{"id":875069,"date":"2025-10-02T21:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T02:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/02\/culture-cinema-are-under-attack-warns-mk2-chairman-nathanael-karmitz-during-politics-entertainment-panel-zurich-summit\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T21:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T02:31:09","slug":"culture-cinema-are-under-attack-warns-mk2-chairman-nathanael-karmitz-during-politics-entertainment-panel-zurich-summit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/02\/culture-cinema-are-under-attack-warns-mk2-chairman-nathanael-karmitz-during-politics-entertainment-panel-zurich-summit\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cCulture &#038; Cinema Are Under Attack\u201d, Warns Mk2 Chairman Nathana\u00ebl Karmitz During Politics &#038; Entertainment Panel \u2014 Zurich Summit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Entertainment <\/p>\n<div>\n<p>\n\t\u201cCulture and cinema are under attack,\u201d was the warning from mk2 Chairman Nathana\u00ebl Karmitz during a timely <a href=\"https:\/\/deadline.com\/tag\/zurich-summit\/\" id=\"auto-tag_zurich-summit\" data-tag=\"zurich-summit\">Zurich Summit<\/a> panel on the topic of how the culture and entertainment sectors can navigate political interference and social media vitriol.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tKarmitz, a leading cinema owner and film financier in France, told delegates that the company had recently organized talks devoted to its movies but that social media abuse had made it a lot harder to continue with the events: \u201cNow we have far right Twitter accounts that systematically attack everything about movies and French movies,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are polemics around the events we have organized for movies.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n\tKarmitz touted France as a country where a company like mk2 can represent a diverse range of filmmakers, including current films by Iranian, Palestinian, and Russian dissident directors. But he warned that cultural freedoms are under pressure.<\/p>\n<div data-pmc-adm-ad-id=\"1234771711\">\n<h3>\n\t\t\tWatch on Deadline\t\t<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>\n\t\u201cOne month ago in France, there was a vote in parliament to cancel the CNC [national film body] that didn\u2019t pass by only 17 votes,\u201d he noted during the panel, which was moderated by Deadline journalist Melanie Goodfellow. \u201cRight now we have a right wing led by Vincent Bollor\u00e9 [the main shareholder of the Vivendi group] who is making a large assault on national television. The privatisation of national TV will be a big topic at the next election. This is a very fragile ecosystem. It\u2019s under attack everywhere because these are the first steps to fascism and away from a liberal system. But I\u2019m optimistic too: I believe in people, I believe in companies and I believe in artists.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n\tKathleen Fournier, producer of Wikileaks documentary <em>The Six Billion Dollar Man<\/em> about Julian Assange, talked about the challenge of getting the film a U.S. buyer in the climate but also spoke eloquently about how, in her view, the type of documentaries championed by streamers tend to be of a less political nature and skew towards true crime, personal interest stories and historical films. <\/p>\n<p>\n\tFournier added that while she was optimistic about the future of entertainment she also has concerns about the safety of journalists and filmmakers tackling challenging subjects.<\/p>\n<p>\n\t\u201cAs a filmmaker, as a producer, there is substantial risk sometimes involved for me and my team. Personally, I moved to Berlin to work on this film. I moved my family to be there. We were gifted all kinds of footage, and we didn\u2019t feel comfortable editing in the UK or in the U.S, because of certain rules there and ways to seize footage. Journalists aren\u2019t protected in the way they are in Germany. That was very inspiring\u2026.until the Gaza war happened, and we started to see that even in Germany, with all of its civic mindedness, it\u2019s fallible to ideology and to erosion. It was very interesting to see journalists challenged there in real time and to react to that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n\tResearcher, analyst and filmmaker Stephen Follows, who had given a presentation about the perceived correlation between \u2018woke\u2019 content and box office failure [his overrall finding was that there wasn\u2019t a strong through line but there were certainly factors for financiers and studios to consider in terms of audience expectation], said that the industry should remain vigilant about self-censorship and avoiding challenging topics.<\/p>\n<p>\n\t\u201cI want to be an optimist as well,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I really want to make sure that we sound the warning together. The 1970s had much more diverse, interesting storytelling than the 1980s and 1990s. In the 70\u2019s they went brave and interesting, and then it pulled the other way due to Reagan and other reasons. The film sector is generally risk averse and scared and cowardly.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n\tHe called it \u201cabsolutely cowardly\u201d that the Venice hit <em>The Voice of Hind Rajab<\/em>, about the death of a Palestinian girl by Israeli forces, had not got U.S. distribution. \u201cThere needs to be agitators. If we leave it and don\u2019t act, the industry acts in horrible ways. The reason MeToo happened is because that when left to our own devices as an industry, we did bad things. Things change for generations when we become more open and kind.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/deadline.com\/2025\/09\/mk2-nathanael-karmitz-culture-and-cinema-are-under-attack-1236557863\/\" class=\"button purchase\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Read More<\/a><br \/>\n Andreas Wiseman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cCulture and cinema are under attack,\u201d was the warning from mk2 Chairman Nathana\u00ebl Karmitz during a timely Zurich Summit panel on the topic of how the culture and entertainment sectors can navigate political interference and social media vitriol. Karmitz, a leading cinema owner and film financier in France, told delegates that the company had recently<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":875070,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24833,693,1798],"tags":[8169,10320],"class_list":{"0":"post-875069","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cinema","8":"category-culture","9":"category-entertainment","10":"tag-cinema","11":"tag-culture"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=875069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/875070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=875069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=875069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=875069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}