“Social cinema” and “civic debates”: the politicization of films through festivals in France

In the mid-1990s, a small group of critics publishing in left-wing newspapers and journals-like L’Humanité, the newspaper associated with the French Communist Party, and the cultural weekly Télérama-heralded the arrival of what they called “social films” in the French film industry, thanks to the work of a few directors. These critics often compared these French filmmakers with British director Ken Loach or the Belgium-based Dardenne brothers. For instance, in a 1997 essay published in the French magazine Positif, Franck Garbarz identified a “new social cinema,” dealing with working-class characters, made by such new directors. For this critic, “social cinema” is not a genre or a school, but is defined by its subject, the people: “these filmmakers, although a minority, prove that our cinema is just as able to engage in the social world as are English filmmakers” (1997: 75). “Social films” focused on the working classes only represent a small proportion of French film releases, estimated at less than 8 percent annually between the end of the 1990s and the mid-2000s (Mariette 2008a).