The decision by the French new Minister of National Education, Gabriel Attal, to ban the wearing of the ‘Abaya’ (and its male equivalent, the ‘Qamis’) in schools has sparked a heated controversy. Several voices, especially from the left, have risen to denounce the establishment of a “clothing police” and La France Insoumise (LFI) has announced its intention to challenge this decision in the Council of State. However, the ban on Abayas and Qamis is not a subject of much debate within the teaching profession, as shown by a survey conducted by IFOP for our monthly magazine “Screen Watch” last November.
China’s most famous diplomatic “warrior wolf”, Lu Shaye, currently based in Paris, is to be recalled to Beijing where, according to our sources, he will take up a junior post.
The former French detainee in Qatar, Jean-Pierre Marongiu, died on June 13 in Nancy. This engineer had set up a management training company in Qatar. In 2013, he was not only robbed by his Qatari “associate”, but sentenced to seven years in prison. Jean-Pierre Marongiu was not released until 2018. Since then, he has published several books on his imprisonment.
Many films dedicated to Nazi horror and the Holocaust have been welcomed, celebrated and rewarded by the Cannes Film Festival. There was, in particular, the tragicomic ‘‘Life is Beautiful’’ by Roberto Benigni (Grand Prix – 1997), the moving and masterful ‘‘The Pianist’’ by Roman Polanski (Palme d’Or – 2002 ), the dark and poignant ‘‘White Ribbon’’ by Michael Haneke (Palme d’Or – 2009) and the atypical and dazzling ‘‘The son of Saul’’ by Laszlo Nemes (Grand Prix – 2015).
At the end of a selection marked by a majority of films dealing with the duality of suspicion / guilt, the Palme d’Or at the 76th Cannes Film Festival went to ‘‘Anatomy of a Fall’’, a French family drama which dissects the mechanisms of suspicion (and the resulting guilt) weighing on a wife after the (accidental?) defenestration of her husband.
Greatly forgotten on the prize list of the 76th Cannes Film Festival, Nanni Moretti has once again conquered the Croisette, with a poignant work tinged with humor and melancholy through which he casts a worried and sarcastic look at today’s cinema.
After a six-year absence and seventeen years of sobriety (feigned or real?), the great Finnish master of zany comedy, Aki Kaurismäki, is back in the footsteps of his famous “losers’ trilogy” (“Drifting Clouds” – 1996 , “The Man Without a Past” – 2002 , “Lights in the Dusk” – 2006). Presented in the Official Competition, his latest opus “Fallen Leaves” won the Jury Prize and dazzled the Croisette with its offbeat, minimalist aesthetic.
Based on the true story of a family tragedy that shook Tunisia in 2014: that of Olfa Hamrouni and her 4 daughters, two of whom were indoctrinated by ISIS, Kaouther Ben Hania’s “Olfa’s Daughters” brilliantly and insightfully dissects the indoctrination process through which Islamists brainwash the socially and psychologically fragile.
What is the most inelegant and unforgivable thing Maïwenn has done? Pulling Edwy Plenel’s hair out or plunging the opening of the 76th Cannes Film Festival with her insipid and very disappointing “Jeanne du Barry”?
In the first part of this “observatory of teachers faced with the expression of religion in schools” (IFOP survey for WATCH SCREEN, published on 9 December), 45% of teachers admitted to censoring themselves in their lessons in order to avoid possible incidents provoked by certain pupils. In this second survey, one teacher in five said that he or she had been the victim, at least once in his or her career, of a religious or identity-based attack. This undoubtedly explains this!
