Building New versus Reporting Facts II: A dialogue with journalist and Le Monde correspondent Mirel Bran

Mirel Bran, Romanian correspondent for prestigious newspapers such as Le Monde (France) or radio (France Inter), continues the RCINY series of dialogues concerning the image building of a country through the media, and, particularly, the complexities of reporting about Romania in foreign newspapers.

How does he choose topics to cover and what is his approach? What are the tensions, if any, of writing about his own country abroad, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of his position?

Following the dialogue there will be a presentation of Mirel Bran’s recently published book, Bucharest, the Thaw / Bucureşti, dezgheţul.

Published simultaneously in Bucharest and Paris in 2006, the book presents 24 diverse portraits of Bucharest and its rapidly changing environment, as contributed by such notables as filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and Cristi Puiu to author Mircea Cărtărescu. Each portrait serves to illustrate, as Paul Morand wrote nearly a century ago, that "The lesson Bucharest teaches us is not a lesson, of art, but of life: it teaches you to adapt to anything, even to the impossible.”