The controversy crosses the Atlantic. We remember the #OscarSoWhite who criticized the lack of color actors at the Dolby Theater awards ceremony. The same goes for the Caesars. This is in any case the opinion of around thirty personalities of the seventh art. Among them, Mathieu Kassovitz, Olivier Assayas, Aïssa Maïga, Sonia Rolland, Stormy Bugsy ...
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They sign a tribune published on the Parisian website denouncing a ceremony that is too white. And in particular call for better integration of artists from overseas and African and Asian immigration in French cinema. According to Ériq Ebouaney, author of the text, these actors of color would be kept in secondary and stereotypical roles, like the inevitable “film on the cities” .
"This invisibility of actors, directors and producers from this section of the population accentuates the uneasiness and the feeling of exclusion already experienced in real life , " said the actor of Cameroonian origin seen in Femme Fatale , Thirst: This is my blood and The Belleville Cop .
An "American communitarianism"
He explains, by publishing this text, that he wanted to “point to the paradoxes of a country which appoints Spike Lee president of the jury for the next Cannes Festival and which at the same time maintains its colored actors in insignificant roles which will never justify any nomination to the Césars. " And said he wrote this column to supplement the one published by his colleagues in Le Monde in early February asking for a reform of the Academy. " I would have liked it to also call for better inclusion of film professionals from the French overseas departments and territories and from African and Asian immigration ," he says.
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And the actor to quote the box office successes of the films Les Misérables by Ladj Ly and Il already your eyes by Lucien Jean-Baptiste or the audience records on Netflix of the film by Kery James Commuters as proof "of the expectations of a audience far more ahead of this question (...) than the institutions of French cinema . ”
"The adoption of inclusion measures is urgent if we do not want to leave these French cinema professionals with only one option: taking the path of American-style communitarianism to express themselves and flourish in their trades. It's time to open the doors and windows of French cinema. Because talent, like emotion, has no color, ” he concludes.
