Workers at the Cannes Film Festival are preparing for a potential strike as the festival’s opening approaches. The group, known as Sous les écrans la dèche (Broke Behind the Screens), is calling for a general strike of all festival employees and its associated events.
Representing around 100 workers, including projectionists, programmers, press agents, and ticket sellers, the collective aims to draw attention to the precarious nature of their employment. Many of these workers are on short-term contracts and do not qualify for France’s unemployment insurance program, leaving them without financial support between jobs.
Despite attempts to address their concerns with festival organizers and government bodies, the group feels their demands have not been met. They fear that upcoming benefit reforms will further worsen their situation, forcing many to give up their jobs and potentially disrupting the festival’s events.
The Cannes Film Festival, renowned as the most prestigious event in the film industry, is scheduled to take place from May 14 to 25. Icons such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Meryl Streep are expected to attend.
If the strike proceeds, it could impact not only the main festival but also associated sidebars including Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week, and ACID Cannes. This 12-day event features highly anticipated film premieres such as George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1.
Also, Read Cannes Classics 2024: Experience Cinema’s Finest Restorations!
The full release from the Sous les écrans la dèche below.
For a year now, we, members of the Sous les écrans la dèche (Broke Behind the Screens) collective, have been warning about the growing precariousness of the people working in film festivals. We go from short-term missions to periods of unemployment and despite the intermittent nature of our profession and our striving for the circulation of cinematographic work, our activity does not fall within the French intermittent status benefit plan for show business workers!
The latest reforms of unemployment benefits in France and the one scheduled for July 1st of this year, which will be passed by decree, are further hardening the benefit rules for employment seekers. These reforms are throwing festival workers in such precariousness that the majority of us will have to give up our jobs, thus jeopardizing the events we take part in. Therefore, we demand that the organizations which employ us be affiliated to a collective agreement allowing us to be hired under the status of show business worker’s intermittence and that our positions be integrated to the unemployment benefit system, retroactive to the last 18 months.
Our warnings and demands have been received with polite consideration so far, but no concrete measure has been offered by the CNC or the Ministry of Culture. That is why the upcoming opening of the Cannes festival is leaving us with a bitter taste. In a context of extreme vulnerability and absolute emergency to protect our work, and after consultation and vote of the members of the collective, we call for a strike of all employees of the Cannes Film Festival and of its sidebars.
