Naughty EU Medias
Published on
Story by
Prune Antoine
Is that all European civil servants think about? As the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera signals, a summer breeze of hormonal madness is appearing to blow into the communication service of the 'Media' programme of the European Union.
Under normal circumstances, the project - officially included in the chapter of cultural community initiatives - is responsible for aiding a European cinema often judged to be dying: promoting full feature-length films, distributing the films, helping in the production or at seminars…
Albeit quite confidential, 'Media' nonetheless finances almost half of the projected productions in the more obscure rooms of the continent. And as sex is still more explicit than the statistics, the merry devils in charge of selling 'Media' 2007 to the public have not held back on the body on film. The result is an ersatz of erotic video by way of publicity campaigns.
Entitled ‘Film Lovers Will Love This’, one of the advertising clips of 'Media' 2007 plays it rather risqué: in the film’s forty seconds, mixing naughty extracts from Amélie or from Almodovar’s All About My Mother, ecstatic faces, naked bodies and other crumpled sheets following one after another, accompanied by quavers of violins and other small excerpts of wild panting. By way of a final slogan, an ambiguous ‘Let’s Come Together’, which leaves a shadow of doubt: should Europeans meet each other or climax together?!
The video has already aroused the wrath of certain Polish technocrats – of whom the Super-Catholic League of Polish Families (LPR) complain at the deprivation of morals and at the 'immoral methods' employed by the EU in order to promote its activities. Faced with this maelstrom (and the PR that revealed the diffusion of this advertising campaign was validated without the batting of an eyelid), the comment of Swedish commissioner Margot Wallström, blonde vice-president of the Commission, was exemplarily: 'it's a matter of taste' she soberly declared.