高谈阔论

Every year in January, the Swiss village of Davos provides the backdrop for the World Economic Forum (WEF). This conference is a meeting of the global economic and political elites. It’s true, the public debates and press conferences have been streamed on the WEF website for a while now, in the spirit of a transparent, albeit suspiciously semi-official, audiovisual protocol – but never in the now 49 years of the WEF’s history was an independent filmmaker allowed any insight into the machinery of the event or behind the facades of the institution. Over a period of three years, director Marcus Vetter observed the workings of this machinery. He cast a few but highly concentrated looks at the history of the Forum, founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab, and now very confidently combines individual biographies, historical moments, logical connections and matters flitting about at the periphery to form the complex picture of a global fabric. Klaus Schwab, 79 today, is pleased with the fabric metaphor, since he himself has repeatedly said that the threads of the world may be coming together at “his” WEF, but that its knots acquire meaning and purpose only when the threads are later redistributed responsibly. This film is about no less than those threads and thus the meaning and purpose of the WEF.