The Film And Politics

The Film
I've been putting down some first thoughts on the film, which I think should be called something like “Portrait Of A Village”, and had a chance to check them out today with Daniel. He invited me for lunch and I had already invited him, Mana and Steve to eat in the evening. We seemed to agree broadly about the approach and subject matter but....................

Daniel wants to go to the Mairie and not only get it cleared there, so that everybody is in the know as to what is going on, but also to extract some money for the film from village funds. I feel fine with the former point; we don't want to make enemies unknowingly and any help and cooperation on offer would be welcome. The latter point worries me a bit. Daniel says he would need extra tape cartridges for his ancient camcorder and Martine could do with some money. OK again. He went on to suggest we could charge 20 euros for the resultant disk to get the money back and there's the rub. He did say we could give a number of disks away but I'd like to see the film, if we ever get to produce it, on the Web. The 20 euros conflicts directly with my stated aim, which Daniel has agreed, to get publicity for the village. To maximise that, the film has to be freely available. Maybe I can slip it past Daniel and Martine that we put the film freely downloadable from the Web as well as charge 20 euros for the disk. Daniel may not see the conflict but I suspect Martine will.

So the story begins.........................

Politics
Inevitably we got to talking politics and Steve asked Daniel and Mana whom they thought would win the upcoming presidential election. Mana was uncertain, Daniel thought definitely that Hollande would win. Currently, Holland is 5-6 points ahead of Sarkozy in the polls but their combined share of the vote comes to only around 60%. Around 25% appear to be unaccounted for, Marie Le Penn has 17-18% and a left-wing consortium which includes the communists has about 7-8%. The consortium votes would appear to be destined eventually for Hollande but, according to Daniel, the votes for Le Penn won't necessarily go to Sarkozy. Daniel argues that Le Penn's appeal is essentially simplistic and Sarkozy's arguments are complex, so the simple-minded may eventually vote left. Whatever; the outcome is most surely in the balance right now.

We got onto Europe and Mana's hope was that a future Hollande-led France would say “No” to Europe's financiers and powers-that-be and find a new direction. Steve and I both pointed out that such a “No” would be a “No” to Europe more generally. Mana said that that was not necessarily so if the rest of Europe took the same line. And so we came again to the fundamental anomaly of France as a principal supporter of a unified Europe. If there is to be a European club of some sort, there have to be club rules. France is fine with this as long as the rules are French rules; if not, the French feel they should be free to ignore or breach them. (I often wish the UK government would take the same approach.) However, it makes the French positioning of the UK as the European disruptive bogeyman look more than somewhat suspect.

Weather
And the cold weather continues. It was minus 6 degrees during the day today; Heaven knows what the temperature will be overnight.