A collective of cinema workers called on Monday for a strike “of all employees of the Cannes Film Festival and parallel sections” aimed at “disrupting” them, one week before the opening of the biggest event of the 7e art.
Questioned by AFP, the festival did not react immediately.
This collective, “Under the screens la dèche”, brought together around fifty members in a general assembly to vote for this strike, explained one of its spokespersons.
This call, which is extremely rare, does not call into question the opening or holding of the festival itself, she clarified, and the objective is not to harm the films that will be presented. But a strike could “disrupt the event,” she added.
Key professions such as projectionists, programmers, press officers, those responsible for ticketing or welcoming guests have voted to strike, she detailed.
Deploring the growing precariousness of their jobs, employed by different festivals during the year on temporary missions, they ask to be able to benefit from the status of intermittent workers in the entertainment industry, of which they are deprived.
They also denounce the latest unemployment insurance reforms taken by decree by the government, which have tightened the compensation rules, to the point that “the majority [d’entre eux] will have to give up” their profession.
“Our alerts and our demands have so far been received with polite kindness, but no concrete proposals have been put forward by the CNC (National Cinema Center, Editor’s note) or the Ministry of Culture,” they insist in a communicated.
The 77e Cannes Festival is to be held on the Croisette from May 14 to 25, with around a hundred films, dozens of stars like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Meryl Streep and Adam Driver, and tens of thousands of festival-goers.
Only one edition was compromised by a social movement: the 21e Cannes Festival had to be cut short, overtaken by the events of May 1968, with illustrious activists like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Lelouch.