France’s top film producer says it will blacklist figures who petitioned against rightwing billionaire

The head of France’s biggest film producer, Canal+, has said the group will no longer work with hundreds of cinema figures who signed a petition voicing concern over the growing influence of the rightwing billionaire owner Vincent Bolloré.

The open letter, published earlier this week to coincide with the opening of the Cannes film festival, was signed by more than 600 figures, including the actor-director Juliette Binoche, the director and photographer Raymond Depardon, the French-Iranian film-maker Sepideh Farsi and the director Arthur Harari, who co-wrote the Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall and is premiering his film The Unknown in the main competition in Cannes.

They said that “leaving French cinema in the hands of a far-right owner” risked “not only the standardisation of films, but a fascist takeover of the collective imagination”.

Bolloré, a conservative industrialist, has a powerful media empire, which includes Canal+ and its in-house production operation, StudioCanal, which is Europe’s leading film and television production and distribution group. StudioCanal’s recent films include the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black and Paddington in Peru.

Vincent Bolloré at a French senate hearing into public broadcasting neutrality and financing in March. Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

He also owns the channel CNews, the radio station Europe 1 and the Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche.

Speaking in Cannes on Sunday, the Canal+ chief executive, Maxime Saada, called the petition “an injustice toward the Canal+ teams, who are committed to defending the independence of Canal+ and the full diversity of its choices”.

He added: “I will no longer work with and I no longer want Canal to work with the people who signed that petition.”

In the open letter, the film industry figures said they were alarmed that Canal+ had taken a stake in UGC, the third-biggest network of French cinemas, with a view to fully owning it in 2028. They said Bolloré would be “in the position of controlling the entire fabrication chain of films from their financing to their distribution and their release on the big and small screen”.