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.
