Citoyenneté, Cinéma et Passeport sanitaire | Citizenship, Cinema and the Health Pass (CCNA – Cinéastes non-alignées Collectif)

 

 

 TRIBUNE
Citoyenneté, Cinéma et Passeport sanitaire
(CCNA – Cinéastes non-alignées Collectif)

 
 
DISCUSSION
Citizenship, Cinema and the Health Pass

(Collective of Non-aligned women cineastes)

SEE ENGLISH TRANSLATION BELOW

 

Citizenship, Cinema and the Health Pass

(Collective of Non-aligned women cineastes)

Translation from French by Beti Ellerson

 

Our cinema depends on our public and for over a year now, we have been kept apart. Our industry depends on our film viewers, on a network of movie theaters-- strong and active, on committed stakeholders and film professionals, on film enthusiasts. Even if virtual platforms have become a fact of life, they will never replace a genuinely two-way process and the fruitful discussions and direct interplay with the public that these professional experiences and venues provide for our films.

 

Yes, the theaters are open again, but the Health Pass is another measure that creates difficulties for our art. The current reduction in attendance of almost 70% says a lot about the promise of the Health Pass: the audiences will not come.

 

A good number of our audiences are in the streets protesting for their freedoms and against the discrimination that this Pass will bring to our society. It is not only a matter of our films and the movie theaters but it is about the entire social fabric, which, through its entertainment and leisure activities, its conviviality, its culture, is disappearing.

 

How can one now write a script, make a film, questioning the values of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” and of living together, which are the very essence of the stories that we tell in our works, if we do not defend these values in reality?

 

How can we justify the fact that we usually present our films to the public by proposing a debate, but here, we remain silent?

 

How can we continue to talk about cinema when this daily life that inspires us so much is in perpetual crisis and distress?

 

Our concern regarding the duration of this Pass is great when recalling that the closure of the country, public spaces, movie theaters and leisure venues was to last for 15 days when in fact it extended for a year and a half, destabilizing a significant number of citizens and careers.

 

Our Collective was created in 2016 to promote inclusion, defend the freedom of creation, of expression, of the free movement of talent and debate, of all social classes and all the diversity of our country. Our films tell about and bear witness to the harm that these calamities cause: injustice, unpredictability, house arrest and screening. We are against all forms of discrimination and stigmatization.

 

We call on all filmmakers, all artists—women and men—from all audiovisual and film professions, to come forward, to question, with our audience, these measures that kill—as with other sectors of the economy—the most rich and incredible fabric of cinema: a place of escape, of reflection, of debate, of exchange of points of view with others, a propagator of dreams, of poetry, of love.