Nearly every day at this edition of the Cannes Film Festival, audiences have broken into loud boos when the logo of Canal+ appears before a movie. “It’s the right-wing media,” one French journalist explained.
And artists have been speaking out, including Spanish directing legend Pedro Almodóvar, who, during Wednesday’s press conference for his latest film, Bitter Christmas, declared, “I don’t want to judge anyone, but I think artists have to speak out about the situation in which they live in contemporary society. It’s a moral duty,” when asked about the controversy.
He concluded by declaring, “Europe must never be subjected to Trump!” To which the room of international journalists burst into applause.
He was wearing a “Free Palestine” pin.
Here’s the background: On May 12, the opening day of Cannes, 600 members of the film industry, including Juliette Binoche, Adèle Haenel and Swann Arlaud (a.k.a. the “hot lawyer” from Anatomy of a Fall) signed a letter criticizing right-wing billionaire and media mogul Vincent Bolloré, who owns France’s premier pay-TV channel Canal+ and its production arm Studiocanal, and is in the midst of acquiring UGC, France’s third-largest cinema chain. It’s a situation similar to the media consolidation occurring in the United States with David Ellison’s Paramount-Skydance acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery.
The letter, published in the newspaper Libération, warned that Bolloré’s control of the entire film pipeline could lead to a “fascist takeover of the collective imagination.” (Just one month prior, in the book publishing world, more than 100 authors quit the publishing house Grasset, which is owned by Balloré, after its publisher, Olivier Nora, was ousted, declaring that they would not be “hostages in an ideological war.”)
The situation in the film world was then exacerbated Sunday, when Canal+ CEO Maxine Saada announced that the network would essentially blacklist any artist who’d signed the letter and refuse to work with them. “I don’t want to work with people who call us crypto-fascists,” Saada said at a Cannes producers’ brunch.
Almodóvar was prompted to speak out when a Spanish journalist asked how he felt about “Hollywood being in crisis and Canal+ threatening creators.”
The director responded: “Silence is an expression of fear. They’re a symptom that things are going really badly. It’s a serious sign that democracy is a crumbling. Creators must speak out.” He continued, “The worst thing to happen to us to stay silent or to be censored. We have a moral obligation to speak out about all these things. We need to turn against Netanyahu. In Europe, we have laws, there are certain limits. We have to act as a shield against this madness.”
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