A week before the start of the festivities dedicated to the 7th art, the Croisette is buzzing – ready to welcome Meryl Streep and company. But the 2024 Cannes Film Festival could also be marked by mobilization.
A collective of cinema workers called this Monday, May 6 for a strike “of all employees of the Cannes Film Festival and parallel sections” aimed at “disrupting” them, SurgeZirc FR has learned.
The collective “Under the Screens La Dèche” – which presents itself on its site as the collective of precarious workers at film festivals – brought together around fifty members in a general assembly to vote for this strike, explained one of its spokespersons to the AFP.
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This call to strike against the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, which is extremely rare, does not call into question the opening or holding of the festival itself, she clarified, and the objective is not to harm the films that will be presented. But a strike could “disrupt the event,” she added.
Essential professions such as projectionists, programmers, press officers, those responsible for ticketing or welcoming guests have voted to strike, she detailed.
The reason: a growing precariousness of their jobs, employed by different festivals during the year on temporary missions, even though they do not benefit from the status of intermittent entertainment workers.
Also at issue are the latest unemployment insurance reforms which have tightened compensation rules, to the point that “the majority (of them) will have to give up” their job.
Their demands are clearly included in the call for strike published on the collective’s website: “We demand that the structures which employ us be affiliated to an adapted collective agreement allowing us to be hired under the intermittent regime.
“And that our professions be included in Annex 8 of the unemployment insurance regulations, which applies to workers and technicians hired by cinema employers, with 18 months of retroactivity.”
The 77th Cannes Film Festival is due to be held on the Croisette from May 14 to 25, with around a hundred films in selection, dozens of stars like Francis Ford Coppola, Richard Gere, Selena Gomez, George Lucas, Meryl Streep, Uma Thurman, and Adam Driver, but also tens of thousands of festival-goers.
Almost every year, the festival is the subject of demonstrations and other strike threats. In 2023, for example, the CGT Energie Union threatened to implement power cuts at the festival site.
Moreover, every year, the Prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes issues a decree in advance to prohibit any demonstration around the Palais des Festivals in Cannes.
However, only one edition was compromised by a social movement: the 21st Cannes Film Festival had to be shortened, overtaken by the events of May 1968, with illustrious activists such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Lelouch.
