 Every year, at the beginning of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, we honour outstanding artists who also are engaged in social, environmental and humanitarian issues and who contribute to making the world a better place. It gives me great pleasure to introduce to you the Crystal Award winners of 2014. Matt Damon. Matt Damon is an accomplished actor, screenwriter and producer, recipient of the Golden Globe and many other awards. All of you have certainly seen a number of his movies. My favourite film of course is Invictus, where he plays the captain of the South African rugby team that he leads together with newly elected President Mandela to become the world champions. I have learned that Matt Damon is really passionate about his engagement as a social entrepreneur. He has long been devoted to environmental and social causes, including climate change science, early childhood education and ending extreme poverty. He is the co-founder with Gary White of Water.org, an international non-profit organisation dedicated to ensuring all people have access to safe water and basic sanitation. And he has engaged in many other organisations and causes like the One Campaign to support effective policies and programmes that are saving lives and improve futures. Damon, please join me on stage. Congratulations. Very much. This is a really, really big honour and I want to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Wait, sorry, that's the wrong speech. This is the Golden Globe speech I never got to give. I know I didn't win, but to be honest, I kind of want to give this speech anyway. It's pretty good. There's this part where I talk about what it was like working with Michael Douglas and I get kind of emotional. It's really good. And then I get a big kiss from Bono. Anyway, I don't know, I'll do that next year maybe. I've got a different speech I want to give tonight. This really is a great honour to receive the Crystal Award. And it's an honour that doesn't really belong to me, but to a whole group of people at water.org, starting with my co-founder, Gary White, who was working on these issues back when I was playing Humpty Dumpty in a high school play. And I wish I could tell you that I'm making that up. I'm very grateful to be here at Davos with Gary because this is a really exciting moment in the life of our organisation. Gary and I got together and started water.org because we shared the same sense of, I guess you could call it, disbelief, that so many millions of people can't get a safe, clean drink of water or have a safe, clean private place to go to the bathroom. And it's not just an issue of their health or their human dignity that's at stake. This is the fate of entire communities, economies, entire countries wrapped up in that glass of water or that simple toilet. These things that the rest of us just get to take for granted. So Gary and I share this disbelief, but we also share a real sense of excitement and a growing confidence even that this is a problem that has a solution. The poor themselves are the solution. The power of the poor, not as recipients of charity, but as citizens, as consumers. Because when somebody's willing to give them a chance to give them a small loan, they're able to take their fate into their own hands, install a toilet or connect to a water utility that for them is literally a lifeline, a pathway to a better life. And that's the idea behind what we call water credit and you're going to hear us talking about it over the next couple of days. We actually can't stop talking about it, just ask my wife. It's because it's not an idea that we've just cooked up. This is in practice it's working and it's building momentum. So far it's helped more than one million people in five countries get access to water and sanitation. And our friends at McKinsey and Company who have better math skills than me tell us that this solution could reach up to 100 million people by 2020, 100 million people by 2020 if we get to help in resources and the expertise that are represented in this room. Today we're poised to begin leveraging the social capital markets to allow even greater scaling and that's something else that we're going to be highlighting over the course of this week. So for all my enthusiasm about water credit and the results it's getting and believe me there's a lot of enthusiasm and we feel really grateful for how well this is going. For me this award isn't so much about what we've achieved, it is I hope a vote of confidence in what we can achieve and what we will achieve because really we're just getting started. We are just getting started and we need you on board because access to water, fundamental as that is, is not an end in itself. Access to water is access to education, access to work, access above all to the kind of future we want for our own families and all the members of our human family. Thank you again. Juan Diego Flores. As an acclaimed Belcanto tenor Juan Diego Flores has performed at most of the world's best known opera houses. His main performances include operas by Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini and many more. But in 2011 he established the foundations in Fornira, Perel Peruch with the purpose of providing young underprivileged children with a musical education. The project is supported among others by Jose Antonio Abreu, the founder of El Sistema in Venezuela, who and who as some might remember is the former Crystal Award winner. We will have the privilege to hear Mr Flores sing a piece at the end of the concert that will follow the ceremony. Juan Diego Flores please join me on stage. Hello everybody. I'm really in awe, I'm really honored and privileged, but most of it I'm really surprised. We only have three years of life. Sinfonia Peru has already achieved in these three years that thousands of children can really be transformed through music. We started in 2011 and we have already almost 15 musical centres dedicating to orchestral and choral practice. In 2009 I travelled to Venezuela and I was really so impressed by what I saw. I saw children happy and totally involved with music and I realised that society could be transformed through the power of music. In Peru we have a lot of poverty as you know. We have a lot of people that don't have water, that don't have electricity. I remember a girl telling me, thank you for creating this musical centre in my place in my neighbourhood. I don't have water, I don't have electricity, but I'm happy to come to the centre and to play my violin and to play and to practice so my orchestra becomes better. In an orchestra in a chorus children learn values, they learn a language of beauty, a language that feels a spirit and makes them better, better human beings. So they could by that transform the society. They go to the families and that attitude is contagious. It really passes that set of values and that spirit to the families and the families, the parents, the mother, the father, they become better and that is also transmitted to the whole community. So it's a contagious process. We are not stopping with the musical centres. We are about to begin also a project, a part of the project to help hand it up children, children who cannot hear, cannot talk. They will sing in a chorus also. You can, you're asking yourself how, but they can. And we are also starting schools of Lutier, which are kids that really build instruments. This is in the region of Cusco, famous for its artisans and craftsmen. So we are going to be providing our project with instruments. So I just want to thank my team. This is really a prize that belongs to them. I really want to help all the institutions involved with the symphony for Peru. And I want to thank you for making this, you know, helping me to sing or to play this symphony for Peru and I hope in the future you will also join us, come to Peru and hear this miracle that is social transformation through the power of music. Thank you very much. Maestro Lorin Mazal, whom we also wanted to honour today, can unfortunately not be with us due to a small injury that happened yesterday and prevents him from travelling. We wish him a speedy recovery. Shirin Nezat is a visual artist from Iran who lives in New York City, where art explores issues of her native society, especially the position of women. She addresses the social, political and psychological dimensions of women's experience in contemporary Islamic societies. Using Persian poetry and calligraphy, she examines concepts such as martyrdom, exile, the issues of identity and feminity. Her photographs and videos have been included in many international exhibitions. In 1997, she created her seminal work, Women of Allah, upon returning to Iran after many years of exile. She has participated in a number of film festivals and most recently won the Silver Lion at the festival in Venice for directing Women Without Men. Shirin Nezat, please join me on stage. Good evening. It's a true privilege to be here tonight. Such an honour to receive this award. Obviously, I'm very nervous as it's quite rare for a visual artist such as myself to address influential audience like you and must be rare for you to hear the voice of an artist whose world is realm of fiction. Yes, I'm an artist, but as Picasso once said, art is the lie that enables us to realise the truth. Yes, my work is fiction, but I believe through fiction we can go deeper into human psyche, deeper into reality, deeper into the universal plight of what is like to be a human being on this planet today. I tend to consider artists as conduits, art and culture as a bridge between people and the people of power. I consider art as a form of communication, art as a way to have emotional and intellectual impact on people without having any specific political or ideological agenda. Now, if you've ever doubted the significance of culture in times of political crisis, I beg of you to look at the Iranian culture as an example. Ever since the Islamic revolution in 1979, where the Iranian image quickly declined from that rich ancient culture of poets and mystics to now suddenly the barbaric land of fanatics and moloss, violence and oppression. It was here, my friends, that Iranian artists and Iranian culture unquestionably became the saving grace of this nation, both in respect to their own people and the world at large. When Iran was burning inside in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution, when Iranians were kept hostage by their own government but isolated in the world, when we suddenly woke up to a country where religion ruled the state, when our people were massacred for the smallest gesture of protest, when families began to be separated for good, when the West decided to take revenge and its embargo hit us hard, collapsing our economy and our medical services, when our government deprived us of the basic human rights, the freedom of expression, when artists, intellectuals, regularly became harassed, arrested and at times executed, our artists began to respond. Musicians, writers, filmmakers, visual artists, intellectuals, all people of imagination worked very hard in light of censorship and all the given boundaries and created the most powerful, imaginative, subversive artistic expression which quickly flourished into the world. Now, if I may take this opportunity and give a message to our newly elected president, Mr. Hassan Rouhani, a man whom I respect, a great deal and whose initiatives have been much welcomed at home and abroad. I would ask the president if, for the past many decades, Iranian artists and intellectuals have protected and preserved our national dignity in the world, now we pass the porch on to you, Mr. President. It is now your turn to be that saving grace of our nation. Mr. President, Iranians living inside and outside the country are badly broken, divided, separated, displaced. Show them unity, show them democracy, show them how we are all Iranians despite of our class, religion, Muslims, Christianity, Jews. Mr. President, let us erase the image of a country that fits the description of access of evil. Let's build a new image of a country that could be a model for peace, democracy and justice. And at last, Mr. President, this is for me. Take care of your artist, your intellectuals and accept that art is no crime, that it is every artist's responsibility to make art that is meaningful, that questions tyranny, that questions injustice. It is artist's task to be advocate for change, for peace and unity. And let me end with last quote by Picasso. He says, art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. Good luck, President. Thank you.