“Culture and cinema are under attack,” was the warning from mk2 Chairman Nathanaël Karmitz during a timely Zurich Summit panel on the topic of how the culture and entertainment sectors can navigate political interference and social media vitriol.
Karmitz, a leading cinema owner and film financier in France, told delegates that the company had recently organized talks devoted to its movies but that social media abuse had made it a lot harder to continue with the events: “Now we have far right Twitter accounts that systematically attack everything about movies and French movies,” he said. “There are polemics around the events we have organized for movies.”
Karmitz touted France as a country where a company like mk2 can represent a diverse range of filmmakers, including current films by Iranian, Palestinian, and Russian dissident directors. But he warned that cultural freedoms are under pressure.
“One month ago in France, there was a vote in parliament to cancel the CNC [national film body] that didn’t pass by only 17 votes,” he noted. “Right now we have a right wing led by Vincent Bolloré [the main shareholder of the Vivendi group] who is making a large assault on national television. The privatisation of national TV will be a big topic at the next election. This is a very fragile ecosystem. It’s under attack everywhere because these are the first steps to fascism and away from a liberal system. But I’m optimistic too: I believe in people, I believe in companies and I believe in artists.”
Kathleen Fournier, producer of Wikileaks documentary The Six Billion Dollar Man about Julian Assange, talked about the challenge of getting the film a U.S. buyer in the climate but also spoke eloquently about how, in her view, the type of documentaries championed by streamers tend to be of a less political nature and skew towards true crime, personal interest stories and historical films.
Fournier added that while she was optimistic about the future of entertainment she also has concerns about the safety of journalists and filmmakers tackling challenging subjects.
“As a filmmaker, as a producer, there is substantial risk sometimes involved for me and my team. Personally, I moved to Berlin to work on this film. I moved my family to be there. We were gifted all kinds of footage, and we didn’t feel comfortable editing in the UK or in the U.S, because of certain rules there and ways to seize footage. Journalists aren’t protected in the way they are in Germany. That was very inspiring….until the Gaza war happened, and we started to see that even in Germany, with all of its civic mindedness, it’s fallible to ideology and to erosion. It was very interesting to see journalists challenged there in real time and to react to that.”
Researcher, analyst and filmmaker Stephen Follows, who had given a presentation about the perceived correlation between ‘woke’ content and box office failure [his overrall finding was that there wasn’t a strong through line but there were certainly factors for financiers and studios to consider in terms of audience expectation], said that the industry should remain vigilant about self-censorship and avoiding challenging topics.
“I want to be an optimist as well,” he said, “but I really want to make sure that we sound the warning together. The 1970s had much more diverse, interesting storytelling than the 1980s and 1990s. In the 70’s they went brave and interesting, and then it pulled the other way due to Reagan and other reasons. The film sector is generally risk averse and scared and cowardly.”
He called it “absolutely cowardly” that the Venice hit The Voice of Hind Rajab, about the death of a Palestinian girl by Israeli forces, had not got U.S. distribution. “There needs to be agitators. If we leave it and don’t act, the industry acts in horrible ways. The reason MeToo happened is because that when left to our own devices as an industry, we did bad things. Things change for generations when we become more open and kind.”
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