Impossible not to notice his lackluster jacket, his messy hair, his smirk. In the upscale salons of the Maria Cristina hotel, the epicenter of the San Sebastian film festival, in the Spanish Basque country, Jaume Roures attracts attention. At 72, isn’t he the influential boss of the audiovisual group Mediapro, the man who shook French football by buying the rights held by Canal+ in 2018, and still dares to produce Woody Allen, when everyone turned away?
In this fall of 2021, the Catalan, reckless producer of the latest Woody Allen (Rifkin’s festival), came to present two films, Official competition, by Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn, and El Buen Patronby Fernando Leon de Aranoa (in June in French cinemas). The Trotskyist militant, who has become a multimillionaire, is expected to dine with old buddies from ETA. He lends himself to the game of the interview. What about the collection of luxury cars attributed to him by gossips? Disarmed smile: ” It makes no sense. But what do you want? There’s no point denying everything people say about me: even if I said the opposite, people wouldn’t believe me. »
In Paris, in his offices on rue Traversière, Marin Karmitz, 83, receives between a huge portrait of Pierre Goldman, a far-left activist assassinated in 1979, and the poster of the film blow for blow (1972). He made this fiction in his Maoist years, on a strike with the boss taken hostage. Time gone? Its cinematographic group, MK2, has a turnover of 90 million euros – if we are to believe the pre-pandemic results. This does not prevent reading, on the walls of the rooms of MK2 Montparnasse, these sentences of the Grand Helmsman: “Let the old serve the new”, “Let the foreigner serve the national”, “Let a hundred flowers bloom”…
In the heart of Milan, the top floor of the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation is lined with a flag of the Paris Commune dating from 1871. “One of the three listed in the world”, boasts Carlo Feltrinelli, 60, showing the premises that house his group – both publisher and bookseller, as powerful in Italy as FNAC was in France. An elegant row of glass and concrete, which is as much a pyramid as an origami, signed by the “starchitects” Herzog & de Meuron, inaugurated in 2016.
Carlo’s father, Giangiacomo (1926-1972), himself heir to a large industrial family, created the foundation in 1949, the editions in 1954 and, in 1957, the bookstores that bear his name. Under the pseudonym of Osvaldo, in 1970 he piloted the Gruppi di Azione Partigiana (GAP), one of the first armed groups of the Italian far left, before succumbing to a bomb explosion, two years later.
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