Last months blog updated with a photo and a comment on the Kind Cannes Film Association For me Cannes 2023 was a wake up call to stand up against the prevailing mentality that delights to the point of a sadists satisfaction, in demeaning women on every level, both mentally and physically. This was enshrined in the pervading atmosphere this year which was remicisent of the first Festivals I went to in the mid and late 1990's when the prostituion networks were at their height and visibly triumphant in their operations, where the march of the girls would occur on La Croisette, every evening as if like a promenade of flesh. Groups of girls all wearing short mini dresses and 4 inch heels would gather outside the Casino and then simply strut down the coastal promenade catching looks from the men who invarably got drawn in to an expensive evening where they paid for everything quite literally and would be found the next day burnt out shanghied with no money in their pockets because it had all gone on one night where no business was done but one thing!!!
Today post MeToo such days of the 1990's seem like a bygone era, that one would think and hope would have no reappearance of the prostitute rings. Not so in 2023 they were bold as brass, heavy dewed with expensive perfume, and unrelentant that it was to be- business as usual. Noone was going to stop them if they made the the pimps visable and as threatening as possible. Indeed they had been stopped in 2013 when the prostitution ring or at least one brand of it had been broken by the police or rather Interpol who raided the parties that had gone on for almost a decade or more in the penthouses of one of the most famous hotels in Cannes.
Post MeToo one would have hoped that the atmosphere of Cannes would have been cleaned up in a way that the prositution had been eliminated never to return as if it could be cleaned clear through and deoderised too just like a laundered dish cloth might be from the cleansing revulsion and anger that had prevaded the whole MeToo process of speaking out. Well well not so.....
Then there were the legitamising forces of the sponsors of the Festival and their behavior, which seemed oddly out of tune with the awakened parts of the film industry and their audiences. Many of the sponsors seemed intent in keeping the habits and mores of a begone era where women were seen but not heard as if we had to bow down and say All Hail to the Brand no matter how dehumanising the processes of its marketing campaigns. This was summed up by an event that was to spoil the evening for many who attended one such brand's party, namely Campari who had hired a security wrangler from another time and place akin to an Italian racket and not the tennis kind either. His behviour of pulling and pushing the ticketed guests in the entryline caused a dangerous crush situation for many so much so that large numbers of those in the crush and subsequent fall out filmed the actions of this head wrangler pushing and shoving the people in the ticket line. Once he understood his actions had been caught on camera by, err, wait for it film makers whose job it is to catch people in the act, he curtailed his thuggery and on cue when the camera turned he realised he must make like a good man and let the poor people gain entry without his slapping hand in front and behind them. Many women complained that he had felt their breasts while he beat them away to fit in with his strange method of crowd control which back fired because in disgust many gave up on wanting to attend the event despite having tickets. I observed the scrum which was akin to a rugby match, and I complained to the head of marketing there who was hiding out in a side room with the skinny models and the vision mixers who were trying to make an art of getting the dancers who were on stage clicking their bums up in a pert sexy way presumably to try to corner the market of eroticism that might only impress the sunburnt penniless men who had lost their money to the prostitute promenade. The marketing department thought they were so cool when in actual fact they were so last year in fashion terms, in that they had not taken MeToo into account or its transformative power. Campari lost out because its party was less than capacity with guests entering and then promptly leaving when they saw the style faux pas of the dancing girls.
Oh well? But something did change, the Palm D'or went to a woman director this year so at least the organisers had made an effort to impress the MeToo female lobby if only for the Awards catagories. Out with that, Cannes was the same old, same old, recipe of gender abuse where women were quite literally the bottom of the heap, under the cosh of the four inch high heeled shoed women who ralled against the normal footware of white tennis shoes that had come into fashion there in 2012 after Julia Roberts made her defiant walk up the Red Carpet in bare feet in way of rebelling against the dress code that said flat shoes could not be woren . Now in 2023 the dress code has fallen into line and been changed to allow women to wear flat dress shoes and high heeled shoes on the Red Carpet though the Tennis shoes remain the provence of the film market (Marche Du Film) where the women producers and directors (at least the film crews) would not be seen dead in four inch high heeled shoes because they symbolize oppression and submission to the mis directed authority of men. In that sense there has been one victory but in terms of the overall social standing of women kind, Cannes Film Festival has a very long way to go.
In order to change the atmosphere in Cannes Film Festival to create postive images of women, I have set up the Kind Cannes Film Association. It will try to create spaces where people can go to chill out, that are alcohol free and may provide for meditation and mindfulness practise. It will also campaign to have better non alcoholic sponsors for the festival that will promote lifestyle options that move away from treating woman badly as only sex objects with no intrinsic creative abilities. Cannes is supposed to be an arts and cultural event not a commercial conduit for business interests of drink,fashion and hospitality brands, who often promote women as purely objects to sell their products. When woman are treated as commodities rather than human beings this is only a short step towards the spectre of prostitution which has regained a footing in the world now to such a degree that sex trafficking is common place. For this to happen the film industry have choosen to ignore their own events as if they are not part of the problem instead of readjusting behaviour to be favourable to allow women to thrive rather than to be pressured into modes that only encourage prositution at a marco - level. Ending exploitation at the heart film industry can only be acheived if it seeks to change itself from within.
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