The French electoral context leaves Les 3 Continents and its team, like a very large part of the cultural world and our fellow citizens, deeply concerned.
Identity and nationhood cannot be decreed. Just as the human gathering that makes up a nation is never predictable. Although some people might not like it, the far right-wing and its populist allies, Ernest Renan, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Albert Camus and many others would have found themselves on this line of opposition to their petrified and mystifying version of what France is and of this people that WE have become and that we can still pride ourselves on being and continuing to invent.
The extreme right-wing threatens democracy and our inseparable republican principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. These principles embody what our country represents most in the eyes of the world at a time when, here and there, others who have already taken a turn for the worse are finding that nothing is changing apart from the deterioration of their social, economic, human and ecological situation.
Hasn’t history taught us that the extreme right is synonymous with violence, abuse of power, hatred, crime and the restriction of freedoms? How could France, since it became a Republic and stood up against this apocalyptic vision, be so blind as to rally to demagogic, dangerous arguments that are unworthy of this multiple WE that we must preserve and enrich? Has anyone ever prescribed the plague to cure a sick person? How can this inward-looking approach enable us to take a credible, respected and predominant place in the concert of nations and globalization (which is an intangible fact)?
Over the past 46 years, we at Les 3 Continents feel that we have learned both a lot from our differences (each person is different by nature) and from the common bonds that have been forged since Nantes between filmmakers and professionals from France and around the world. By discovering new works and sharing experiences and questions, we have begun to write a history of world cinemas from a place where they are welcomed, shared, discussed and valued with the same concern to celebrate creativity: a very French desire to find ourselves all together in front of the same screen to inhabit the cinema house and the world.
On 7 July, let’s stand shoulder to shoulder with the values that remain the bedrock of our collective inspiration, of our ability to create, to engage in dialogue, to imagine, to share, to stand together, to pass on and to learn by forming a Popular Front.
The Les 3 Continents association and its team.
Update on 2024.07.02
