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allocating a considerable portion of their assets and endeavours to this great task with impassioned
commitment and dedication, laying the groundwork for researchers and scientists around the
world, some of whom are Spanish, to work together in the fight against tuberculosis, malaria and
AIDS, thereby making programmes even more effective.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation works with cutting-edge ideas, providing us with a
priceless example of generosity and highlighting the true nature of abject poverty: its futility, its
irrationality, its absurdity and the injustice of it all. It will one day be said about the Gateses, to
paraphrase the splendid verse of Paul Verlaine, that their hearts did not beat in vain.
The National Geographic Society, which has received the Award for Communication and
Humanities, is a prestigious organization founded in Washington at the end of the nineteenth
century that works with thousands of professionals around the world. Throughout its history, it
has played a crucial role not only in discovering and exploring the Earth, but also in informing the
broader public of scientific breakthroughs relating to Nature and mankind’s heritage in history,
ethnology, geography and art.
It also publishes five monthly reviews —one in thirty-one languages with a circulation of eight
million copies— which places the organization in the vanguard of the media specialising in the
marvels of Nature and culture worldwide. Using carefully crafted production and photography
of enormous symbolism and expressiveness, any issue whatsoever related to man’s adventure on
Earth and as part of the universe is embellished by the work of
this publishing, television and film-making society.
It is also a non-profit organization that ploughs its profits
back into its media publications and cultural and scientific
activities. Thanks to the eight thousand research projects and
expeditions it has funded to date and another five hundred that
are presently being undertaken, the Society disseminates the
highly accurate information needed to foster an acute awareness
of the threats stalking Nature and to galvanize the will needed to overcome them.
National Geographic is therefore a beacon illuminating and succouring the precious world
bequeathed to us. Its approach and its message foster and spread the harmony that our times cry
out for. Furthermore, it is an open window onto a world that we want to continue to thrive in all
its splendour, complexity and beauty. Man continues to explore it, but we now have the awareness
and the duty to protect it as something of vital importance for the present and future of mankind.
The Award for Arts has been conferred on filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, who has taken his
personal brand of cinema to the pinnacles of international fame and prestige. The creative passion
and originality of this La Mancha-born filmmaker has transcended frontiers and captivated
millions of cinema-goers the world over. His characters suffer and laugh and are touched by
love, melancholy, tenderness and affection in scenes in which senses of humour and irony arise
alongside crudity, thereby configuring the hallmarks of his unmistakeably personal style.
Immediate realities merge at the heart of his films; realities apprehended in his native La
Mancha, in the youth culture of Madrid in the eighties, which are then forged into the international
kaleidoscope of urban culture of the following decades. He thereby describes a new, avant-garde
aesthetic synthesis, with a Spanish background reminiscent of Mihura, Berlanga and Buñuel, and
provides us with invaluable portraits of the human condition, depicted as true-to-life, yet observed
through the prism of his creative talent and personality.
His films attract the theatre-goer, who perceive in his works not only certain assertions, doubts,
contradictions, fears and hopes, but also new facets of a cultural world in a permanent state of flux.
His films are seen worldwide as a major part of our intellectual and aesthetic world, making him a
benchmark of Spain’s best and most inventive cinema.
This Award to Pedro Almodóvar expresses the acknowledgement of a hallowed film director,
and serves as a spur to the endeavours and production of so many young, hopeful professionals of
the 7th Art in our country.
“The fact that eight out of ten children on
our planet do not enjoy the most basic
of rights is a perennial call to action.”
20
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O
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2006
