AT in Warsaw, president of the City of Literature Foundation.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Shaun Walker – The Guardian’s CEE correspondent, Russia expert.
Partner: Google
Discussion panel
Moderation: Agnieszka Lichnerowicz – journalist, TOK FM.
Partner: European Council on Foreign Relations
Discussion panel
Moderation: Jacek Łęgiewicz – Member of the Board of the Digital Poland Association.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Konrad Ciesiołkiewicz – member of the scientific council of the Janusz Korczak Children’s Rights Institute, president of the Orange Foundation.
Partner: Janusz Korczak Children’s Rights Institute
Discussion panel
Moderation: Magdalena M. Baran – philosopher, managing editor of the monthly “Liberté!” magazine.
Author's meeting
Paulina Siegień – ethnographer, Russian scholar and Russian philologist by education. Graduate of the Study of Eastern Europe at the University of Warsaw and Russian Studies at the University of Gdansk. A journalist and translator by profession. She cooperates with “Krytyka Polityczna”, Newsweek and the Jan Nowak Jeziorański Eastern Europe College. For several years she wrote about Kaliningrad and the Kaliningrad region for “Gazeta Wyborcza”. The author of the book “Fairytale City. Many stories of Kaliningrad”, for which she received the Conrad Prize for the best prose debut of 2021. She lives in Podlasie.
Moderation: Kamil Całus
Partner: Wydawnictwo Czarne
Discussion panel
Moderation: Magdalena Rigamonti – journalist for Onet.pl.
Path: ELF HUB
Co-organizer: European Liberal Forum
Discussion panel
Moderation: Sebastian Ogórek – economic journalist, head of the wyborcza.biz editorial board.
Partner: Allegro
Discussion panel
Moderation: Laurenz Van Ginneken – project officer at the European Liberal Forum and municipal councilor in Schilde – ‘s-Gravenwezel (Belgium).
Path: ELF HUB
Co-organizer: European Liberal Forum
Discussion panel
Moderation: Marcin Zieliński – President of the Board of Directors & Chief Economist of the Civil Development Forum.
Partner: Civil Development Forum
Discussion panel
Moderation: Magdalena Gałkiewicz – Secretaries of the National Board, National Councilor and co-chair of the Lodz circle of the Green Party.
Path: Zielone 100 dni
Co-organizer: European Climate Foundation
Discussion panel
Moderation: Bartłomiej E. Nowak – lecturer at the Vistula Academy of Finance and Business, member of “Team Europe”, a team of experts at the European Commission, and member of the Forecasting Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
THE MEETING WILL NOT BE STREAMED ONLINE
Discussion panel
Moderation: Konrad Piasecki – radio and television journalist.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Justyna Dobrosz-Oracz – journalist and parliamentary correspondent. Between 2010 and 2016, she was a reporter for TVP News. Since 2016 she has been associated with “Gazeta Wyborcza”.
We live in an era of information wars. Information has become a tool and often a very valuable commodity. The acquisition of confidential data, manipulation and creation of information has become the domain of not only the intelligence services of the modern world. It is through information that states, companies or certain interest groups can gain an advantage over competitors or opponents. Information and its appropriate use can trigger certain behaviors of individuals and societies. Is disinformation a permanent part of our everyday life? How to deal with the information war?
Discussion panel
Moderation: Maia Mazurkiewicz – expert on combating disinfromation and behavioral change.
Partner: Amazon
Discussion panel
Moderator: Dominika Wielowieyska – Polish journalist and columnist, a theater scholar by profession.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Katarzyna Kasia – philosopher, regular contributor to “Liberal Culture”, Contact glass on TVN24. A columnist for the weekly Newsweek Polska and the monthly magazine “Pani”. She hosts morning broadcasts on Radio New World.
Partner: Krytyka Polityczna
Discussion panel
Moderation: Misia Furtak – composer, author, vocalist and bassist, winner of, among others, the Passport of Polityka with très.b in the popular music category for 2012 and the Fryderyk Award in the debut of the year category.
Partner: Music Declares Emergency
Discussion panel
Moderation: Szymon Bujalski – journalist for climate.
THE MEETING WILL BE NOT STREAMED ONLINE
Discussion panel
Moderation: Marcin Zieliński – President of the Board of Directors & Chief Economist of the Civil Development Forum.
Partner: Civil Development Forum
Discussion panel
Moderation: Edwin Bendyk – Polish journalist and publicist.
Partner: Batory Foundation
Discussion panel
Introduction: Gerlinde Niehus – Deputy Director, Defence and Security Cooperation, NATO.
Moderation: Katarzyna Pisarska – Polish political scientist and social activist.
Path: ELF HUB
Co-organizer: European Liberal Forum
Discussion panel
Moderation: Ester Povýšilová – project manager at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.
Partner: Friedrich Naumann Foundation
Discussion panel
Moderacja: Dominika Wantuch – journalist.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Weronika Michalak – director of the Polish branch of the international organization Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL).
Path: Zielone 100 dni
Co-organizer: European Climate Foundation
Discussion panel
Moderacja: Agnieszka Oleksyn-Wajda – Director of the Institute for Sustainability and the Environment, creator and director of the postgraduate program in Environmental Law at Lazarski University.
THE MEETING WILL NOT BE STREAMED ONLINE
Partner: Zalando
Discussion panel
Moderation: Jan Szyszko – EU analyst, international policy commentator.
Discussion panel
Moderator: Katarzyna Kasia – philosopher, a regular contributor to the Contact Glass program on TVN24 and “Liberal Culture”.
Path: Zielone 100 dni
Co-organizer: European Climate Foundation
Discussion panel
Intruduction: Christal Morehouse – at the Open Society Foundation’s Europe and Central Asia (ECA) Program, is a senior program officer in the Strategy and Strategic Outreach pillar.
Moderation: Roman Imielski – journalist, deputy editor-in-chief of “Gazeta Wyborcza”.
Partner: Open Society Foundations
Discussion panel
Moderation: Paweł Orlikowski – journalist, INNPoland.pl.
Partner: Open for Business
Youth:
VS
Politicians:
Moderation: Agata Kobylińska – Plenipotentiary of the Mayor of Łódź for children and youth, Member of the Board of the Association of the Congress of Women.
Partner: Kongres Kobiet
Author's meeting
Anda Rottenberg – exhibitions curator, art historian and critic. Employed in the Polish Academy of Sciences 1973-1986. Founder of the EGIT Art Foundation, 1986; Warsaw Soros Center of Contemporary Art, 1992; Institute of Art Promotion Foundation, 1997. Director of the ‘Zachęta’ National Art Gallery in Warsaw 1993-2001.
Art writings published in many languages around the world, curator and co-curator of many international exhibitions such as: I-st Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Aspects-Positions 1949-1999, 50 Years of Art in Middle Europe (Vienna-Budapest-Barcelona-Birmingham 2000); L’Autre Moitie de l’Europe (Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume 2000/2001, Paris); Where is Abel, Thy Brother (Zachęta Gallery, Warsaw), 1995; Forgetting, Weseburg Museum, Bremen, 2000; Continental Breakfast, Belgrade 2004; Warsaw-Moscow
(Zachęta Gallery, Warsaw/Tretiakowskaya Gallery Moscow) 2004/2005; Side by side. Poland-Germany, 1000 years of history in art (Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin) 2011; VOID, Nowy Sącz City, 2012; UNI/JA-UNI-ON, Open Air, City of Lublin, Poland, 2013; Progress and Hygiene (Zachęta National Gallery Warsaw) 2014, Adolescent Perspective, Silesia Museum, Katowice, 2018; Difficult Age, OM Museum Vilnius 2021. Curator (1993-1995) and commissioner of the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 1993-2001 and the Sao Paolo Biennale 1997-2007. Author of the novel Here you are (2009); diaries Berlin depression (2017) and List (2019); essays on art: Art in Poland 1945-2005 (2005), Draught (2009), Close-ups (2020), From Poland
with Love (2019), Dispersion (2023) and cookbook Social and emotional cuisine (2022). Author of the personal weekly radio broadcast Andymateria as of 2012 and the Culture Editor of “Vogue Polska” magazine (as of 2017). Acting also as a freelance art writer and curator.
Moderation: Marta Zdanowska – editor, theater reviewer and literary scholar.
Partners: Krytyka Polityczna, Łódzki Szlak Kobiet
Discussion panel
Moderation: Katarzyna Janowska – Polish television, radio and press journalist.
Discussion panel
Moderacja: Janusz Schwertner
Partner: Fundacja Unaweza
Discussion panel
Moderation: Karolina Lewicka – political journalist at Radio Tok FM, hosts the program Political Interview.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Barbora Krempaská – project manager at the Prague office of the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom political foundation.
Partners: 4liberty.eu, Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom
Discussion panel
Moderation: Katarzyna Szymielewicz – lawyer, social activist and publicist. Co-founder and president of the Panoptykon Foundation.
Partner: Panoptykon Foundation
We are approaching one year since the new generation of Chat GPT has changed the perception of the challenges that artificial intelligence brings. We will talk about the challenges and ideas on how to create a safe framework for humans in relation to the development of artificial intelligence in the “Turning Point in AI” panel.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Weronika Michalak – director of the Polish branch of the international organization Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL).
Path: Zielone 100 dni
Co-organizer: European Climate Foundation
Discussion panel
Moderation: Krzysztof Izdebski – expert, Stefan Batory Foundation.
Partner: National Federation of NGOs (OFOP)
When we think about the future of Poland, we are accompanied by various feelings, from uncertainty, fear, sadness or frustration, to hope – because although we are worried about the present, we know what direction the changes should take. We want to live in a country with freedom, democracy, security, justice, fairness, rule of law, modernity, tolerance, respect for nature and openness. However, we feel disillusionment with a country we do not trust, because it failed us in moments of crises – the outbreak of a pandemic or the first weeks after Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine. We felt on our own then, and the first to react were organizations and civil society – because we are the ones who know how to act and build a better future.
We want to show that as civil society we have concrete proposals for Poland in many areas of public life that require fundamental changes.
Social organizations together with expert circles have been working for months on proposals to repair, improve or modernize the most important spheres of life in Poland. Some of them – the Pact for Education, laws restoring the rule of law, climate law, recommendations for measures to restore local self-government, draft solutions to protect and realize the fundamental rights of women, proposals for migration and integration policy, minorities, LGBTQ+, a project to sanitize public media, a law on museums, recommendations for measures to strengthen the empowerment of young people or concerning social and civic activities will be presented during the debate at the Freedom Games.
Read more at: https://ofop.eu/propozycje-obywatelskie-dla-polski/.
The time of breakthrough we live in needs a Radical Reaction: the discovery of new areas and perspectives for thinking and imagination. And these can only be born in the area of freedom, exploration, spiritual (intellectual and artistic) invention. We will talk about the dead ends, the aporias, the ineffectiveness and shallowness of efforts for social change. And about the fact that it is possible and necessary to Otherwise. That Awakening and inner Liberation is possible.
The event is a preview of the (anti)festival we are planning for spring 2024 in Krakow.
Participants will include Piotr Augustyniak, Leszek Jażdżewski (words and thoughts) and Marek Pospieszalski, Max Mucha, Bartek Szablowski (musical improvisation).
Inspiration: Stanisław Wyspiański
WATCH ONLINE
Discussion panel
Moderation: Mirek Michalski
Choice is one of the fundamental rights of each of us. The freedom to make choices is, on the one hand, a gift, on the other hand, an obligation, and finally a responsibility for the consequences. Why are so many of us so willing to give up the privilege of choice, entrusting our fate into the hands of others? Out of fear? Out of weakness? From habits learned from the environment that shaped us? Why do some people conquer their choices, while others entrust their here and now and their future into the hands of strangers? This is what the guests of the panel “Elections – a right, a privilege, a duty…” will discuss.
Partner: KOD reg. łódzki
Discussion panel
Moderation: Detmar Doering – Senior Advisor to the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom (FNF) for Central Europe and the Baltics in Prague.
Partner: 4liberty.eu
Discussion panel
Moderation: Laurenz Van Ginneken – project officer at the European Liberal Forum and municipal councilor in Schilde – ‘s-Gravenwezel (Belgium).
Path: ELF HUB
Co-organizer: European Liberal Forum
Author's meeting
Mikołaj Grynberg – photographer and writer, with a background in psychology. His photographs have been exhibited almost all over the world. Throughout his work, he adopts a particular perspective of dialogue, focusing on meeting others and being open to their personal experiences and stories.
Author of the albums “A lot of women” (2009), “Auschwitz – what am I doing here?” (2010) and “Survivors of the 20th Century” (2012). He published a collection of conversations “I Accuse Auschwitz. Family Stories” (2014) and a volume of short stories “Rejwach” (2016), which in 2018 was nominated for the Nike Literary Award and the Angelus Central European Literary Award. In 2018 the book “The Book of Exodus” was published, and in 2020 the book “Confidential” (published by Czarne).
Moderation: Olga Brzezińska – program director of the Leadership Academy for Poland, lecturer at UW, UJ and AT in Warsaw, president of the City of Literature Foundation.
Partner: Wydawnictwo Agora
Discussion panel
Moderacja: Jędrzej Słodkowski – journalist, editor, deputy head of the culture section of “Gazeta Wyborcza”.
The question of unsubscribing from the Catholic Church heats up the public debate every ten months or so in connection with apostate celebrity declarations. Everyone discusses it, but it is still difficult to find those who not only talk about it, but have made it. Why is it so difficult for those who don’t want to be in the Church to leave it? And is it really that complicated? From the Church’s point of view, is it better to have a Church that is theoretically universal, but full of “dead souls,” or a smaller Church, but made up of true believers? The issue of apostasy is one of the proxies of the state-citizen-Church relationship, and is a great starting point for seeking answers to the fundamental question: how do we, believers and non-believers, actually arrange our lives in one country?
Round table
Moderation: Wojciech Klicki – lawyer, activist.
Partner: Panoptykon Foundation
Discussion panel
Moderation: Aleksandra Gliszczyńska-Grabias – lawyer.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Paweł Orlikowski – journalist, INNPoland.pl.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Maria Alesina – policy and research specialist at the European Liberal Forum.
Path: ELF HUB
Co-organizer: European Liberal Forum
meeting: Meeting
Moderation: Sławomir Drelich – political scientist and ethicist, publicist and co-founder of “Liberté”; expert on educational issues.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Robert Jurszo – Polish journalist and columnist specializing in nature conservation and animal rights.
Path: Zielone 100 dni
Co-organizer: European Climate Foundation
Discussion panel
Moderation: Beata Krawiec – specialist in digital skills and media education.
THE MEETING WILL NOT BE STREAMED ONLINE
Partner: Panopticon Foundation
Discussion panel
Moderation: Maria Alesina – policy and research specialist at the European Liberal Forum.
Path: ELF HUB
Co-organizer: European Liberal Forum
Discussion panel
Moderation: Kinga Dagmara Siadlak – attorney, President of the Defensor Iuris Bar Association.
Partners: Tour de Constitution, Congress of Citizens’ Democratic Movements Foundation
Discussion panel
Moderation: Weronika Michalak – director of the Polish branch of the international organization Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL).
Path: Zielone 100 dni
Co-organizer: European Climate Foundation
Author's meeting
Michał Koterski – Polish actor, television presenter. He made his big screen debut in 1999 with the role of Sylwuś, son of Adam Miauczynski, in Marek Koterski’s film “Ajlawju”. He played this character in two more films: “Dzień świra” (2002) and “Wszyscy jesteśmy Chrystusami” (2006). He also starred in many other films, including “7 Feelings” and “Gierek”, and TV series.
Moderation: Beata Nowicka – journalist, author of several hundred interviews with prominent representatives of the world of culture, art, politics.
Author's meeting
Jarosław Kurski – deputy editor-in-chief of “Gazeta Wyborcza”. Gdansk citizen. He graduated from law school. Belonged to the opposition Young Poland Movement. Arrested under martial law. Member of the editorial board of “Solidarity,” an underground magazine of the Gdansk region, the first issue of which was published in the Gdansk Shipyard in August 1980. He worked for the Spanish news agency EFE and the Gdansk Weekly. He was a spokesman for Lech Walesa. In opposition to the “war at the top,” he resigned from his job. He published Wodza, a political portrait of the chairman of the “S” against the background of the events of the time. He has been a columnist for “Wyborcza” since January 1991, and its deputy editor since 2006. He hosted political talks on Polsat, TVP and TOK FM. Author of essays on Raymond Aron Peace with a View of History and the biography Jan Nowak-Jezioranski. Courier of Freedom. Officer of the Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta and Knight of the Order of the French Legion of Honor.
Moderation: Joanna Podolska-Płocka – journalist, Polish language and cultural studies expert.
Partner: Wydawnictwo Agora
Discussion panel
Moderation: Zuzanna Nowicka – lawyer for the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.
THE MEETING WILL NOT BE STREAMED ONLINE
Discussion panel
Moderation: Marcin Zieliński – President of the Board of Directors & Chief Economist of the Civil Development Forum.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Marek Tatała – economist, manager in the NGO and think-tank sector, expert on economic policy, regulation and economic analysis of law.
Partner: Fundacja Wolności Gospodarczej
Discussion panel
Moderation: Joanna Łopat – journalist, OKO.press.
Partner: Google
Discussion panel
Moderation: Adam Mazur – art historian, critic and curator, Americanist.
Partner: InLodz21
meeting: Meeting
Marta Frej – visual artist, illustrator, president of the Kulturoholizm Foundation. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź. She has participated in many group exhibitions and had around 50 solo exhibitions.
She is the winner of the 2015 Glasses of Equality Award, awarded by the Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka Foundation, in the category of women’s rights and counteracting gender discrimination for artistic work committed to defending women’s rights and gender equality.
Co-author of the book “Memes and Graphs” with Agnieszka Graff, author of the herstory comic strip “Dromaderki”, and the book “150 faces of Marta Frej”.
Her most well-known works are captioned paintings with feminist themes and sociological premises. They illustrate the contemporary life of women in Poland. The works, which have taken the form of paintings, have been exhibited in various galleries throughout Poland. Her memetic strategy has been scientifically analysed by Justyna Budzińska in terms of diagnosis (the way in which the subject was chosen), creation (the choice of method of execution) and, most broadly, the choice of remedy. Marta Frej’s work was also used by Paweł Sarna to describe the performative aspect of memes in terms of selected interpretative frameworks during his research on the role of internet memes used as rhetorical messages.
In 2017, she was awarded the O!Shining-Cultural Awards by Onet for giving memes the status of an artistic work; for feminist art on the internet, which – thanks to its topicality and uncompromising nature – has real power. She co-organised the Arteria Festival of Contemporary Art in Public Space in Częstochowa Arteria.
She has worked at the Centre for the Promotion of the Young in Częstochowa and at the Centre for the Promotion of Culture “Gaude Mater” in Częstochowa. Since August 2020, she has lived and run a studio in Gdynia. A regular contributor to the Polityka weekly, as well as to Gazeta Wyborcza.
Anna Pamuła – Polish reporter and writer living in Paris. Her texts are published in “Gazeta Wyborcza”, “Wysokie Obcasy”, “Chidusz” and the French monthly “Parents”. For years, she has collaborated with Martyna Wojciechowska on documentaries and books. She is the author of four books: “Polacos. Chajka płynie do Kostaryki”, “Wrzenie. Francja na krawędzi” (nominated for several literary awards, including National Geographic’s book of the year), “Mamans du Monde” in French and “Moms to Talk to. Mothers of the world about love, strength and difficult choices”. Together with Marta Frej, she is creating the social project Tabubabki. She is a member of the Historical and Literary Society of Paris and an Ambassador of the Birth by Humanity Foundation.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Izabella Adamczewska-Baranowska – literary scholar, assistant professor at the Institute of Contemporary Culture of the University of Łódź. Journalist at the Lodz branch of “Gazeta Wyborcza”.
Partner: Festiwal Łódź Czterech Kultur
Discussion panel
Moderacja: Michał Jabłoński – attorney, managing partner of Jablonski Kozminski & Partners, chairman of the board of the Foundation for Freedom and the Rule of Law – Cicero Institute.
THE MEETING WILL BE NOT STREAMED ONLINE
Author's meeting
Marcin Kącki – reporter, editor of “Free Saturday” magazine in “Gazeta Wyborcza”, playwright. Winner of the Journalist of the Year title in the Grand Press competition. Author of, among other books, Maestro. Historia milczenia, Białystok. Biała siła, czarna pamięć, Oświęcim. Czarna zima.
Moderation: Piotr Beniuszys
Lecture
Prof. Leszek Balcerowicz – Professor at the Warsaw School of Economics, Chairman of the Council of the Civil Development Forum.
Founder of the Civic Development Forum think-tank. Professor at the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH); Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance in the first two non-communist governments of the 3rd Republic of Poland and in the years 1997-2000; Governor of the National Bank of Poland in the years 2001-2007; holder of honorary doctorates of 32 domestic and foreign universities. He has received prestigious awards and distinctions – in Poland: including the Order of the White Eagle (2005), the highest state decoration, which he received for his contribution to the systemic transformation of our country, and abroad: among others, the Milton Friedman, Ludwig Erhard and Friedrich von Hayek awards, granted to him for promoting freedom; honorary chairman of the Bruegel think-tank in Brussels. Polish junior cross-country champion in 1965. Founder and chairman of the board of the Civil Development Forum think-tank.
Partner: Forum Obywatelskiego Rozwoju
Discussion panel
Moderation: Edwin Bendyk – journalist, columnist and writer, chairman of the board of the Stefan Batory Foundation.
THE MEETING WILL BE NOT STREAMED ONLINE
Partner: Batory Foundation
Discussion panel
Moderation: Olga Brzezińska – program director of the Leadership Academy for Poland, president of the City of Literature Foundation, lecturer at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the Theater Academy in Warsaw.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Małgorzata Gołota – print and radio journalist, author of a series of podcasts.
Path: Zielone 100 dni
Co-organizer: European Climate Foundation
meeting: Meeting
Moderation: Anna Pamuła – Polish reporter and writer.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Magdalena M. Baran – D. in philosophy, columnist, managing editor of the monthly “Liberté!” magazine.
THE MEETING WILL BE NOT STREAMED ONLINE
Path: ELF HUB
Co-organizer: European Liberal Forum
Author's meeting
Rebecca Makkai – REBECCA MAKKAI’s last novel, THE GREAT BELIEVERS, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels THE BORROWER and THE HUNDRED-YEAR HOUSE, and the collection MUSIC FOR WARTIME—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada University and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. Her new novel, I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU, is forthcoming in February 2023.
Moderation: Anna Dziewit-Meller – writer and journalist.
Partner: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, Wysokie Obcasy
Discussion panel
Moderation: Wojtek Maziarski – journalist and writer.
Discussion panel
Introduction: Marta Lackowska – local government researcher, geographer.
Moderation: Anna Materska-Sosnowska – D. in political science.
Partner: Batory Foundation
Discussion panel
Moderation: Agata Kowalska – journalist and podcaster OKO.press.
Partners: SOS Community Education Network, Protest with an exclamation point, Free School
Discussion panel
Moderacja: Aneta Korycińska – Polish language teacher, editor, oligophrenopedagogue, teacher and founder of the “Baba from Polish” website.
Partner: Inspiring Girls
Media partner of the panel: NOIZZ
Author's meeting
Anna J. Dudek – journalist, editor, author of books, including a reportage on Polish Muslim women Poddaję się. Her new book will be published by Znak in the spring. She has been a contributor to Wysokie Obcasy for five years, where she writes mainly about human rights, politics and the church.
Moderation: Joanna Żarnoch-Chudzińska – journalist, reporter, editor, “Gazeta Wyborcza”.
Partner: Wysokie Obcasy
Discussion panel
Moderacja: Michał Kanownik – president of the Digital Poland Association.
THE MEETING WILL BE NOT STREAMED ONLINE
Partner: Digital Poland Association
Discussion panel
Moderation: Marta Zdanowska – editor, theater reviewer and literary scholar.
Partners: Wydawnictwo Literackie, Łódzki Szlak Kobiet, Teatr Nowy im. Kazimierza Dejmka w Łodzi, Wydawnictwo RM, Replika
Discussion panel
Moderation: Adam August Michalik – Political scientist by training and passion, third sector manager. She has been at the School of Leaders since 2019, coordinating the political program since 2020.
Partner: Szkoła Liderów
Discussion panel
Moderacja: Magdalena M. Baran – D. in philosophy, columnist, managing editor of the monthly “Liberté!” magazine.
Author's meeting
Inga Iwasiów – novelist, literary critic, publicist, activist, columnist, professor of literary studies, works at the Institute of Literature and New Media at the University of Szczecin. A member of the Council for Scientific Excellence and the Committee for the Study of Literature of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is a juror of the Nike and Poznan Literary Awards.
Moderation: Barbara Piegdoń-Adamczyk – journalist, “Gazeta Wyborcza”.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Magdalena Sikorska – climate expert at the European Climate Foundation, where she specializes in projects on public perception of climate change.
Path: Zielone 100 dni
Partner: European Climate Foundation
Author's meeting
Agata Buzek – theater and film actress, vegan, human and animal rights activist.
Moderation: Kuba Karyś – journalist.
Partner: Wybory bez picu – Obywatelska Kontrola Wyborów
Author's meeting
Jarosław Hrycak – Ukrainian historian, public intellectual, professor at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Modern Ukrainian History and Society. He has also taught at Universities: Columbia, Harvard and Central European University. Founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Ukraina Moderna and author of numerous publications on modern history. From 2014-2022, one of the directors of the German-Ukrainian Historical Commission. Between 2010 and 2020, Yaroslav Hrytsak frequently appeared on the list of the 100 most influential Ukrainians. He has been repeatedly recognized both in Ukraine and abroad for his academic achievements and public activities, including: Bene Merito Medal (Poland, 2009) and Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (Poland, 2014), Polish Historical Society Award for special scientific achievements (2010), Anton Gindely-Preis für Kultur und Geschichte Mittel-, Ostund Südosteuropas Award (Austria, 2010), Stanislaw Vincenz Award of the City Council of Krakow (Poland, 2016).
Moderation: Andrzej Kompa – byzantinist, antiquarian (late antiquity) and medievalist, genealogist.
Path: ELF HUB
Co-organizer: European Liberal Forum
Discussion panel
Moderation: Magdalena M. Baran – D. in philosophy, columnist, managing editor of the monthly “Liberté!” magazine.
Everyone has some sort of ideal place. An idea of where and how he would like to live, with whom to share daily life, how to work, what values to share with others every day. It doesn’t stop there. In the realm of our dreams, we consider a good place to work and to live, a school for our children, an infrastructure that improves life, an efficient health service, an administration that doesn’t throw a spanner in the works, policies that are effective yet accessible to citizens. We dream… What if we could turn our dreams into reality and plan such an ideal place from A to Z? How do liberals, Christian Democrats, progressives, leftists or conservatives think of their ideal province? And do we actually differ so much in these dreams. We’ll talk about all this during the “Dream Province” panel.
Discussion panel
Moderation: Magda Mołek – journalist, youtuber.
Partner & Host: Wolne Sądy
Now you can create your own personalized program of the Freedom Games, which will consist only of the events you are interested in!
All you need to do is mark the selected events with asterisks in the lower left corner of each tile, and then, at the bottom of the page, please select “Download Program” (your program will be automatically downloaded in a PDF format) or “Send Program” (the program will be sent to your e-mail address).
