guardian: Call to ban film of Mitterrand's last feast
The Guardian reports on a French campaign to stop a film, based on a book by Georges-Marc Benamou, about former president Mitterand. Friends have called on Mitterand family members to exercise moral rights – granted under European copyright law – to prevent the film from being released.
One of the late president’s adulators, Pierre Berg, the millionaire behind the YSL fashion empire, last week started campaigning to ban the film before shooting had even started. Referring to the author of Le Dernier Mitterrand , Georges-Marc Benamou, he said his one-time friend had ‘touched Judas’s 30 pieces of silver’ by selling his book, which includes the ortolan episode, to a film producer.Berg, chairman of Les Amis de Franois Mitterrand, called on the president’s widow, Danielle, and his illegitimate daughter, Mazarine Pingeot, to exercise their ‘moral rights’ to stop the film. He has been joined by Mitterrand’s brother-in-law, Roger Hanin, a popular film and TV actor, and Jack Lang, the former Culture Minister. According to Lang, the description of the last supper was ‘fictional’. ‘I would advise the director to treat his subject as baroque, surrealist fiction and not make any claim to historical accuracy,’ Lang said. ‘If I was shooting the film, I would turn events into a great social saga. The personality of this man is too rich to be reduced to caricature around invented anecdotes.’