MARLY-LE-ROI, France: No more munching, crunching and slurping at the movies in France.
The country’s increasingly fraught fight against an unprecedented surge in coronavirus infections is putting a stop to eating and drinking at French cinemas, just as they show signs of recovering from the brutal economic bashing of lockdowns last year.
COVID-19 measures kicking in Monday, once France’s New Year’s celebrations are out of the way, will mean an enforced rest for popcorn machines and ice creams left in cold storage. The ban of at least three weeks on eating and drinking also applies to theaters, sports venues and public transport.
For cinema owners hoping to lure back movie fans who switched to home-viewing during the pandemic, not being able to tempt them with candies and soft drinks is another blow. French cinemas sold 96 million tickets in the eight months they have been reopened this year, a jump of 47 percent compared to 2020. But ticket sales are still down 55 percent compared to 2019, before the pandemic, the National Center for Film and Moving Images said Thursday in its look at French cinemas’ annual sales.
Benoit Ciné Distribution, which supplies 70 percent of France’s cinemas with popcorn, sweet treats and drinks, was deluged with both order postponements and delivery requests from movie houses expecting good sales on the final weekend before the food and drink ban, with “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Matrix Resurrections” featuring on billboards.
“It’s like being told to apply the emergency brake to the high-speed train,” said Vincent Meyer, a director at Benoit.
Against raging coronavirus infections, the government is hoping its latest measures will also apply a brake on the fast-spreading omicron variant, but without derailing France’s economic recovery that is a vote-getter for President Emmanuel Macron, facing reelection in April.
As well as the food and drink ban, there’ll once again also be limits on crowd numbers at public venues, with no more than 2,000 allowed indoors and 5,000 outdoors. The limits don’t apply to election campaign rallies, infuriating some musicians who will no longer be allowed to perform for stand-up crowds. Some suggested, only half-jokingly, that they may rebrand their concerts as political rallies.
France’s COVID-19 death toll is already at more than 123,000 people. New infections are higher than they have ever been and hospitals are again overburdened with the gravely sick. Many health experts had called for stricter measures than those announced by the government this week, with some pushing for renewed closures of schools and businesses. France reported another 206,243 coronavirus infections Thursday, just shy of the record 208,000 cases set Wednesday.
Michel Enten, manager of the Le Fontenelle cinema in the town of Marly-le-Roi west of Paris, was relieved to stay open, even if he’ll no longer be able to sell cotton candy, popcorn, ices and drinks. He says he has lost about half of his clientele during the pandemic. He expects the ban on food and drinks to hit larger cinemas particularly hard and says it may even help lure back fans to smaller, arty cinemas like his.
“There are lots of people who hate hearing the sounds of popcorn in the auditoriums,” he said. “Perhaps we will win over new movie fans, people who were watching Netflix and are saying to themselves, ‘Now there’s no more popcorn, let’s run to the cinema.’“
Cinemagoers said they understood the need for new measures, although some struggled to see any logic in not being able to indulge their sweet cravings in cinemas or theaters when restaurants are still allowed to serve food and drinks.
“It’s going to be strange to just go to the cinema and do without all these little moments,” Vincent Bourdais said as he lined up in Marly-le-Roi for “Spiderman.”
“Often, when one imagines the cinema, one thinks of the auditorium, the beautiful posters, the popcorn, the smells.”
Cut! Popcorn, candy ban hits French cinemas’ virus recovery
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Cut! Popcorn, candy ban hits French cinemas’ virus recovery
- COVID-19 measures kicking in Monday will mean an enforced rest for popcorn machines and ice creams
- The ban of at least 3 weeks on eating and drinking applies to theaters, sports venues and public transport
Rapper Werenoi, France’s biggest-selling music artist in recent years, dies at age 31
PARIS: Rapper Werenoi, France’s biggest-selling music artist in recent years, has died at the age of 31, his producer and record company said.
The artist, whose real name was Jérémy Bana Owona, was the number 1 album seller in France in 2023 and 2024 according to the ranking of the National Union of Phonographic Industry, which includes in-store and e-commerce sales as well as plays on streaming services.
“It’s with immense sadness that we’ve learned of Werenoi’s passing,” his record company Believe said on Instagram. “All our thoughts are with his family, loved ones, his team and everyone who knew him.”
“Rest in peace my brother, I love you,” his producer Babs posted on X.
French media report Werenoi died early Saturday in a Paris hospital. The cause of his death has not been made public.
Werenoi first became known to the French public in 2021 when he posted his song “Guadalajara” on YouTube and it was viewed hundreds of thousand times.
He released three albums, “Carré” in 2023, “Pyramide” the next year and “Diamant Noir” last month, making him one of the biggest names in French rap.
Several French rappers posted tributes on social media. French-Malian pop star Aya Nakamura, who featured on his second album, wrote : “Rest in peace my dude. A news that saddens me and courage to the loved ones especially.”
“He made a difference for the quality of his songs, his melodies and his punchlines,” singer Pascal Obispo, who had accompanied Werenoi on the piano at a 2023 Paris concert, told French newspaper Le Parisien.
Adidas, Puma family feud to be turned into TV series
CANNES: The bitter brotherly feud that sparked the creation of sports-shoe brands Adidas and Puma in the same small German town in the 1940s is to be turned into a television series with the help of family archives, its producers announced Sunday.
Hollywood-based film producer No Fat Ego is backing the project, which has the blessing of the family behind the Adidas empire founded by Adolf “Adi” Dassler.
It will delve into one of the most fascinating fraternal blow-ups in corporate history, which pitted Adi against his brother Rudolf (“Rudi“) who went on to create rival Puma.
The two men jointly ran a family-owned footwear company before falling out during World War II, with their post-conflict animus splitting their town of Herzogenaurach to this day.
Scriptwriter Mark Williams, behind the hit Netflix series “Ozark,” has been hired to lead the project and is currently going through Dassler family home videos and memorabilia to work on the story.
“Everybody knows the brands, but the story behind them is something we don’t really fully know,” Williams told AFP at the Cannes film festival.
One of the most sensitive areas — particularly for the reputations of the multi-billion-dollar footwear companies today — will be how the brothers are portrayed during the war period.
Both became members of the Nazi party in the 1930s, as was customary for the business elite at the time.
Rudi went to fight, however, and was arrested by Allied forces on his return to a defeated Germany.
“Adi stayed home and tried to keep the company alive,” Williams added.
Their factory was seized as part of the war effort and converted into a munitions plant.
The series promises to be a “Succession-type drama between the family” set over several generations, Williams explained, comparing it to the earlier hit HBO series.
The head of No Fat Ego, Niels Juul, who has produced Martin Scorsese’s most recent movies, said he was originally drawn to the story after learning about Adidas’s collaboration with legendary black American runner Jesse Owens.
Partly thanks to Adidas’s innovative spiked shoes, Owens became one of the stars of the 1936 Berlin Olympics which Hitler had hoped would showcase white German supremacy.
No Fat Ego intends to develop the series with full editorial independence before offering it to streaming platforms.
“We want to have the creative control, and Mark has to have absolute silence and quiet to do what he does,” Juul told AFP.
Iraq’s first filmmaker in Cannes says sanctions no piece of cake
CANNES: Hasan Hadi, the first filmmaker from Iraq to be selected for the prestigious Cannes Festival, said economic embargoes like those imposed in his childhood under Saddam Hussein did not work.
“Sanctions empower dictators,” he told AFP, as they concentrate scant resources in their hands and only make them “more brutal.”
“In the history of the world, there was no one time when they (imposed) sanctions and the president couldn’t eat.”
Hadi’s first feature film, “The President’s Cake,” has received very good reviews since premiering Friday in the Directors’ Fortnight section.
Cinema publication Deadline said it was “head and shoulders above” some of the films in the running for the festival’s Palme d’Or top prize, and “could turn out to be Iraq’s first nominee for an Oscar.”
The film follows nine-year-old Lamia after she has the misfortune of being picked by her school teacher to bake the class a cake for the president’s birthday, or be denounced for disloyalty.
It is the early 1990s, the country is under crippling UN sanctions. She and her grandmother — with whom she shares a reed home in Iraq’s southern marshlands — can barely afford to eat.
As they set off into town to hunt down unaffordable ingredients, with Lamia’s pet cockerel and their last meagre belongings to sell, the film plunges into the social reality — and everyday petty corruption — of 1990s Iraq.
The near-total trade and financial embargo imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait “demolished the moral fabric of society,” Hadi said.
It sent the country “hundreds of years back.”
The filmmaker said he did not taste cake until he was in his early teens, after the US-led invasion in 2003 toppled Saddam and sanctions were lifted.
Instead, with processed sugar and eggs out of reach, there was “date cake” — whose main ingredient was squished dates, sometimes with a candle on top.
“As a kid you’re sad that you’re not getting your cake,” he said. But as you grow up, you realize what your parents must have gone through to put food on the table.
“Not only my family, but all of these people had to sell literally everything,” he said. “There were people that were even selling their door frames.”
Hadi and his team shot the film entirely in Iraq.
It beautifully captures the ancient wetlands in the south of the country, listed as a World Heritage Site since 2016 and reputedly the home of the biblical Garden of Eden.
Saddam drained them in the 1990s, trying to flush out rebels hiding in the reeds.
But after the US-led invasion, authorities opened up the valves and the wetlands flourished again — even if they are now threatened by climate change.
Hadi said he chose the location partly to make the point that “the marshes stayed and Saddam went away.”
To re-create the Iraq of his youth, Hadi and his crew paid close attention to detail, amassing vintage clothes and bringing a barber on set to trim the hair and moustaches of everyone down to the extras.
They scouted out the best locations, shooting one scene in a small eatery reputed to have been frequented by Saddam himself.
They chose non-actors to play ordinary Iraqis under the ever-present eyes of the president in posters, pictures frames and murals.
Hadi said hearing US President Donald Trump say recently that he planned to lift sanctions on Syria after Islamists toppled president Bashar Assad last year was “amazing.”
“I don’t think the sanctions helped in any way to get rid of Bashar, but definitely empowered him to kill more people, and torture more people,” he said.
Austria wins Eurovision crown with JJ’s song Wasted Love
BASEL, Switzerland: Austria won the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 in Swiss host city Basel on Saturday, with the country’s first victory since bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst won in 2014.
Operatic singer JJ won ahead of Israel in the world’s biggest music competition, which was watched by more than 160 million people across the world.
The win was Austria’s third in the competition, following Conchita’s success and Udo Juergens’ victory in 1966.
JJ, a 24-year-old from Vienna, combined elements of opera, techno and high-pitched vocals in his song Wasted Love, winning the hearts of the professional juries and telephone voters.
Switzerland won the right to host Eurovision after Swiss rapper and singer Nemo won last year’s contest in Malmo, Sweden.
Fans traveled from across Europe and beyond to Basel, with 100,000 people attending Eurovision events in the city, including the final.
Eurovision, which stresses its political neutrality, has also faced controversy again this year due to the war in Gaza.
Israel’s entrant, Yuval Raphael, was at the Nova music festival during the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas militants on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage, according to Israeli officials.
Pro-Palestinian groups urged the European Broadcasting Union to exclude Israel over Gaza, where more than 50,000 people have been killed in the ensuing offensive by Israel, according to local health officials.
Around 200 protesters mounted a demonstration in Basel on Saturday evening.
Spanish public broadcaster RTVE also showed a message before the start of the Eurovision show saying “When human rights are at stake, silence is not an option. Peace and Justice for Palestine.”
Man badly hurt by falling palm tree at Cannes film festival
- The Asian man, believed to have been attending the festival, was badly injured
- A sudden gust of wind brought the tree down
CANNES: A man was seriously hurt after a palm tree fell onto him at the Cannes film festival on Saturday.
The Asian man, believed to have been attending the festival, was badly injured, firemen who treated him at the scene said.
A sudden gust of wind brought the tree down near the Palais des Festivals on the Croisette esplanade overlooking the Mediterranean, an AFP journalist at the scene said.
The accident happened as the American movie “Eddington,” starring Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone and Pedro Pascal was being shown.
The Croisette was crowded with festivalgoers when the tree fell, witnesses said.
“There was a terrible gust of wind and I heard a cry,” said Marthy Fink from Luxembourg.
