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In movies, close-ups of a car, a beer, or a chocolate bar are rarely part of the script. These images, which are in no way neutral, allow brands to wake up the consumer behind the viewer, in return for financial aid for film production. In the jargon, this is called “product placement”, a practice now commonplace. More virtuous, although still in its infancy, “cause placement” now aims to correct the distorting prism of professionals in the seventh art, who, despite their rhetoric, are not always champions of diversity.
Facts are stubborn. The headliners are mostly white and male, recalled, in 2021, the “Cinequalities” study of the 50/50 Collective, which campaigns for parity and diversity in cinema. The survey only counted 40% of women in the 115 French films released in 2019, and barely 22% of characters considered “non-white”.
Another index of the gap between fiction and reality, more than half of the characters are executives, while barely 18% of working people in France fall into this socio-professional category. And, according to a report published in 2021 by the Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority, barely 0.8% of on-screen characters are disabled, well below the share of people with disabilities. in society (about 20%).
Noting that women are still reduced to potiche roles and that the only black person in a cast subscribes to the character of the drug dealer, Olivier Saby founded, in 2019, with four partners, volunteers like him, Impact Film, a structure investment in films “who do more than cinema”. In 2020, the senior cinephile official launched the Observatoire des images, in order to promote a community of professionals who try to move the lines.
Raise awareness
Nothing predisposed this 40-year-old multi-diploma man to pose as a defender of diversity. Having ancestors from Saint-Etienne and Switzerland, “without the slightest trace of interbreeding”, he acknowledges, Olivier Saby went through the benches of Sciences Po and ENA, two social reproduction machines. Both his origins and his career have preserved him from condescending looks, hurtful little phrases, discouragement. “But I always wondered about the role I could play around me”he assures.
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