Two weeks ago, the French actor Gérard Depardieu appeared before a judge, accused by two women of sexual assault during a filming. Last December, director Christophe Ruggia was convicted of having violated actress Adèle Haenel. That same month, interpreter Judith Godrèche, 52, told the French senators the aggressions that, she suffered, suffered from the directors Benoît Jacquout and Jacques Douillon when she was 16 years old.
These cases, the most recent and media in France, are only the tip of the iceberg of “a problem that is endemic and systemic” in some sectors of culture. “The finding is clear: sexual violence in cinema, theater, dance or music is endemic and systemic. They are moral, sexist, sexual, economic, sometimes physical violence,” said Deputy Sandrine Russeau, president of the Parliamentary Commission created a year ago to investigate these abuses in this sector on Wednesday.
For six months, this parliamentary group, which was created after Godrèche’s statement before the deputies and after the wave of complaints of several actresses, has collected testimonies of almost 400 people who work in different fields of culture, many of them victims of these aggressions. The conclusions of the work have been presented this Wednesday and reveal that “these professions are overexposed to these situations of violence.”
“Because they are professions in which all sacrifices seem to be justified, due to work and economic pressure, because there is a feeling of belonging to a great family and that there is a higher interest, to serve the creation. They are more exposed by precariousness, strong hierarchy, an exclusive hiring system and an absolute cult of the author of the creation, which allows all the drifts and feeds the Omertá”Rousseau has detailed. Violence situations follow each other in the castingsin the sets, in the promotions, in the filming, in the film festivals and in the concerts “and the Police, the justice does not appear as safe spaces” for the victims, which “feeds that silence of the victims”, denounces the deputy.
The report is the “anatomy of a talent destruction machine, a system that amplifies the sexist culture. The world of entertainment or cinema is the reflection of our society and amplifies phenomena that are persistent in our society and this is still sexist and patriarchal,” said the head of the text, Erwan Balaanant, of the Centrista Modem Party, which adds that “in numerous cases, there are minors exposed to risk situations.” Balaanant has denounced “the culture to the figure of the genius, that creator who, because he has talent, thinks he is superior and can be out of the work codes, as if his creation were above the rules of our society.”
The report details 87 recommendations aimed at professionals in the world of cinema and show, such as professionalizing the agencies of casting (“Sometimes there are sexist comments and from the first test”), introduce to “intimacy coordinators” in the filming or regulate the intimate scenes in the contracts. “Detail, that the script is not limited to saying ‘a love scene,” said the deputy.
“These recommendations are not the heart of the report, but the precise analysis and sometimes unpleasant of what there is,” according to Balaanant. This has concluded: “The culture must be a world that allows society to be changed, that is prescribing progress. Our world has to change. The perception that men have of women must change. And a man who has been raised in this patriarchal and sexist society says.