What is happening in Iran is shocking.
On Instagram yesterday, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, who received two Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category for A separation (in 2011) and The traveling salesman (in 2016), hailed the “courageous women leading the protests to demand their rights.”
Then he invited “artists, filmmakers, intellectuals” from all over the world to “show solidarity with the powerful and courageous women and men of Iran by making videos, writing texts or in any other way”.
I wonder who will be the first “artist, filmmaker, intellectual” from Quebec to respond to his call.
SO WHERE ARE YOU?
When, in her video, Farhadi pays homage to the “courageous women who lead the protests” and demand “quite simply the fundamental rights of which the state has deprived them for years”, it seems to me that it should fall squarely in the interests of our “artists, filmmakers and intellectuals”.
Normally, there are plenty of artists, filmmakers, intellectuals in Quebec who declare themselves “solidarity” and “feminists”, always ready to defend a Cause, share a #hashtag, change their profile picture, sign a petition , wear a felt square or a colored ribbon.
Quick, quick, like that, from memory, I can give you several names… and the list is far from exhaustive.
Émile Bilodeau, who cares about the fate of women so much, that he denounced a festival where there were only male groups.
Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, who wrote The leaky woman et The forest womanwho is the founder of Mères au front and who has published a children’s album on “the great forgotten women of the history of Quebec”.
Laurence Nerbonne, who declared to Elle Quebec “We will have come to a tie when there are house bands completely feminine.
Kim Lévesque Lizotte, who wrote a series named after feminist Simone de Beauvoir, The Simones.
Xavier Dolan, who once told a French magazine: “I feel that I have a natural inclination for characters who are in exactly the same situation as me. Women are like gay men, they’re trying to fit into a society that’s a space made for straight men, no matter what…I mean, no matter how much progress we have the seem to do… [la société] is still defined by the predominance of men”.
Penelope McQuade, who regularly talks about toxic masculinity and is careful to talk about “people with a womb” to make sure she stands in solidarity with gender minorities.
In short, we are not short of solidarity and feminist artists in Quebec. It’s raining!
Open the UDA directory to any page and you’ll find dozens of men and women who are ready to come to your show to defend inclusive writing, denounce mansplainingthe manspreadingthe hypersexualization of young girls or educate us on the reality of people who have menstruation.
THE BITTER QUESTION
To paraphrase Louis Morissette’s famous phrase about the Medicago vaccine, I would like to ask: “Is the feminist-solidarity-pro-Iranian mobilization of Quebec artists coming soon? I ask for a friend”.