\n<\/p>\n
The head of France\u2019s biggest film producer, Canal+, has said the group will no longer work with hundreds of cinema figures who signed a petition voicing concern over the growing influence of the rightwing billionaire owner Vincent Bollor\u00e9.<\/p>\n
The open letter, published earlier this week to coincide with the opening of the Cannes film festival, was signed by more than 600 figures, including the actor-director Juliette Binoche, the director and photographer Raymond Depardon, the French-Iranian film-maker Sepideh Farsi and the director Arthur Harari, who co-wrote the Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall and is premiering his film The Unknown in the main competition in Cannes.<\/p>\n
They said that \u201cleaving French cinema in the hands of a far-right owner\u201d risked \u201cnot only the standardisation of films, but a fascist takeover of the collective imagination\u201d.<\/p>\n
Bollor\u00e9, a conservative industrialist, has a powerful media empire, which includes Canal+ and its in-house production operation, StudioCanal, which is Europe\u2019s leading film and television production and distribution group. StudioCanal\u2019s recent films include the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black and Paddington in Peru.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Vincent Bollor\u00e9 at a French senate hearing into public broadcasting neutrality and financing in March.<\/span> Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes\/Reuters<\/p>\n He also owns the channel CNews, the radio station Europe 1 and the Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche.<\/p>\n Speaking in Cannes on Sunday, the Canal+ chief executive, Maxime Saada, called the petition \u201can injustice toward the Canal+ teams, who are committed to defending the independence of Canal+ and the full diversity of its choices\u201d.<\/p>\n He added: \u201cI will no longer work with and I no longer want Canal to work with the people who signed that petition.\u201d<\/p>\n In the open letter, the film industry figures said they were alarmed that Canal+ had taken a stake in UGC, the third-biggest network of French cinemas, with a view to fully owning it in 2028. They said Bollor\u00e9 would be \u201cin the position of controlling the entire fabrication chain of films from their financing to their distribution and their release on the big and small screen\u201d.<\/p>\n They said that \u201cbehind his business suit\u201d, Bollor\u00e9 was promoting a reactionary, far-right project for society \u201cthrough his TV stations like CNews and his publishing houses\u201d and they feared this could extend to film.<\/p>\n \u201cThe influence of [his] ideological offensive on the content of films has so far been discreet, but we are under no illusion: this won\u2019t last,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n The tumult mirrors similar upheaval in the publishing industry. In an unprecedented move last month, more than 100 writers quit the publishing house Grasset in protest at Bollor\u00e9\u2019s control of its parent company, Hachette. \u201cWe refuse to be hostages in an ideological war that seeks to impose authoritarianism everywhere in culture and the media,\u201d the authors wrote.<\/p>\n In a sign of Bollore\u2019s divisive reputation, the Canal+ logo was booed in Cannes at some screenings this year, including for the opening film, The Electric Kiss.<\/p>\n In a senate hearing in 2022, Bollor\u00e9 denied political or ideological interventionism, saying his interest in acquiring media was purely financial and his cultural empire was about promoting French soft power.<\/p>\n After last month\u2019s authors\u2019 revolt over his publishing business, Bollor\u00e9 wrote in Le Journal du Dimanche that those who had quit were \u201ca tiny caste who think themselves above everyone else\u201d. He said: \u201cAs for the attacks concerning my \u2018ideology\u2019, I\u2019m a Christian democrat.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The head of France\u2019s biggest film producer, Canal+, has said the group will no longer work with hundreds of cinema figures who signed a petition voicing concern over the growing influence of the rightwing billionaire owner Vincent Bollor\u00e9. The open letter, published earlier this week to coincide with the opening of the Cannes film festival,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49514,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[3400,24539,7836,1171,3824,1394,24540,5055,10388,1168],"class_list":{"0":"post-49513","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-billionaire","9":"tag-blacklist","10":"tag-figures","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-frances","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-petitioned","15":"tag-producer","16":"tag-rightwing","17":"tag-top"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/49514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}