Yesterday evening, a few minutes after Justine Triet was awarded the Palme d’Or for her film Anatomy of a Fall, Rima Abdul Malak, Minister of Culture in title, said she was “stunned” by the speech “so unfair from the recipient of Cannes’ highest distinction. The latter, trophy in hand, had indeed declared that “this country has been crossed by a historic, extremely powerful, unanimous challenge to pension reform. This challenge was shockingly denied and suppressed. And this pattern of increasingly uninhibited dominating power breaks out in several areas. Obviously socially, it is the most shocking…”
The night, often a good adviser, passed but obviously did not appease the Minister of Culture who returned this morning to the microphone of BFMTV on the controversial remarks of the young director honored by the jury of the Riviera Festival. Reaffirming the freedom of opinion and expression that prevails in the French Republic, the politician rejected, point by point, the criticisms of the distinguished filmmaker on the Croisette.
Faced with the full-scale attack by Justine Triet, who claimed that “the commodification of culture that this neoliberal government defends is in the process of breaking the French cultural exception…”, Rima Abdul Malak expressed her disagree by saying that under the Macron presidency “the government has continued to defend the French cultural exception, adding that culture is not a commodity like the others.”
And to support her point, the minister wanted to be precise, detailing the government measures taken in favor of culture: “We have brought a directive to European level allowing platforms to finance part of French production. There is a 20% funding requirement. Not to mention the aid deployed during the crisis, more than 400 million euros for the world of cinema, and that of the National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image (CNC), a third of which concerns first films.
Ingratitude or incomprehension, Rima Abdul Malak thinks that the voice of Justine Triet does not represent the majority of people in the cinema. She even sees in the speech of the young holder of the Palme d’Or a very marked political orientation: “In Justine Triet’s speech there is clearly an ideological background on the far left, I respect her positions, but she has obviously this argument, she starts from the pension reform which she contests, she continues. (…) She starts from that to criticize today’s aid system to say that before it was better. I would like her to give me the figures and the facts on which she relies. The ball is now in the court of the director of Anatomy of a fall…
