On the eve of the opening of the Cannes Film Festival, the timing is rather opportune. More than a hundred people, including actress Judith Godrèche, gathered Monday in front of the headquarters of the National Cinema Center (CNC) in Paris to demand the departure of its president Dominique Boutonnat, who must be tried in June for assault sexual.
The objective of this mobilization is to “request the withdrawal of Boutonnat from the presidency of the CNC”, declared to AFP Fanny de Casimacker, general delegate of the Collectif 50/50, which campaigns for equality, parity and diversity in the film and audiovisual industry.
Present at this gathering, Judith Godrèche, who in recent months has become one of the spearheads of the #MeToo movement in France, had already requested the departure of Dominique Boutonnat in February. In Cannes, she will present a short film, Me tooproduced with a thousand people victims of sexual violence who responded to his appeal on social networks.
A trial scheduled for June
The president of the CNC was reappointed in mid-2022 as head of the organization which oversees French cinema, despite being implicated in a case of sexual assault on his 21-year-old godson. Charges that he disputes. The trial is scheduled for June 14 in Nanterre.
In the complaint consulted by AFP, the young man accuses his godfather, with whom he has no family connection, of having tried to “masturbate” him on the night of August 3, 2020, after having bathed naked in the swimming pool. “I masturbate him so that he stops touching me,” he denounces, assuring that his godfather then tried to force oral sex on him. Under fire for several weeks, the president of the CNC has still not announced his withdrawal.
Demonstration coupled with a petition
“Today we are witnessing a mobilization of the entire industry to address the issue of preventing and combating gender-based and sexual violence. There is also a commission of inquiry voted by the (national) Assembly to support and see how to improve our practices. So it is completely inconsistent that, in this dynamic, at the presidency of the CNC there is still a person who is accused of sexual assault,” added Fanny de Casimacker.
+ Information on Judith Godrèche
This gathering is coupled with a petition launched on Sunday calling for “the withdrawal of Dominique Boutonnat from the CNC”, at the initiative of artists and technicians, members of the CGT-Spectacle and associations including the Collectif 50/50, as well as ‘at the initiative of “producers and other professionals outside unions and associations”. “If Dominique Boutonnat benefits from the presumption of innocence, it seems to us (…) essential that our main institution sets an example,” write its authors, whose initiative had collected some 1,500 signatures at midday on Monday.