Caesars in the Senate.
The actress Judith Godrèche will meet this Thursday in the solemn setting of the Luxembourg Palace, which could offer a political relay for her speech on the silence surrounding young victims of sexual violence.
Since she filed a complaint against filmmakers Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon for sexual violence when she was a teenager, the actress has become the leading figure in the movement to denounce this violence in cinema.
She is expected at 9 a.m. under the auspices of the upper house, in front of parliamentarians from the women's rights delegation, for a 1.5 hour hearing broadcast on Public Senate.
These elected officials have focused in recent months on access to abortion, abuse in the porn industry and even homeless women, increasing the number of hearings.
They will receive an artist for the first time, its president, Dominique Vérien, told AFP.
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“The idea is not to be a voyeur and to have her come to testify, but to think about what it is possible to do to protect” children from sexual violence, underlined the centrist senator, who hopes that she will be able to “denounce a system, and what happens with minors handed over alone to directors who do with them what they want”.
The actress could return to the more than 2,000 testimonies that she says she has collected from victims of violence since an appeal she launched on social networks.
And on the “level of impunity, denial and privilege” in the cinema industry, which she denounced on Friday on the stage of the Olympia in Paris, during the 49th César ceremony.
“You have to be wary of little girls.
They hit the bottom of the pool, they bump into each other, they hurt themselves but they bounce back,” she declared, describing “the little girls” as “punks” dreaming “of a possible revolution”.
Free the floor
A #MeToo revolution that many believe is still to come.
And that the “curious family” of French cinema, as Judith Godrèche has described it, continues to tolerate violence, under the guise of artistic creation.
More broadly, Judith Godrèche's interventions nourish the hope of feminist movements for a broader liberation of speech.
She has already encouraged several actresses to speak out, such as Anna Mouglalis who accused the filmmakers Philippe Garrel and Jacques Doillon of having sexually assaulted her, or Isild Le Besco who denounced a "destructive influence" and "violence" of the from MM.
Jacquot and Doillon.
Also read: Isild Le Besco: “I experienced a destructive influence with Benoît Jacquot, a loss of self”
“The hope” is that Judith Godrèche “continues to kick the anthill so hard that it doesn’t fall back and that we finally call into question the confusion between freedom of creation and freedom to act” as she wishes, hopes Clémentine Charlemaine, co-president of the 50/50 collective, at the forefront of these issues.
Legislative consequences?
The hearing in the Senate also has a political dimension: elected officials have until now stayed away from the movement which is shaking French cinema.
With sometimes contradictory reactions: two months after President Macron said that Gérard Depardieu, indicted for rape and sexual assault, made France "proud", his new Minister of Culture Rachida Dati denounced on Saturday a "collective blindness » which “lasted years” in the industry.
VIDEO.
Depardieu affair: Macron has “no regrets” for having defended the actor’s “presumption of innocence”
On the side of Parliament, an environmentalist amendment was adopted in mid-February by the Senate to make it possible to withdraw public aid from a film in the event of a criminal conviction for sexual assault on the set.
The president of the delegation for women's rights, Dominique Vérien, does not exclude that the hearing of Judith Godrèche will make it possible to launch new legislative avenues.