Play all audios:
A ROUND-UP OF NEWS, AND THOSE CREATING ‘LE BUZZ’ IN FRENCH CULTURAL LIFE 1. ROMY WITH A VIEW A fictionalised account of actress Romy Schneider has been slammed by her daughter, Sarah
Biasini. _3 days in Quiberon_ depicts Schneider convalescing following a split from her husband in 1981. A journalist from German magazine _Stern_ interviews her during her stay. “The film
contains multiple insinuations and innuendos that are totally misleading,” said Biasini, referring to the references to alcohol misuse. “She was just at a _thalasso_, not a detox centre. I
want people to stop making money from lies.” Vienna-born Schneider held French and German citizenship, and was one of Europe’s leading actresses, and remains a revered cinematic figure in
France. She died in 1982 aged 43. The Franco-Iranian director of _3 days in Quiberon, _Emily Atef, said that while she used some parts of the _Stern_ interview as source material, she wrote
other aspects. “I needed that freedom from real events to reach the character’s truth,” she said in the film’s press release. 2. ORADOUR SURVIVOR’S NOTES PUBLISHED The memoirs of a survivor
of the Nazi massacre in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne have been published for the first time in full, after Mathieu Borie’s son gave his permission. However, some have
called the stonemason’s testimony – written in school notebooks a few weeks after he escaped from a firebombed building – ‘questionable’, with the village’s former mayor, Raymond Frugier,
refusing to write the book’s preface. He believes some of the diary notes, including the assertion that the village was hiding resistance fighters, cannot be confirmed without further hard
evidence. Only six people escaped the razing of the village on June 10 1944, when 642 villages and passers by were executed. Das Reich soldiers were said to be looking for a Nazi believed
captured by local resistance forces. The extraordinary village has remained just as it was left that day, as a memorial to the murdered. 3. BRETONS NOT AMUSED BY REAPPEARANCE OF BÉCASSINE
When a new family-friendly film called _Bécassine_ came out at the end of June, there was one region of France where it was not especially welcomed: Brittany. The reason? The titular
character, from an early 20th century comic strip, is a Breton housemaid depicted as simple-minded and backward. In the film, she heads to Paris and is the butt of many jokes and much
ridicule – in one scene, she is not even able to use a telephone. One Breton independence group called for film-goers to boycott the comedy, saying the film was ‘an insult to all Breton
women’. “We are not asking for the film to be banned, but we are calling on the whole of Brittany society to boycott it so that Parisian producers can think about it next time,” said Ewan
Thébaud from _Dispac’h_, a collective that is “independentist, anti-capitalist, feminist, ecologist and internationalist”. Although _Bécassine_ was one of the first ever female protagonists
in BD (_bande dessinnée_) she did not even have a mouth. She is still widely available in doll form and featured on an official La Poste stamp in 2005, marking the centenary since her first
appearance in the girl’s magazine _La Semaine de Suzette_.