Can You Help Promote Healthy Life Extension? Enter This Short Film Competition

Tackling aging and working towards a world where longer, healthier lives are a reality takes more than science alone. It takes activism.  Research and engineering provide us with the tools, but these need funding and support to get off the ground. The more resources and support we have, the quicker we’ll be able to act, the more lives we save, and the more suffering we prevent. Most people are afraid to die but they avoid dealing with their mortality. This mentality is now holding us back. Developments could realistically create not just longer lives, but healthier ones, and this message needs to reach a wider audience, enabling a wider global discussion.

This means we need to persuade people

Heales, The Healthy Life Extension Society, is dedicated to promoting and informing the public about life extension and longevity breakthroughs. In this spirit, Heales has announced a Short Film Competition with a grand prize of €3.000. Heales wants you to capture why living longer, healthier lives will be  something to celebrate, not fear.

We caught up with Didier Cournelle, director of the society, to find out more about the competition:

Why do you think there are so few positive portrayals of longevity and life extension in the media?
 
In general, the press prefers bad news to good news. Good news concerning longevity is difficult to describe because it is often made of small, incremental progress. Another aspect is that the idea of radical life extension looks fringe to many people. Last aspect: to speak about longevity is to speak about death and unconsciously, we tend to avoid what reminds us of our own death.

What do you think people who support longevity can do to change this and encourage better public perception and support?
 
Information, good information, great information. Medical progress for all especially old people is going fast and we must tell people this. This information must be correct and attractive. It must not tell that biological immortality is for tomorrow, but that each medical progress is a progress in the direction of a life without time constraint. We have also to explain why longevity is good for the person as well as for the society.
 
What do you hope to achieve with the winning short film entry?
 
I hope the winner will bring a new surprising way to express that the best way to express solidarity to people advancing in age is to tackle aging.
 
Do you have any advice for anyone thinking of creating/submitting an entry?
 
Start immediately to film. You can film yourself, your old pet, something very old and something very young,…. Then, tell us a story about that.

The end film should be between 1-10 minutes long and must be submitted by the 21st of September. 

Thinking about it? Go check out the Competition here!