Translator: Elisabeth Buffard Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Hello.
I'm here to share an idea with you tonight
about our children, about our future.
Do you ever worry that your children will grow up
and they will look back at their childhood
and they would think:
"I spent too much time inside, looking at screens."
Or do you worry that your children will grow up
and they will have a hard time to handle emotional stress,
like broken relationships and death?
And how often do you take your children outside?
I mean, really into nature.
Do you worry that your children will grow up
and they will only feel safe in this man-made world
and thinking that the forest is a dangerous place,
full of bugs, bears and rapists just waiting to attack them.
These are my two sons, Frank and Leo,
and our two dogs, Bruno and Caracas the Terrible.
And my mission as a parent
is to prepare Frank and Leo for the day that I am dead.
And when they that day comes, I hope that they won't need me anymore.
Let me share a few stories with you
about what parenting means to me.
You see, I became a father when I was 23.
And at that time, I had just worked as a sailor,
sailing a small sailing boat from Australia to Turkey
over the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and into the Mediterranean.
And when I got back to Sweden, I got a job in the north:
first week I got there, I met a girl,
and we had a baby nine months later.
And that was Frank.
Let's just say we didn't really plan this.
13 months after Frank, we had another baby boy, Leo.
And let's just say we didn't really plan that either.
And like everybody else my age, we broke up.
And in 2008, since that day, I've been living with Frank and Leo
in our little house, by our little lake, in Luleå, Sweden.
And this is the view from our porch.
Frank and Leo grew up,
and one day, when they came home from school,
they asked me if they could play
photorealistic shooting games on the computer.
That's when I took them to the border to Syria,
close to the West Bank in Israel and Palestine.
You see, we made a deal.
I said: "If you come with me to a conflict zone,
you can do interviews with people who have lived through war,
and when we get back to Sweden,
you can choose for yourself if you want to play the games or not.
In my life, I've been really hungry to try a lot of different things.
I worked as a chef, I worked as a sailor,
I worked as a taxi driver,
I worked as a DJ,
and I worked as a bartender,
university teacher and some other stuff.
But for 15 years, I worked as a freelance journalist.
I started to travel down to the Middle East
to help a friend of mine who was filming a documentary in Jerusalem and Hebron.
And that day, back in Sweden,
when Frank and Leo asked me about the game,
it didn't matter how much I tried to explain to them,
all those logical arguments,
it didn't matter how much I told them about the roadblocks,
the checkpoints, the guns, the shortage of electricity and water,
or the tension in the air in Jerusalem
when missiles are being exchanged somewhere along the border.
They just thought the game was cool.
So I had to ask myself one question:
how far was I willing to go to educate my children?
So I took them to Shuafat,
a refugee camp right between Jerusalem and Ramallah
where people burn their trash in the street
and live surrounded by walls and towers.
Just like scenes out of a computer game.
Except that this was real.
I took them to checkpoints
and I took them to the beautiful Golan heights,
with its amazing views,
which also is home to one of the world's most densely mined borders,
right next to Syria.
When we got back, Frank and Leo didn't want to play the games anymore.
And this became viral and also international news.
I got some criticism from parents who thought that I had gone too far,
that I had put my children in danger.
I don't think so.
I on the other hand think that
it's putting your children in danger if you leave them in front of screens,
playing war games all day long.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
Then followed a few dark years of my life,
with a lot of pain and sorrow, with a lot of deaths.
First my father had a severe stroke and then he got cancer.
Then my girlfriend got cancer.
Then a friend of mine, Gustav,
committed suicide when he was only 23 years old.
And after many years of depression,
my mother also committed suicide.
And now I thought it was time for me to explain to Frank and Leo
that life and death are interconnected
and that death is a natural part of life.
So when the funeral home called us
and asked if we wanted to see my mother's body one last time,
I said yes.
It was time for them to see death in the eye
And then Leo asked me if we could put something in the coffin.
And I said yes, I mean, sure.
And I asked him: "What do you want to put in the coffin?"
And so Leo said:
"Grandma liked to smoke a cigarette in the evening,
we should get her a pack of cigarettes."
I said: "Sure! Great idea!"
So we're sitting there in the chapel;
my mother is lying in her coffin in front of us,
looking very dead, you know, like Elvis has left the building.
It's just an empty shell, take it away and burn it, it's nothing left.
And then Leo wants to put the cigarettes in the coffin.
So I pull a pack of cigarettes out of my pocket
and when I flip it around,
we can all see the warning label
that says "smoking kills."
And we all kind of look at each other and I say:
"I don't think it matters so much right now."
And we all start laughing our heads off
right there in that very, very, very serious moment.
And it was so liberating, it was like a prayer, you know,
like setting a bird free.
And we had a great conversation afterwards.
And we talked about life and death
and I explained to Frank and Leo
that you're not getting out of life alive,
so don't take it too seriously.
During these years, to handle the sorrow that I had inside of me,
I started to keep myself very busy.
I did a lot of things: I started to compete in Ironman triathlons
and in 2014, I ran the world championship in half marathon,
and finished in top 12 percent.
(Applause)
And I also started to travel to Barcelona
to go to techno clubs and house clubs
and danced all night long and take pictures.
And for a while, the sorrow inside would go away and I would be free.
I would just be right there on the dance floor.
And then, by chance, I started to listen to this British philosopher
called Alan Watts.
And I would listen to everything that I could find online from Alan Watts,
over and over again.
And he would talk about the destruction of the ego,
he would talk about letting go of things
and he would talk about how man had lost connection with nature.
So I started to be even more outside in the forest.
I mean, I have two big dogs but really, I've been a lot in the forest.
And with time, I would go into the forest at night,
alone, feeling very calm and feeling very peaceful.
Have you ever been in the forest at night,
when a thunderstorm comes in
and the rain falls on the pine trees,
and you can smell that smell of the forest?
Or if you're sitting on a rock in the forest
and from nowhere there's a gust of wind that comes and plays through the trees.
Shhhhh ...
And right there I would become one with the forest.
I would cease to exist,
and for a few hours,
all that pain and suffering would go away.
And as the hours passed, the Sun would start to rise over the treetops
and I would leave some of that sorrow and pain in the forest,
and walk into the light.
But Frank and Leo they were not so happy about the idea of going outside
and being alone in the forest at night.
(Laughter)
I was telling them how terrific it was and they didn't really buy it.
So,
I mean, in our civilization today, we have so few rites of passage.
We don't have really ceremonies that mark change anymore.
And my idea was that
if you can teach yourself how to feel safe and secure
out in the forest at night alone,
you will carry with you something inside
which will make you feel secure,
something that no one can take away from you.
So now I had to ask myself this question again:
How far am I willing to go to educate my children,
to reconnect them with nature
and to cure the fear of the dark?
So we got in the car and I drove three and a half hours
straight into Swedish Lapland and outside of a small village called Arjeplog.
I dropped them off in different places, alone in the forest.
They each had a one-man tent
and they had some supplies and a fishing rod.
And the next day, we had a meeting point
which they would fish their way up streams and we would meet up.
And this was a very, very good lesson for me as well,
because when I saw them disappear into that forest,
I had to practice letting go of them.
So the next day we met up
and I asked Leo how his night was
and he said that he had fallen asleep
holding his electric torch and his foot-long hunting knife, like this!
But he'd done it!
And I don't know if I'm imagining,
but I think that the boys had a different look in their eye
when they came out of that forest,
like something had changed.
Because what I was hoping for
was that they would feel at home in the forest at night
or at least feel that, "I did it!"
And I hoped that they would carry this sensation with them
for the rest of their lives.
And that, in my world,
is one of the greatest gifts that you can send to your children
on their way to growing up.
I worry.
I worry that we are looking at a lost generation of children
made up by easily manipulated individuals
who have spent too much time inside in front of screens.
Children who have never been able to bond properly with their parents
so they don't have a sense of belonging,
and children who are obese
because they've never been into sports or gotten used to being outside in nature,
children who don't have an emotional base of their own.
So when something happens in life,
and I mean children today,
they watched thousands of murders and breakups on television,
but when something happens in their life,
they crumble.
Frank and Leo, you guys, come on up!
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
And remember what Bob Marley and Peter Tosh sang:
you can't blame the youth.
Thank you so much Cannes!
(Applause)