Cannes pageant employees turned a pre-festival meet-and-greet occasion right into a spontaneous strike rally on Sunday, applauding representatives from the Sous les écrans la dèche collective, a bunch that has known as for a walkout by freelance employees to disrupt this yr’s occasion.

On Sunday, Could 12, pageant employees had been invited to fulfill with administration for a pre-festival cocktail and casual welcome, one thing that occurs yearly earlier than the pageant kicks off.

However this time, members of the Sous les écrans distributed badges and stickers for employees to indicate their solidarity with the group’s calls for, which embody a basic strike of “all staff of the Cannes Movie Pageant and of its sidebars” in protest of what the group phrases the “precarious” place of freelancer employees on the occasion.

In a video despatched to The Hollywood Reporter by a member of Sous les écrans, employees may be seen applauding the group’s spokesman and cheering him on.

The group, whose identify interprets as Broke Behind the Screens, has lengthy been sounding the alarm concerning the precarious nature of movie pageant work, which generally includes short-term freelance contracts. Many intermediate pageant employees aren’t lined by France’s unemployment insurance coverage program, that means in between jobs or tasks they don’t qualify for unemployment advantages.

New French labor legal guidelines, set to enter impact on July 1, will make it even tougher for a lot of freelance employees to qualify for advantages. The collective is asking for a change to the contracts from freelance pageant employees to permit them to qualify, and for the adjustments to be backdated 18 months to permit employees to say for earlier pageant work.

Greater than 400 worldwide filmmakers and trade executives, together with Anatomy of a Fall actor Swann Arlaud and Louis Garrell, who stars in Quentin Dupieux’s Cannes pageant opener The Second Act, Palme d’Or winner Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Hellboy director Neil Marshall, and U.S. director and producer John Landis (The Blues Brothers) have signed a web based petition in help of Sous les écrans.

The Cannes pageant has stated it’s open to a dialog with the group and hopes that “collective motion” can stop a strike. The pageant is predicted to deal with the difficulty on Monday. The 77th Cannes movie pageant kicks off Tuesday, Could 14.