The collective of precarious workers at film festivals wanted to hit hard from day one. During the rise of the steps of the Cannes Film Festival, another form of event took place on the roof of the Palais on Tuesday evening. While the big film stars walked the red carpet in Cannes, a few demonstrators hung a banner from the parapet of the building. In red letters, their rallying cry: “Under the screens, the waste”.
The operation was accompanied by a demonstration in the street. The second group of activists chanted the collective’s slogan, while blowing whistles to attract the crowd’s attention. At the bottom, no banner, but each demonstrator carried their small A4 sheet on which their motto was written. In all, there were around twenty of them, divided into two squads of twelve people.
The Cannes police immediately intervened, while the activists remained behind the gates which separated them from the entrance to the Palace. According to the Deadline website, the collective would have scheduled a face-to-face meeting with the Minister of Labor Catherine Vautrin. For the moment, the cinema workers’ strike has not yet started. “Under the screens la dèche” had announced it a week before the Festival kicked off.
On Monday, the committee spoke during the welcome drink for employees of the Cannes Film Festival. With the agreement of management, they had set up a small table to distribute stickers, followed by a speech. Their demands mainly concern the transition from their status to that of intermittent workers in the entertainment sector: “We demand that the structures which employ us be affiliated to an adapted collective agreement allowing us to be hired under the intermittent regime”, we can say. read in their press release.
Indeed, film festival workers alternate “short-term assignments and non-working periods,” the document continues. With recent unemployment insurance reforms, they fear they will no longer be able to hold on. Jean-Charles Canu, member of the collective, responded on Tuesday, in the street. “Indeed, we festival workers are undergoing a reform which was implemented in 2021 which means that our compensation has fallen by 50% when we do not work between two festivals”, he explained to the AFP. Alongside him, Lucie Detrain, employee at La Quinzaine des Cinéastes, is part of the movement. She deplores a situation “where it is becoming more and more difficult to survive between our contract periods,” reports AFP.