“We realize that we weren’t prepared for that… No one is immune to such situations. It’s dramatic, it’s painful and, at the same time, it’s an exercise in humility for us. » Until recently, Laurence Lascary was one of the three co-presidents of the Collectif 50/50, which works for the equal rights of women – their visibility, their status, their salaries, and the fight against sexual assault – in the world of cinema. This was before the “case”. Because, on March 11, a feminist activist invited to an informal evening of the collective accused another woman, a member of its board of directors, of having made an inappropriate gesture towards her. Since then, 50/50 has literally been shattered.
The movement appeared four years ago on the media scene with the photo of these 82 women, actresses, directors, producers, climbing the steps of the Cannes Film Festival. From then on, with their thousand male and female members, but also their diversity of profiles, they became ants and obtained advances welcomed everywhere, obliging here to quotas, there to bonuses for the production of films where the parity of films is respected, writing a White Paper on sexual violence or setting up mentorships. Three employees, a board of directors of twenty-one people and an office.
Postcolonial paternalism
All of this, of course, is not without tension. And the pandemic has stiffened positions. In videoconferencing, the points of view become more clear-cut. “The differences that we had managed to add up no longer added up”, says one of the directors. And then, with workshops and assemblies put on the back burner, the hard core of the council drifted away from the membership. The machine needs to be revitalized. A seminar is therefore scheduled for Saturday 12 March. And, just to add joy to all this, informal reunions are organized the day before.
They are about thirty to find themselves like this, this Friday, March 11, in an apartment on 11and district of Paris. We drink, we smoke, we talk. Some came with a friend. This is the case of the director Aïssa Maïga, who invited the actress Nadège Beausson-Diagne. Activist, the interpreter of Commissioner Sara Douala of the television soap opera More beautiful life is also the initiator of #memepaspeur, which she aspires to make an African #metoo.
Juliette Favreul Renaud, member of the board of directors and producer (Women Are Heroes, Vernon Subutex…), is also there. When the two women meet in the evening, the producer, quite drunk, slips her hand through the actress’s hair. The gesture is important: it is particularly unbearable and symbolic for anti-racist activists, who read in it the translation of postcolonial paternalism. At another time, Nadège Beausson-Diagne asks the producer to stop smoking because her friend is asthmatic.
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