Culture
Macron Gives Passionate Speech Defending Cinema To Country That Invented Cinema
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
PARIS, FRANCE. French President Emmanuel Macron delivered what aides are calling a 'landmark address' on the future of global cinema this week, urging world leaders to embrace a New Multilateralism across the creative industries before it is too late.
The speech was given in Paris.
Macron warned that humanity had 'built a civilization of images' and must not 'resign itself to watching it deteriorate,' a message sources confirm was received with great seriousness by the assembled French people, in France, who had traveled to the French capital to hear a French president explain that French things are important.
'We cannot simply stand by,' Macron told the room, standing in a city whose most famous street is named after a word meaning 'beautiful,' whose national film archive contains over forty thousand titles, and whose government maintains a dedicated tax on movie tickets specifically to fund more movies about other movies.
The address was held not far from the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines, where on December 28, 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumière projected the first public film screening in human history to a paying audience. The Lumières were French. The café was French. The audience was French. This detail was not mentioned in any of the post-speech briefings, presumably because it was considered too obvious to require mention, or because mentioning it would have raised uncomfortable questions about what exactly the emergency is.
'He really made me think,' said Gilles Fontaine, 54, a film producer from Lyon who attended the address. 'I had never considered that cinema might be worth protecting. I have worked in cinema for thirty years, but I had never heard it put so clearly.' Fontaine declined to explain what he thought was being put clearly.
A spokesperson for the Élysée Palace said the speech was intended to 'open a global conversation about who gets to tell stories, and who profits from them, and what structures of international cooperation can ensure that creative sovereignty is not surrendered to platforms whose values do not reflect our own.' The spokesperson then left for lunch, which lasted two hours and twenty minutes, and which, by all accounts, was very good.
Critics of the speech have pointed out that France already has the most comprehensively subsidized film industry in the world, that French cinema has never stopped being made, that French films continue to win awards at festivals France also invented, and that the specific threat Macron was rallying against was not entirely defined at any point during the forty-minute address.
Supporters of the speech have pointed out that it was, as speeches go, quite stirring.
At press time, Macron was reportedly working on a follow-up address about the importance of bread.
The story we are making fun of: https://variety.com/2026/biz/opinion/french-president-emmanuel-macron-op-ed-future-creative-industries-1236852793/