Dieppe — Anglophones in New Brunswick are voicing their displeasure over this year’s season of FICFA, saying the francophone film festival gives preferential treatment to avant-garde erotica featuring French boobs.
An anglophone rights group is boycotting the Festival International du Cinéma Francophone en Acadie, now in its 29th year, saying English boobs are not properly represented in many of the independent, French arthouse films.
“One year at FICFA, I got tickets to see Jeune et Jolie, a coming-of-age drama about an adolescent girl discovering her burgeoning sexuality, and while the English subtitles made the film accessible to me, I was disappointed to find out it only featured French-language boobs,” said one of the group’s founding members, Jacob Steeves of Sussex.
Steeves maintains the group is not “anti-francophone-boobs,” but simply wants to raise awareness of “forced bilingualism,” and to curtail duality as it pertains to indie festival films with overtly erotic overtones.
“It’s not about stopping francophones from going to see provocative, sexually liberated French-language cinema,” said Steeves, “it’s about the proportional representation of boobs. You couldn’t even get a role in one of these steamy films without having at least one French boob. That’s not fair to us.”
“I was also at FICFA in 2013 to see La Vie d’Adèle — commonly known by its English translation, “Blue is the Warmest Colour” — and I was shocked, not by the explicit depictions of passionate, uninhibited lesbian intimacy, but by the fact that festival organizers chose a film that so clearly exhibited a pro-French-boobs bias, with little regard for boobs of any other linguistic background. I had no choice but to walk out,” Steeves added. “Also, the movie was pretty boring; most of it was just two women acting all melodramatic and yelling, and throwing plates at each other.”
The advocacy group has created a hashtag — #anglosforenglishboobs — it hopes will raise awareness of language issues in the province, and of boobs.
So i guess we are all out of real problems?