Luce Grosjean to Festivals: Stop Inviting Problematic Directors

Luce Grosjean, head of MIYU Distribution, is known in the independent animation world for picking up both successful and quality-minded animation shorts, such as Negative Space, Garden Party, Bloeistraat 11, Egg, and I’m Going Out for Cigarettes.

In her introductory statement to the 16th Animateka presentation, Grosjean highlighted festival politics and the much-needed effort to isolate toxic elements. As she herself stated:

"Some ideas that were shared during the last few days for making festivals and, more generally, the animation industry safer places. It is not the rules that you should have, but you can think about how radical you want to be, the reasons that you want to react:

• Stop selecting films of problematic directors
• Stop inviting them
•  If it is during your festival that you are learning that one of your guests is problematic, let your staff know, especially the women, because they are the ones who have to be nice with your guests, so the most exposed ones.
• Speak with them because they may not even know they are problematic, especially if you are a male festival director, your voice will be more listened to than ours… Don’t let only women deal with these questions.
• Let other programmers know that we know you are speaking to each other.
• Please, believe women, no women want to be considered a victim or named someone for revenge. 
• Make talks about feminism and other social issues when they are the most people attending the festival, in the beginning of it, so people can share their thoughts during all the festival.
• If you are asking women to speak about feminism, ask men to share their thoughts on how they benefit from being men. We should have equal time to speak about our work than men, our jobs are not being women."

Find the full video of her speech during the 16th Animateka Festival:

The 16th Animateka festival took place 2-8 December 2019. Here is the list of the awards.

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