Clara Menais

In France, laughing at the powerful has become a risky business. Over the past thirty years, the country’s most outspoken comedians on television and radio have been systematically silenced, sidelined, censored, or even fired. In public broadcasting as in the private media, the same pattern keeps repeating itself: satire is tolerated as long as it doesn’t bite. The moment it takes aim at those in power, the microphone is switched off. From the sets of Canal+ to the studios of France Inter, through the corridors of France Télévisions, and from the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy to that of Emmanuel Macron, this documentary traces the mechanisms of a systematic silencing—one that reveals much about the true state of freedom of expression in French broadcasting.

The roundabout in Aimargues is one of the first emblematic places of the Yellow Vests’ movement, the symbol of an outlier France. The story of this mobilisation is told through nothing more than the images they shot with their mobile phones.

In France, laughing at the powerful has become a risky business. Over the past thirty years, the country’s most outspoken comedians on television and radio have been systematically silenced, sidelined, censored, or even fired. In public broadcasting as in the private media, the same pattern keeps repeating itself: satire is tolerated as long as it doesn’t bite. The moment it takes aim at those in power, the microphone is switched off. From the sets of Canal+ to the studios of France Inter, through the corridors of France Télévisions, and from the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy to that of Emmanuel Macron, this documentary traces the mechanisms of a systematic silencing—one that reveals much about the true state of freedom of expression in French broadcasting.

The roundabout in Aimargues is one of the first emblematic places of the Yellow Vests’ movement, the symbol of an outlier France. The story of this mobilisation is told through nothing more than the images they shot with their mobile phones.