Program
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Registration desk opens at 10:00 AM at the venue
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An Open Space for Stories, Questions and Unfinished Thoughts, led by Ninutsa Nanitashvili
Help us turn the festival from something you attend into something you create: pick up the mic to share a story, respond to a session, ask a question, or test an idea. You have 5-15 minutes!
The Fragile Art of Being Understood
Tamta Melashvili, Tina Mamulashvili and Iva Pezuashvili in conversation with Matthew Janney
What does it mean to write in a language the world rarely reads? For Georgian writers, translation is not a luxury; it is the bridge to international readers, publishers and literary life beyond the country’s borders. This conversation explores what gets lost, what gets carried, and who decides which books are allowed to travel.
A Crash Course on Georgia, with Giorgi Lomsadze
Back by popular demand, acclaimed journalist Giorgi Lomsadze returns with his essential crash course on the bewildering, at times terrifying, most often beautiful madness that is Georgia. Whether you are visiting for the first time, coming back for more, or even call this place home, start your festival with clarity, insight, and a few laughs as Giorgi walks us through the country’s fast-moving politics, culture and contradictions.
A workshop on presence and productive disagreement, with Pat Rodriguez
This workshop combines practical techniques for commanding presence, speaking with confidence under pressure, and navigating disagreement with empathy and clarity. Through breath work, improv exercises, active listening, and spontaneous speaking practice, participants learn how to stay grounded, think on the fly and engage constructively.
Fake War, Real Memory, and the Images That Teach Us Conflict
Thomas Dworzak in conversation with Isabel Evans
Thomas Dworzak has spent much of his life photographing real wars. Here, he turns his camera toward the other wars around us: military simulations, hostage training, reenactments, parades, memorials, TV shows and games. Moving between the real and the staged, the serious and the absurd, Dworzak asks what happens when war becomes something we rehearse, remember, consume and play.
Powered by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Tbilisi
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A Live Experiment in Attention
With Emily Kasriel, hosted by Ninutsa Nanitashvili
Most of us know how to wait for our turn to speak. Fewer of us know how to listen in a way that changes the conversation. In this polarized moment, when disagreement so quickly turns into performance or retreat, journalist and author Emily Kasriel leads a live, interactive session on deep listening: how to stay present when a conversation gets difficult, respond in a different way, and hear more than the answer you expected.
Georgia’s Independent Media and the Fight Not to Disappear
Heather Chaplin and Emily Bell with Lika Antadze and Nino Bakradze
A live Tow Center/Columbia Journalism Review podcast recording with two journalists from Sinatle Media, the Georgian coalition of independent online outlets formed around a simple promise: the lights must stay on. As pressure on free media intensifies, this is a conversation about what it takes to keep reporting when the walls close in.
In partnership with The Tow Center
Books, Boycotts and the Battle for a Global Voice
Natasha Lomouri, Nato Alhazishvili and Paata Shamugia in conversation with Patrick Walsh
When Georgia’s Writers’ House was taken over by a ruling-party appointee in 2023, many writers, publishers and translators walked away. The boycott cut off the country’s main official route to translation funding and international visibility. This conversation asks how Georgian literature finds its way into the world when the institutions meant to support it become part of the problem.
An Open Space for Stories, Questions and Unfinished Thoughts
Help us turn the festival from something you attend into something you create: pick up the mic to share a story, respond to a session, ask a question, or test an idea. You have 5-15 minutes!
What Gets Lost when a Country Has to Cross into Another Language?
Sahar Dowlatshahi in conversation with Patrick Cox
Sahar Dowlatshahi translates Iranian literature into languages that can reach the world, at a moment when Iran’s reality is constantly flattened, censored or misunderstood. A conversation with Patrick Cox on why the smallest choices of language can make all the difference.
What the Photograph Hides
Bao Nguyen in conversation with Rena Effendi
One of the most famous photographs of the twentieth century shaped how the world remembers the Vietnam War. But what if the story behind it was wrong? In The Stringer, filmmaker Bao Nguyen follows the contested authorship of the image known as “Napalm Girl” and the Vietnamese photographer whose work helped make history without always entering its official record. In conversation with photographer Rena Effendi, he asks what happens when an image becomes so iconic it obscures the person behind the camera.
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With Democracy Under Threat, What Does It Mean to Reimagine Liberty?
Mohamedou Ould Slahi in conversation with Yoeri Albrecht
Mohamedou Ould Slahi was detained for 14 years without charge. He was tortured under a program personally approved by the US Secretary of Defense. From inside Guantánamo, in a language that was not his own, he wrote the diary that carried his voice into the world before he was free. He is now a Dutch citizen and an internationally acclaimed author. He is still barred from entering the United States. A conversation about survival, freedom, and the life that begins after the story everyone thinks they know.
Masterclass on How to Make People Care About a Story
With Joshi Herrmann, facilitator Irina Matchavariani
Most stories fail not because they lack facts, but because nobody has been given a reason to care. Joshi Herrmann has built Mill Media around journalism people actually want to read. With Irina Matchavariani, he takes apart the difference between information and story — and offers practical lessons on beginnings, scenes, characters, tension and the details that make readers keep going.
How Change Becomes Possible
Zsuzsanna Lippai in conversation with Hans Gutbrod
Hungary spent years as a warning: captured media, weakened institutions, demonized civil society, politics built on fear. Then something shifted. Zsuzsanna Lippai, who has worked across media, philanthropy and human rights, joins Hans Gutbrod to ask how civic life survives long periods of pressure — and how change becomes possible when a system looks immovable.
On Confusion, Curiosity, and the Power of Not Settling
Geoff Dyer in conversation with Matthew Janney
Not everything that matters can be explained, and not everything that can be explained matters. We live in a moment that rewards clarity, certainty and expertise. But some of the most interesting ideas begin in confusion, in the instinct to follow a thought without knowing where it leads. Moving between writing, memory, obsession, and the strange logic of ideas that refuse to settle, this is a conversation about thinking as a process rather than a product, and why, in a world that demands answers, there is still power in staying with the question.
On Reclaiming What We Leave Behind
Nadia Beard in conversation with Razia Iqbal
Most of us can name the moment we stopped: the instrument put down, the thing we loved before life told us to be serious. In The Melody of Things, Nadia Beard returns to the piano after years away — not as a professional, but as an amateur in the original sense: someone who does it for love. In conversation with Razia Iqbal, she talks about time, practice, beginning again, and whether it is ever too late to go looking for the parts of ourselves we left behind.
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Thinking Under Fire
Volodymyr Yermolenko and Vakhtang Kebuladze in conversation with Matthew Pye
What is philosophy for when missiles are falling, friends are dying, and the future of your country is being decided by force? Ukrainian philosophers Volodymyr Yermolenko and Vakhtang Kebuladze have spent the war not retreating from the world, but moving closer to its most dangerous edges: lecturing near the front line, arguing with history, playing music, and trying to keep language alive in a time of violence. This is a conversation about thinking as an act of resistance: what war does to ideas, what ideas can still do in war, and why the life of the mind is not a luxury when everything else is under attack.
A workshop on data, design, and reaching the unconvinced
Inna Gadzynska, Nino Macharashvili, Lasha Kveseladze and Diana Deliurman
Some stories are too vast, too painful, or too politically contested for conventional reporting to carry. In this workshop, journalists and data visualisation specialists from Texty and ForSet present the tools and methods they used to make the stories, like that of Ukraine's abducted children, impossible to ignore, not for audiences already paying attention, but for those who weren't, or didn't want to be. A practical session on how design, data and AI tools can make complex, sensitive material travel across indifference.
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Missing Half of the Story
Eliza Anyangwe in conversation with Luba Kassova
Women’s lives are not a niche subject. They are where power shows itself first. So why does journalism still turn women into victims, symbols, exceptions or afterthoughts? Eliza Anyangwe and Luba Kassova ask what the news still fails to see — and what would change if women’s lives were treated as central to the story of power.
Powered by UN Women and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation
Venezuela and What Comes Next
Leopoldo López in conversation with Jon Lee Anderson
For years, Leopoldo López has lived inside Venezuela’s unfinished struggle: as opposition leader, political prisoner, exile and one of the country’s most visible voices for democratic transition. In this conversation, New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson, who just returned from a reporting trip to Venezuela, interviews López about what comes after Maduro — not only the fall of a man, but the harder question of how a country rebuilds after fear, corruption, oil politics, foreign influence and years of broken trust.
A workshop on how to make sense of ourselves in uncertain times
With Tara McDonald, facilitator Irina Matchavariani
Before we have a thought, we have a sensation. Before we tell ourselves a story, the body has already decided whether it feels safe or not. Tara McDonald works with children, parents and adults whose earliest experiences often live beyond language — in the nervous system, in the body, in reactions that can feel inexplicable until we learn how to read them. In this practical workshop, she offers a way to understand our own cues of safety and threat, and to see our responses less as failures than as forms of protection.
Gratitude, Adversity, and the Edge of Astonishment
Brad Barton in conversation with Jake Friedman
What happens when magic stops being about deception and starts being about truth? Producer Jake Friedman and mentalist Brad Barton have both worked at the edge of what the form can carry: the opportunity within grief, the beauty inside broken things, plus the unusual relationship between a magician and their audience. A conversation about what lives on the other side of the illusion.
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The Middle East and the Politics of Refusal
Rachel Shabi in conversation with Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
Some arguments have become impossible to have. The words are familiar, the positions fixed, the outcome predetermined. Rachel Shabi has spent years writing about antisemitism, racism, Israel and Palestine inside debates designed to produce heat, not understanding. In conversation with Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, she asks what happens when societies lose the ability to think together — and whether stories can reopen doors that politics has slammed shut.
How Strange Places Become Institutions
David Belt in conversation with Nic Dawes
Before Newlab, there were swimming pools made out of dumpsters, a country club in a junkyard, and the discovery that cities are hungry for places that do not quite fit anywhere else. David Belt has made a career out of seeing possibilities where other people see waste. In conversation with Nic Dawes, he explores how real innovation begins before there is permission, why cities need places that are neither school, office, museum nor startup — and how the best institutions answer a need people cannot yet name.
Football Kits, Fashion and What’s Lost in Between
Jorg Skorobogatov and Mari Sukhishvili
From the scandalous Eintracht Braunschweig 1973 shirt, to the iconic kits of the 1990s, football jerseys used to belong to fans as symbols of loyalty — now they are everywhere. What happens when clothing brands borrow credibility from football and what does football receive in exchange? [This session includes an opportunity to take pictures in your favorite team’s kit, styled by a professional art director.]
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A Workshop on Speaking Clearly, with Laurence Lee
Some people are taught early how to sound confident. Others are taught to stay quiet. Former foreign correspondent Laurence Lee has spent his career telling stories under pressure, and now works with young people learning how to make themselves heard. A practical workshop on voice, presence, confidence and the small techniques that help people speak clearly when the room, the camera or the stakes feel too big.
What the Body Learns When Safety Disappears
Arwa Damon in conversation with Simon Schellevis
A threat can pass long before the body believes it is over. Arwa Damon has spent her life close to war, first as a journalist and then as a humanitarian working with children. Simon Schellevis works with the body as a place where memory, fear and protection are stored. Together they explore what people carry after danger — and what it takes to teach the body that the threat has passed.
149 photojournalists. 29 countries. One war that the world mustn’t look away from. FotoEvidence — the publishing house dedicated to documentary photography focused on human rights and social justice — has spent a decade building an archive of Russia's aggression against Ukraine. This short documentary draws on that archive, weaving together the images and first-hand testimonies of the photographers who risked everything to bear witness: to the destruction, but also to the strength and humanity that survives inside it. A film about what photojournalism is for, and why the people who do it keep going back.
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Harvey Weinstein, Silence, and the Law That Followed
Zelda Perkins in conversation with Nadia Beard
Harvey Weinstein's former assistant signed a non-disclosure agreement in 1998. Breaking it cost her everything — her career, her relationships, years of her life. What she built from the wreckage changed the law in three countries. Nadia Beard sits down with the woman who exposed the system that enables those in power to buy impunity.
Powered by UN Women and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation
An Open Space for Stories, Questions and Unfinished Thoughts
Help us turn the festival from something you attend into something you create: pick up the mic to share a story, respond to a session, ask a question, or test an idea. You have 5-15 minutes!
The Right to Be Difficult
Nana Darkoa Sekyimah, Tamriko Kordzaia, Rosmery De la Cruz Suazo, Rachel Corp in conversation with Matthew Pye
Culture loves women as inspiration, image, witness, victim, beauty, memory. It is less comfortable with women as authors of the story, makers of the frame, owners of the room. A conversation about women who refuse the decorative role and what happens when they stop being material for someone else’s genius.
Powered by UN Women and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation
What Public Health Reveals About Power
Allison Ekberg Dvaladze and Alexander Kvitashvili in conversation with Shelley Thakral
Every country tells a story through the health of its people: who is protected, who is ignored, who profits, who waits, who leaves, who dies early. Allison Ekberg Dvaladze has spent much of her career working on the systems that shape everyday survival. Alexander Kvitashvili has tried to reform health care from inside the government in Georgia, Ukraine and now Albania. Together with Shelley Thakral, they ask what it takes to make a country healthier and why health is never only about medicine.
Design, Heritage, and the Stories Buildings Carry
Agata Kurzela in conversation with Kirsten Dawes
Every space tells people how to behave, what to notice, what to remember and what to forget. Agata Kurzela works between architecture, interiors, craft and cultural memory, designing places where heritage is not simply displayed but translated into material, movement and atmosphere. Drawing on her recent work at the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi, she explores what it takes to turn history into a lived experience — and why the smallest details of a room can carry the largest stories.
A Workshop with Marcela Mora y Arauji on how to use sport to tell bigger stories, led by Irina Matchavariani
Sport is never just sport. A match can reveal class, power, gender, money, nationalism, grief, migration, beauty, corruption, faith — almost anything, if you know how to lose. Marcela Mora y Araujo has spent her career writing about football as a way into politics, culture and human drama. In this workshop, she and Irina Matchavariani explore how to take a subject that seems narrow, niche or “soft” and use it to tell a much larger story.
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Coda Live at ZEG 2026
ZEG 2026 begins with a question: what’s the story? The answer unfolds through an immersive evening of live storytelling and music, with six stories of long-lost family, opera sung across a divided city, desire discovered later in life, corruption exposed from the inside, survival after solitary confinement, and the search for light as darkness closes in.
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Start your day by exploring Tbilisi on foot with a relaxed 7–8 km run through the city’s most iconic streets. We’ll meet next to the Bicycle Statue on Rose Revolution Square before heading down Rustaveli Avenue, through the Old Town, and along some of Tbilisi’s most beautiful historic neighbourhoods.
Whether you’re a regular runner or simply looking for an active way to experience Tbilisi before the festival begins, everyone is welcome. Expect an easy pace and good conversations! Leading the run is Kristina Skupien, a passionate ultra runner who has completed more than 50 races in Georgia and around the world and is excited to share one of her favourite routes through the city.
Tour Guide: Kristina Skupien
Meeting Point: The Giant Bicycle monument, Rose Revolution Square
Spaces are limited: Sign up here
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The Internews Digital Security Clinic is a hands-on support space for journalists, filmmakers, photographers, artists and civic storytellers working in sensitive or high-risk environments. Over two days, participants can book short one-to-one consultations led by Internews digital security specialists with extensive field experience supporting journalists and media organisations globally.
The clinic covers personal risk assessment, secure communications, device and account protection, source and data protection, and online harassment and surveillance awareness. No prior technical knowledge required. Participants leave with clear, prioritised actions they can implement immediately — with practical protection tool recommendations.
Powered by Global Technology Hub
Meeting Point: Digital Clinic Room (in front of the Arena Stage)
Duration: 15 minutes per session
Spaces are limited. Sign up here
This tour, developed by the Soviet Past Research Laboratory (SovLab) explores Joseph Stalin’s personal metamorphosis, his embrace of Bolshevism in the early years, and its influence on the fate of an independent and democratic Georgia.
The tour begins at the former Tbilisi Theological Seminary, where Stalin and many other political figures studied. Here, we explore Stalin's early involvement in social democratic organizations and the formative conflicts that shaped his political transformation.
Next, the tour moves to the site of the infamous 1907 bank robbery, in which Stalin played a key role — an event that significantly elevated his status within the Bolshevik movement.
We then visit the Palace of Youth, formerly the parliament building of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, to discuss Stalin's stance on Georgian independence and his role in orchestrating the Soviet Russian invasion of February 1921. The tour continues with an examination of the invasion itself, Stalin's ill-fated visit to Georgia in July 1921, and his subsequent purge of communist leaders in the newly occupied republic.
The tour concludes at the former headquarters of the Soviet secret police.
In collaboration with SovLab
Tour Guide: Giorgi Kandelaki
Meeting Point: Amiranashvili State Gallery of Art - Pushkin Sq.
Spaces are limited. Sign up here
The area around the First Republic Square in Tbilisi offers visitors a unique opportunity to trace the development of various architectural styles during the last two centuries. The location is a perfect spot for observing the relationship between the natural mountainous terrain of the city and the environment built across it.
The tour includes several landmarks that showcase Tbilisi’s architectural diversity: The mosaic of Colonial Row (Art-Nouveau), “Zarya Vostoka” Publishing House (Constructivism), the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and the Miners’ Administrative Buildings (Soviet brutalist), the Telegraph Hotel (Modernist) and the Republic Restaurant (Post-modernist). Each of the buildings carries the spirit of its creator, offering insight into how multinational architects adapted to shifting political landscapes – and the compromises they made to leave their imprint on the city.
Tour Guide: Levan Kalandarishvili
Meeting Point: The First Republic Square
Spaces are limited. Sign up here
At ZEG, stories inspire us to see the world differently. Some are shared on stage. Others begin the moment we choose a new direction.
This year, Volvo invites you to experience a story of your own behind the wheel of the Volvo XC60, XC90, and the fully electric ES90. Thoughtfully designed around people, safety, and innovation, each model offers a different perspective on the journey ahead.
Take a moment away from the festival, get behind the wheel, and discover where the road might take you.
Book your Volvo test drive.
Meeting Point: In front of the Main Stage
Duration: 10 minutes
Spaces are limited. Sign up here
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What the Bio Leaves Out
David Belt in conversation with Janna Levin
Every public life eventually gets compressed into a biography: founder, professor, fellow, CEO. It leaves out the institutions, there are detours, bad decisions, obsessions, jobs that do not fit the later narrative, and years that disappear from the official version. David Belt and Janna Levin compare the lives behind the bios — and ask whether the rough, unfinished parts of a person are not incidental to the work, but the reason it exists.
The New Samizdat in the Digital Age
Heather Chaplin and Emily Bell with Natalia Antelava and Simon Allison
A live Tow Center/Columbia Journalism Review podcast recording on The Atlas, the new collaboration between Coda Story and The Continent. In a world where AI slop, algorithmic feeds and platform monopolies decide what we see, what would it take to build a newspaper designed for human trust? Natalia Antelava and Simon Allison ask how journalism can travel through real networks again — and whether, in the age of noise, we can still get the world to read from the same page.
In partnership with The Tow Center
Live Storytelling in an Age of Infinite Replay
Chas Edwards in conversation with Kaizar Campawala
Pop-Up Magazine became a cult phenomenon by doing something very unfashionable: asking people to leave their feeds, sit in a room, and experience stories that would not be recorded or streamed later. Chas Edwards reflects on what live journalism taught him about attention, risk, and why the stories we remember most are sometimes the ones that disappear.
How Memory Engineering Turns Politics Into Ethnic Conflict
Giorgi Kandelaki in conversation with Nutsa Batiashvili
Abkhazia once had elections, jury trials, elected judges and parliamentary politics. Almost no one remembers this. Drawing on SOVLab’s book Abkhazia 1917–1921, this session explores how Soviet totalitarianism and nationalities policy erased a functioning democratic past and replaced it with an ethnic frame that still shapes how the conflict is understood today. A conversation about memory, power and what becomes possible — or impossible — when history is engineered out of existence.
A Screening and Conversation on Friendship, Power and Moral Reckoning
Brent Katz in conversation with Bipasha Ghosh
What happens when your best friend starts working for OpenAI? Director Brent Katz made a film about his childhood friendship group, and how it was turned upside down when, in the months before ChatGPT was launched, one of his buddies showed him a mysterious machine that could do anything you asked. This is a story about friendship under pressure, what it means to be truly close to a tech bro, and how it feels when they start to scare you.
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Climate, Storytelling, and the Limits of Being Right
Kumi Naidoo in conversation with Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
Kumi Naidoo has spent his life inside movements that were right about the future but failed to change it fast enough: blocked by governments, corporations and the slow violence of institutional indifference. The climate movement warned, documented, organized and marched. The world listened and did nothing. In conversation with Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, he asks how movements can keep going and what story they tell after the warning has failed.
An Open Space for Stories, Questions and Unfinished Thoughts
Help us turn the festival from something you attend into something you create: pick up the mic to share a story, respond to a session, ask a question, or test an idea. You have 5-15 minutes!
Care, Power, and the Infrastructure of Survival
Alison Ekberg, Seema Jilani, Tekuna Gachechiladze in conversation with Shelley Thakral
Every crisis eventually lands somewhere: in a kitchen, a hospital ward, a classroom, a refugee shelter, a grandmother’s apartment, a daughter’s phone. Care is treated as soft, private, feminine, secondary. But it is the infrastructure that keeps societies alive. This session asks what would change if care was understood not as charity or instinct, but as power, labor and political design.
Powered by UN Women and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation
Football, Myth, and the Country Inside One Man
Marcela Mora y Araujo in conversation with Joe Sabia
Diego Maradona was a genius and a scandal, joyful and self-destructive, full of class rage and national myth. Marcela Mora y Araujo met him, translated his autobiography, and followed him through different stages of his life. In conversation with Joe Sabia, who documented Roger Federer’s final days on court, she explores what happens when an athlete becomes bigger than the game — and when one person becomes the place where a country argues with itself.
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A workshop on the power of your voice, with Pat Rodriguez
Join voice actor Patricia Rodriguez for a workshop where you explore the power of voice as a storytelling tool. Discover how your voice can command attention, convey emotion, and shape the direction and impact of your story.
A Farm, a Family, and the Future of Georgia
Elene Mikaberidze in conversation with Julia Watson
What can a blueberry farm tell us about a country? In Blueberry Dreams, filmmaker Elene Mikaberidze follows a Georgian family trying to build a future from a piece of land while the political weather around them keeps shifting. A conversation about home, inheritance and documentary as a way of looking closely when the loudest stories are happening elsewhere.
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Inside the Wonderful World of Machine Intelligence
Karen Hao in conversation with Simon Allison
Every empire begins with a story people want to believe. Silicon Valley’s newest one arrived as a promise: intelligence without limits, safety at scale, progress for humanity, perhaps even salvation from ourselves. Karen Hao spent seven years inside that promise, following the people who built it, sold it, funded it, feared it and paid for it. The question now is why the myth worked and what becomes possible once we stop believing it.
Race, Media, Belonging, and Who Gets to Tell the Story
Led by Ianthe Mosselman
For more than three decades, Martin G. Reynolds has worked with journalists and media organizations to strengthen leadership, build cultures of belonging, and improve how communities are represented in the news. Drawing on the Maynard Institute's Fault Lines® framework, his work explores how race, class, gender, generation, geography, and other dimensions of identity shape coverage, trust, and civic engagement. Bring your questions about race and media, leadership, newsroom culture, local news, and the future of journalism.
A Worldbuilding Workshop for the Day After Tomorrow
With Giulia Trincardi, Federico Nejrotti and Viola Stefanello
What if someone from the future arrived and told you the world had ended — but somehow, everything went well? In this workshop, Giulia Trincardi, Federico Nejrotti and Viola Stefanello use the tools of role-playing games and worldbuilding to help participants imagine backwards from a future that did not collapse. A practical, playful session about utopia, catastrophe, and the stories we need in order to build something other than dystopia.
A workshop with Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, led by Eliza Anyangwe
Sex is one of the most written-about subjects in the world, and one of the hardest to write about well. Too often it becomes either clinical, coy, exploitative or embarrassing. Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah has spent years creating spaces where women can speak openly about desire, shame, pleasure and power. In this workshop, she and Eliza Anyangwe explore how to write about sex with honesty, humour, care and political intelligence, without flattening the people whose stories are being told.
War, Children, and the Stories We Tell After Loss
Inna Varenytsia in conversation with Arwa Damon
How do we speak to children about war without handing them only fear? Ukrainian journalist Inna Varenytsia has spent years documenting war, and now works with stories that help children approach loss, courage, absence and love without being trapped inside trauma. In conversation with Arwa Damon, she asks what war stories are for and how truth can be carried to the next generation without stealing the world from them.
Powered by ECPMF within the SAFE Programme, supported by the German Federal Foreign Office
Livestreaming, Chaos, and the Future of Reality
Adam Faze in conversation with Jake Friedman
When iShowSpeed came to New York, the city became a set, the crowd became a cast, and the internet watched in real time. Adam Faze was behind the scenes of what he called a “48-hour livestream movie” — part performance, part logistics nightmare, part new form of mass entertainment. In conversation with Jake Friedman, he tells the story of how live streaming is changing the grammar of storytelling, and why the future of media may look less like a finished product than a controlled disaster unfolding in public.
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Storytelling in the Age of Exile
Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with Razia Iqbal
Few writers have done more to unsettle the stories America tells about refugees, war and its own innocence than Viet Thanh Nguyen. Born in Vietnam and raised in the country that helped destroy the one he fled as a child, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer writes from a contradiction: refugee and American, insider and outsider, grateful and unforgiving. In conversation with Razia Iqbal, he talks about exile, empire and the stories countries invent to live with themselves.
Gaza, Journalism, and the Limits of Bearing Witness
Arwa Damon and Rachel Shabi in conversation with Lindsey Hilsum
Gaza has produced more dead journalists than any conflict in recent history. It has also produced more coverage, more footage, more real-time documentation of destruction than almost any war before it. And still. A humanitarian who left journalism because witnessing wasn't enough, and a journalist who has spent her career writing about the stories the industry keeps getting wrong — on what journalism can and cannot do when the story is this size, this close, and this politically impossible to tell straight.
What We Know, What We Don’t, and Why That Matters
Janna Levin in conversation with Simon Allison
Most of the universe is missing from view. We infer it from shadows, collisions, distortions, waves: evidence left behind by forces we cannot see directly. Astrophysicist Janna Levin takes us to the edge of the known universe — black holes, dark matter, dark energy and the strange beauty of not knowing. In conversation with Simon Allison, she asks what science can teach us about uncertainty, imagination and the limits of human perception.
The Price of Speaking Out
Shahmir Sanni, Chris Wylie and Stephen Kohn in conversation with Julie Posetti
Democracy does not collapse in one dramatic moment. It is bent out of shape by campaigns, data firms, legal threats, political operations and people working behind closed doors. And it takes just one person to make the hidden system visible. Shahmir Sanni exposed wrongdoing at the heart of the Brexit campaign. Chris Wylie blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica, forcing a global reckoning over the weaponisation of personal data. Stephen Kohn has spent decades defending the people who take those risks. We ask them what happens after the world stops paying attention.
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A Masterclass with Jon Lee Anderson, led by Masho Lomashvili
New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson has spent 50 years sitting across from presidents, warlords, revolutionaries and strongmen. In this masterclass, he shares what he has learned about access, fear, performance and power — how to listen, when to push, what to sacrifice for the truth, and how to leave the room with something worth knowing.
Faith, Technology and the Search for Meaning
Rusudan Gotsiridze, Şerife Wong and Alix Dunn in conversation with Isobel Cockerell
We live in an age of extraordinary power and very little certainty. Old institutions have lost authority; new systems promise answers, prediction, companionship, even transcendence — all with the seductive ease of convenience. A bishop, an artist and a technology thinker ask what humans are really searching for when we turn to gods, machines, rituals and oracles, and what kind of spiritual crisis is hiding inside our hunger to be told what comes next.
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Education, Power and the Future of Georgia
Nana Dikhaminjia and Simon Janashia in conversation with Aaron Rasmussen
Education is never only about classrooms, exams or careers. It is where a country decides what kind of people it hopes to raise — curious or obedient, open or afraid. As Georgia’s schools and universities come under growing political pressure, we explore what it takes to protect free minds, and why the future of democracy begins in the classroom.
A workshop with Daniel Howden on how to turn an investigation into a story people understand
A good investigation is not enough. Someone has to understand it, commission it, fund it, publish it and stay with it. Daniel Howden, founder of Lighthouse Reports, leads a practical workshop on pitching ambitious public-interest stories: finding the sharpest frame, translating complexity without flattening it, and making editors or partners see why the story matters now. Participants are invited to bring real story ideas for live feedback.
Soft Power Beyond Propaganda
Bobby Ghosh in conversation with Richard Addy
Countries spend fortunes trying to make the world admire them: stadiums, museums, airlines, film funds, football clubs, global summits, national brands. But what actually travels is often stranger, smaller and harder to control: a song, a footballer, a chocolate bar, a film, a joke, a taste of home. Bobby Ghosh has spent his career watching power move through politics, culture, food, sport and foreign policy. In conversation with strategist Richard Addy, he asks why some stories become influential — and why the most effective soft power is rarely the kind governments think they are buying.
Memory, Power, and the Fight to Define Europe
Volodymyr Yermolenko, Giulia Trincardi and Branko Brkic in conversation with Yoeri Albrecht
Europe is not only a geography. It is an argument about memory, power, belonging and the future. A Ukrainian philosopher, an Italian educator, a Serbian-born South African editor and a Georgian journalist ask who gets to shape that argument now — and what it takes to keep it open.
Powered by the Delegation of the European Union to Georgia
Footnotes to a Murder
In conversation with Shelley Thakral
When a woman is killed, the world learns her name. Sometimes the killer's. Rarely the names of those sentenced to live in the aftermath. Rosmery De la Cruz Suazo was one of them. Thirty-three years after her father murdered her mother Lucy, she built LUCY33 to honour the children, families and futures left behind by femicide — the women who are gone, and the lives that must continue without them. A closed-door conversation about the long afterlife of violence against women, and what changes when those left behind stop being treated as footnotes.
Powered by UN Women and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation
Football, Pop Culture, Devotion, and the Politics of Loving Too Much
Marcela Mora y Araujo, Adam Faze, Emily Bell in conversation with Matthew Janney
Fans are often treated as irrational, but fandom may be one of the most sophisticated emotional systems we have: loyalty, mythology, disappointment, community, projection, grief, joy. From football to livestreamers to celebrity culture, a conversation about what humans reveal when they love something together, loudly.
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The Future of Sovereignty — and What Still Belongs to Us
Anna Kazlauskas, Mahsa Alimardani and Geoff Dyer in conversation with Nic Dawes
Sovereignty begins with a simple question: what belongs to you, and who gets to decide? For nations, that question has been fought over through borders, laws, currencies and stories. For people, it is now being asked of our bodies, faces, movements, data and secrets. As states tighten control and companies turn private life into material to be captured, packaged and sold, this conversation asks what sovereignty means when the territory in question is the self.
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An Open Space for Stories, Questions and Unfinished Thoughts
Help us turn the festival from something you attend into something you create: pick up the mic to share a story, respond to a session, ask a question, or test an idea. You have 5-15 minutes!
Inside the Fight for a Law That Almost Died
Stefan Turkheimer in conversation with Jane Martinson
A bill to protect women from nonconsensual intimate images had passed the House and the Senate. Then Elon Musk helped blow it up. Stefan Turkheimer tells the inside story of how survivors and advocates brought it back — by finding allies in deep Republican districts, working the East Wing, and refusing the easy comfort of cynicism.
War Reporting Through Poetry and Fiction
Lindsey Hilsum in conversation with Yaroslav Trofimov
Reporters are trained to stay with the facts. But some truths of war live beyond the dispatch: in memory, silence, the private bargains people make to survive. Lindsey Hilsum has spent decades carrying poetry into conflict zones. Yaroslav Trofimov reported on Ukraine's war, then turned to fiction to reach for the stories news could not hold. Together, they explore what poetry and fiction taught them about the wars they covered.
Public Support, Private Risk and the Fight for Creative Freedom
June Tan and Michelle Rocha in conversation with Sophio Ebralidze
What does culture need in order to stay alive and stay free? Moving between the UK, Georgia and Southeast Asia, this conversation looks at radically different cultural worlds: places where public investment has helped make art part of civic life, and places where artists and producers have had to build their own support systems from the ground up. June Tan, Michelle Rocha and Sophio Ebralidze explore what independent culture needs most, asking if creative communities can truly exist without funding and how they can grow without becoming obedient to the systems that fund them.
On Production Design, Invisible Storytelling, and the Architecture of Feeling
Michael Bricker in conversation with Joe Sabia
Every room on screen is a thesis. The peeling wallpaper, the quality of light, the chair placed just so. None of it is accidental, and most of it you never consciously notice. That's the point. Michael Bricker trained as an architect, won an Emmy for his design of Russian Doll, and has spent his career building worlds that shape how a story feels before a single line is spoken. A conversation about the design that works by disappearing.
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Music, Listening, and What Democracy Can Learn from Music
Michael Barenboim and Aïda Delpuech in conversation with Nadia Beard
Aïda Delpuech grew up in Palestine and became an opera singer and a journalist. Throughout that trajectory she has been haunted by a question: what can music actually do? Michael Barenboim has spent his life inside the most politically loaded musical project of our time, working with an orchestra that was conceived as a palliative. Together they ask what it means to truly listen, and whether that capacity, cultivated through music, can be the beginning of something that politics has so far failed to deliver.
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Music, Memory, and the Sound of Return
Tamriko Kordzaia and Kordz in conversation with Jake Friedman
Recorded between Tbilisi and Zurich, Find Me moves between electronic composition and classical piano, private memory and public unrest, distance and return. Pianist Tamriko Kordzaia and her son, Alexandre Kordzaia, better known as Kordz, bring the album to ZEG to show how music can carry what families and countries cannot always say out loud.
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Start your morning from the Stamba Hotel entrance with a relaxed 7–8 km run. We’ll begin with a gentle uphill climb to enjoy some of the best panoramic views of Tbilisi from above, before descending into the charming Old Sololaki district. From there, we’ll weave through the city's narrow historic streets, discovering hidden courtyards, balconies, and architectural gems on our way back to Stamba Hotel.
No matter your running experience, everyone is welcome. Expect an easy pace, a friendly group, and good conversation as we discover another side of Tbilisi together.
Leading the run is Kristina Skupien, a passionate ultra runner who has completed more than 50 races in Georgia and around the world and is excited to share one of her favourite routes through the city.
Tour Guide: Kristina Skupien
Meeting Point: Stamba Hotel, 14 Merab Kostava Str.
Spaces are limited: Sign up here
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The Internews Digital Security Clinic is a hands-on support space for journalists, filmmakers, photographers, artists and civic storytellers working in sensitive or high-risk environments. Over two days, participants can book short one-to-one consultations led by Internews digital security specialists with extensive field experience supporting journalists and media organisations globally.
The clinic covers personal risk assessment, secure communications, device and account protection, source and data protection, and online harassment and surveillance awareness. No prior technical knowledge required. Participants leave with clear, prioritised actions they can implement immediately — with practical protection tool recommendations.
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Meeting Point: Digital Clinic Room (in front of the Arena Stage)
Duration: 15 minutes per session
Spaces are limited. Sign up here
A walking tour through the history, art, culture and politics of Tbilisi's past and present. Starting at the Shota Rustaveli monument, the tour moves along Rustaveli Avenue, exploring the city's architectural landmarks and what they reveal about modern Georgian life. Archive photographs mark the turbulent moments along the way — the transitions, the ruptures, and the city as it is today.
Tour Guide: Zura Balanchivadze
Meeting Point: Shota Rustaveli Monument, Rustaveli Avenue
Spaces are limited: Sign up here
Once an industrial hub, Georgia – and particularly its capital, Tbilisi – still carries visible remnants of that era. This tour will showcase former industrial buildings – bread and textile factories, a film atelier, a hospital – which have now been reinvented into modern cultural hubs and have become integral parts of contemporary urban life. How has this reinvention reshaped Tbilisi’s neighborhoods? What benefits and drawbacks come with repurposing industrial architecture? Join us to find out.
Tour Guide: Levan Kalandarishvili
Meeting Point: Fabrika, E.Ninoshvili Str. 8
Spaces are limited. Sign up here
At ZEG, stories inspire us to see the world differently. Some are shared on stage. Others begin the moment we choose a new direction.
This year, Volvo invites you to experience a story of your own behind the wheel of the Volvo XC60, XC90, and the fully electric ES90. Thoughtfully designed around people, safety, and innovation, each model offers a different perspective on the journey ahead.
Take a moment away from the festival, get behind the wheel, and discover where the road might take you.
Book your Volvo test drive.
Meeting Point: In front of the Main Stage
Duration: 10 minutes
Spaces are limited. Sign up here
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On Joy, Desire, and the Radical Act of Feeling Good
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah and Eliza Anyangwe in conversation with Julia Watson
Pleasure has always been political. Who gets to experience it, who is denied it, and who gets punished for claiming it has never been accidental. At a moment when women's bodies are legislated, policed, and weaponised across the world, two writers and thinkers from Ghana and Cameroon speak with Julia Watson to ask a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to feel good — and why is that still so dangerous?
How Online Violence Pushes Women Out of Public Life
Heather Chaplin and Emily Bell with Julie Posetti
A live Tow Center/Columbia Journalism Review podcast recording with Julie Posetti on how gendered disinformation and online abuse are used to drive women journalists, activists and public figures out of visibility. What is often dismissed as digital noise is increasingly a political weapon: designed to exhaust, discredit and silence. A conversation about how misogyny moves from screen to street — and what happens to public life when women are pushed out of it.
In partnership with The Tow Center
Against the Odds
Irma Dimitradze, Mariam Jachvadze and Ketevan Kavtaradze in conversation with Rachel Corp
How do you keep going when pressure builds, resources shrink and the usual ways of working no longer hold? A conversation about trust, solidarity and what survival takes when staying visible becomes part of the work.
Algorithms, Journalism, and the New Fight for Survival
Martha Dark and Nora Mbagathi in conversation with Claudia Milne
The bargain was simple: journalists made the work, search helped people find it. Now Google has broken the bargain. Google’s AI Overviews are accused of taking reporting, turning it into instant answers, and sending less traffic, revenue or credit back to the people who did the work. Martha Dark of Foxglove and Nora Mbagathi of Katiba Institute have been supporting efforts worldwide to push back against Google’s theft of news and in this session will discuss why this is not a niche fight about technology or competition law, but a fight over who gets to make the public record — and who is left standing when the answer machine eats the source.
An immersive somatic experience, with Simon Schellevis
It began with a back problem no test could explain. In trying to understand it, Simon Schellevis found something medicine had not offered him: a way of listening to the body's intelligence. He sought universal components of spiritual or consciousness practices. Through stillness, breath and motion, in this workshop he offers a practical introduction to understanding the body’s signals: where fear lives, what it is and how it causes tension that can protect us, but that can also break us down in the long run, and what becomes possible when we stop treating the body as a problem to solve.
Six Months, One Decade’s Worth of News
It has been a busy news year. Join Phil Chetwynd, Global News Director of AFP, and Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, for an informal, audience-led session on what it means to report on our upside down world.
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Authorship, Erasure, and the Price of the Image
Bao Nguyen and Rena Effendi in conversation with Emma Lacey Bordeaux
Every story has a version that was told and a version that disappeared. The gap is rarely accidental. Two filmmakers who returned to contested histories — and to the people left outside the official record — on what documentary can still do when institutions control the archive.
What Journalism Can Still Do
Heather Chaplin and Emily Bell with Razia Iqbal
A live Tow Center/Columbia Journalism Review podcast recording with Razia Iqbal on what journalism can still do when attention moves faster than understanding. Drawing on decades at the BBC across global news, interviews and culture, Razia reflects on the craft of asking better questions, staying with complicated stories, and making space for nuance in a media world built to move on.
In partnership with The Tow Center
Iran and the Politics of Disconnection
Mahsa Alimardani in conversation with Bobby Ghosh
In Iran, the internet is not just a place where people speak. It is where the state decides what can be seen, what can be proven, and when a society can be cut off from itself. Mahsa Alimardani has spent more than a decade tracking Iran’s digital repression: shutdowns, surveillance, platform bans, disinformation and the growing machinery of control around everyday communication. In conversation with Bobby Ghosh, she asks what happens when authoritarian power no longer only censors speech, but attacks connection itself.
On Empire, Memory, and What Doesn't End When the Troops Come Home
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with Natalia Antelava
America likes to declare its wars over. But wars do not end when the troops come home. They continue in the countries remade by invasion, in the refugees asked to be grateful, in the collaborators abandoned, in the stories nations tell to absolve themselves, and in the memories that refuse to stay buried. Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen come together for a conversation about the afterlife of empire: what America leaves behind, what history keeps returning to, and how to reckon with power without creating another easy myth.
The price of a life in the fight
In conversation with Matthew Pye
The climate crisis is often described as something ahead of us. For many people, it has already arrived — unevenly, violently, and without permission. Kumi Naidoo and philosopher Matthew Pye lead a closed-door conversation about what we owe each other, what we owe the young, and how to keep acting when the future has already been damaged.
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Before and After Guantánamo
Mohamedou Ould Slahi has lived inside some of the defining contradictions of the post-9/11 world: detention, fear, power, faith, survival, forgiveness. In this informal, audience-led session, he sits with the room to answer what people rarely get to ask directly: about Guantánamo, freedom, memory, wars, and what it means to rebuild a life.
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A Crash Course in Our Most Embarrassing Species Habits
Janna Levin, Caoilfhionn Gallagher, Julia Watson in conversation with Armando Iannucci
Imagine an alien lands at ZEG and asks the obvious questions. Why do humans fall in love, draw borders, cook for each other, worship athletes, start wars, invent gods, lie to themselves and refuse to listen? A cosmologist, a food writer and a foreign-policy columnist attempt to explain the species from scratch. An absurd premise for a serious conversation about appetite, belonging, violence, ritual and the strange habits that make us human.
An Intimate Listening Session by Lotte Geeven, introduced by Becky Lipscombe
At the front line in Ukraine, Lotte Geeven recorded one of the most intimate sounds there is: the sound of the heart. The first recording was of Mykola, a teenage icon painter, who embraced his mother goodbye before leaving for the front. That recording became the starting point for TILO — ”Body” in Ukrainian — a monumental audio recording created across the 1,000-kilometer front line. Heard alongside fragments of the soldiers’ stories, their hearts become a form of testimony of people from different lives, brought together by war. Their bodies bear witness where words fall short.
A Worldbuilding Workshop for the Day After Tomorrow
Giulia Trincardi, Federico Nejrotti and Viola Stefanello
What if someone from the future arrived and told you the world had ended — but somehow, everything went well? In this workshop, Giulia Trincardi, Federico Nejrotti and Viola Stefanello use the tools of role-playing games and worldbuilding to help participants imagine backwards from a future that did not collapse. A practical, playful session about utopia, catastrophe, and the stories we need in order to build something other than dystopia.
Sex, Power, and Violence in the Digital Age
Carrie Goldberg in conversation with Julie Posetti
Abuse no longer stays in the room where it happens. It travels through phones, platforms, search results, group chats, and anonymous accounts — carried by technologies designed by men who have never had to fear them, and used to silence, control and punish women at a scale that was previously impossible. Carrie Goldberg has built a legal practice for people whose bodies, privacy and reputations have been turned into weapons against them. She is taking on the most powerful men and corporations on the planet. In conversation with Julie Posetti, she opens up about her real fights against the technology companies — and their billionaire owners — whose dating apps, social media platforms, AI tools and online commerce platforms are destroying women's lives at an unreal scale.
Powered by UN Women and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation
The Music You Inherit
In conversation with Kirsten Dawes
The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was built on an idea: that Arab and Israeli musicians could share a stand, and that the act of listening to one another might do something that politics could not. Daniel Barenboim made it a symbol. His son, Michael, grew up inside it. A closed-door conversation with Michael – concert violinist and activist for Palestinian rights – about what happens to such a vision when the world it was made for has changed beyond recognition.
Dogs, Cities, and the Things Humans Miss
Isabel Evans, Rachel Shabi and Mariam Tsertsvadze
Dogs understand the world differently. They know who walks too fast, who is lonely, who feeds them — and, apparently, who is a dictator. Rachel Shabi borrowed a dog and discovered London’s secret society of park conversations. Isabel Evans filmed the strange intimacy of people walking other people’s dogs. In Tbilisi, street dogs turned up at protests, barked at police and seemed to know exactly what was happening.
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Justice and the Fight for Consequences
Oleksandra Matviichuk, Caoilfhionn Gallagher and Natalia Antelava, moderated by Julie Posetti
We are living through a strange and dangerous moment: more crimes are visible than ever, but fewer people seem to pay for them. From Russia’s war in Ukraine to attacks on journalists, political prisoners and women in public life, impunity is no longer just the failure of justice — it is a strategy. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk joins leading human rights lawyer Caoilfhionn Gallagher, Julie Posetti and Natalia Antelava for a conversation about the hard, unfinished work of making consequences real.
Standards, Trust and the Courage to Hold the Line
Claudia Milne and Jamie Daves in conversation with Rachel Corp
Everyone says they want truth — until it refuses to serve their side. Until recently, Claudia Milne was Senior Vice President of Standards at CBS News, making the difficult calls audiences rarely see: what is fair, what is verified, what is missing, and what language crosses a line. Now she and entrepreneur Jamie Daves — whose work has moved across media, technology, public policy and systems of trust — are building Backbone, a new company helping newsrooms, content creators, and institutions hold the line under pressure, because standards are not bureaucracy: they are the spine we need when everyone wants reality to bend.
Photographing a War You Are Also Living
Serhii Korovayny in conversation with Emma Lacey-Bordeaux
Before the war, Serhii Korovayny photographed Ukraine's environment: its landscapes, its ecosystems, its slow emergencies. Then war arrived and he turned his camera on a country fighting for its life. His photographs are not dispatches from elsewhere; they are images made from inside a place he knows, loves and is watching change in real time. Emma Lacey-Bordeaux talks with one of Ukraine's most important visual witnesses about proximity, responsibility, and what the camera can and cannot hold.
The End of the Game As We Knew It
Marcela Mora y Araujo in conversation with Phil Chetwynd
The World Cup was never just about football. But in 2026, everything feels bigger: more teams, new rules, new technologies, new betting markets, three host countries, and a tournament unfolding inside an America few people can predict. Marcela Mora y Araujo, one of the great writers on football and politics, argues that Russia 2018 may have been the last World Cup as we knew it. A conversation about joy, nationalism, money, spectacle, and what the world’s most beloved game reveals when reality refuses to stay outside the stadium.
Inside the hospitals
In conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Hospitals are supposed to be places where the world’s violence stops at the door. But what happens when fear, immigration enforcement and politics follow children inside? Pediatrician and humanitarian Seema Jilani sits down with Viet Thanh Nguyen for a closed-door conversation about care, migration, state power and what it means to protect children when the systems meant to shelter them begin to close in.
Wrong Turns, Bad Ideas, and What They Make Possible
Geoff Dyer and David Belt in conversation with Isobel Cockerell
Success stories are usually lies told backwards. They leave out the drift, the bad decisions, the false starts, the lucky breaks and the years when nothing quite worked. Geoff Dyer has made a career out of wandering away from the point and finding something better. David Belt has built buildings, institutions and impossible projects through mess, collapse and reinvention. Led by Isobel Cockerell, they ask what failure actually teaches, what it destroys, and why the wrong way may sometimes be the only way.
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What We Choose Not to See
Seema Jilani, Kumi Naidoo, Zelda Perkins and Michael Barenboim in conversation with Natalia Antelava
The information was there. The evidence was available. The pattern was visible to anyone willing to look. Complacency is not the same as ignorance; it is what happens when knowledge becomes inconvenient and comfort wins. A pediatrician, a climate activist, a whistleblower and a musician ask what we choose not to see — and when the cost of looking away becomes impossible to deny.
Common Ground Without False Comfort
Richard Addy in conversation with Hans Gutbrod
Division is the story of our age — it's being packaged and sold. Richard Addy has been looking at evidence that points to something stranger: we are less divided than many believe, which may offer hope for the future. Hans Gutbrod asks a challenging question from Georgia and the post-Soviet space: when does common ground help a society hold, and when does it become a way of avoiding power, memory and conflict? A live conversation about what people still share — and what should not be smoothed over in the name of unity.
Class, Voice, and the Performance of Authority
Jane Martinson in conversation with Laurence Lee
Before anyone hears what you think, they hear how you sound. Class lives in accent, confidence, vocabulary, posture, the instinct to speak or stay quiet. Jane Martinson knows what it means to hide where you came from inside British media. Laurence Lee has spent his career working with voice, trust and communication. Together they ask who gets trained to sound authoritative, who learns to disguise themselves, and whether the crisis of public trust is also a crisis of who gets to speak.
Bible Translation and the Politics of meaning
Patrick Cox in conversation with Malkhaz Songulashvili
Few texts have shaped politics, culture and power more than the Bible — and every translation is also an act of interpretation. In Georgia, where language, faith and identity have always been bound together, Bishop Malkhaz Songulashvili has spent decades thinking about what it means to carry sacred text from one world into another. In conversation with Patrick Cox, he asks who gets to decide what holy words mean, what is lost and gained when scripture changes language, and what happens when technology enters one of humanity’s oldest acts of translation.
What's Left To Mock When Reality Beats You To It
In conversation with Jake Friedman
For years, Armando Iannucci made politics absurd enough to reveal the truth. Then politics started doing the job itself. In this off-the-record conversation, he talks with Jake Friedman about comedy after parody, writing power when power has become performance, and what happens to satire when the most ridiculous line in the script is the one that actually happened.
Technology, Curiosity, and the Future of Human Skill
Aaron Rasmussen in conversation with Ninutsa Nanitashvili
For a long time, technology promised access: to teachers, knowledge, tools and worlds that were once out of reach. Now access is everywhere, and the harder question is what we actually do with it, and how do you tell your own story of expertise? Aaron Rasmussen co-founded MasterClass and Outlier.org, two platforms that tried to make elite learning travel beyond elite rooms. In conversation with Ninutsa Nanitashvili, he explores what technology changes about learning, what it cannot replace, how seat time is an old metric for learning, and why mastery may matter more in a world of instant answers.
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Magic, Machines, and the Things We Want to Believe
Şerife Wong and Brad Barton
Our grandmothers read tea leaves, palms, smoke, dreams. We ask machines to predict our futures, finish our sentences, find our dead, and tell us who we are. Centered around Şerife Wong's live performance piece, The 7 Trillion Dollar Séance, and featuring “the reality thief” Brad Barton, this session explores why every age invents new ways to believe — and what happens when the oracle starts answering back. An open, town hall-style discussion will follow.
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What We Learn When We Lose
With Alix Dunn
After three days of stories about power, technology, memory, war, faith, pleasure, fear and possibility, what do we do with everything we have heard? In the festival’s closing story, Alix Dunn returns to the chessboard and to her six-year-old daughter’s first encounters with strategy to reflect on power, loss, and why the game is never only in the hands of those who think they can see ten moves ahead.
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An Experiment in Astonishment
A performance by Brad Barton
We end the festival with an invitation to lose your grip on certainty. Brad Barton invites us into a final hour of mischief, wonder and impossible questions about perception, belief and the stories our minds tell us. Come prepared to surrender your certainty.