Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande took to the airwaves on Monday evening to denounce the latest austerity drive announced by the government, at the same time as the prime minister spoke on a rival channel.

"/> Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande took to the airwaves on Monday evening to denounce the latest austerity drive announced by the government, at the same time as the prime minister spoke on a rival channel.

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FRANCOIS HOLLANDE

Rivals attack government austerity plans

Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande took to the airwaves on Monday evening to denounce the latest austerity drive announced by the government, at the same time as the prime minister spoke on a rival channel.

Published: 8 November 2011 09:39 CET

Prime Minister François Fillon was defending the new plan on the 8pm news programme on TV channel TF1 while Hollande appeared on the France 2 bulletin.

In the plan announced on Monday, the government said it hoped to balance its budget by 2016 by saving €100 billion ($138 billion) overall.

A package of measures to save €7 billion in 2012 was announced, including raising the Value Added Tax (VAT) rate from 5.5 percent to 7 percent and a temporary increase in corporation tax for larger companies.

Fillon also announced that plans to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 will be brought forward from 2018 to 2017.

The prime minister defended his plans on Monday evening as “just” and “necessary.”

“Not many governments, just a few months from elections, would have the courage to take the measures we’ve decided to take,” he said.

“We’ve done it because we believe it is our duty to protect the French people from the very serious dangers that are faced by many European countries that did not take the necessary decisions in time.”

Socialist François Hollande claimed the plans were “incoherent, unjust and inconsequential” and said they were an “acknowledgement of failure” on the part of the prime minister and President Sarkozy. 

“There is a crisis, I don’t deny that, but there’s also revenue that’s been lost with the €75 million tax gifts handed out by Nicolas Sarkozy,” he said. 

Monday’s announcement also included a freeze on the salaries of the president, prime minister and other ministers. Hollande said he would go one step further by “reducing by 30 percent the salary of the president and his ministers.”

The measures announced received widespread support in the president’s own UMP party, but other opposition politicians were critical.

Jean-François Copé, general secretary of the UMP, called the plans “courageous” while centrist François Bayrou said they “lacked justice.”

“The Sarkozy government has struck a new violent blow against the purchasing power of the French,” said far right Front National leader Marine Le Pen.

“By pushing the French towards economic and social agony we are building towards the fall of the country and the explosion of the debt.”


Clips of François Hollande and François Fillon on Monday evening’s news bulletins.

 

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FILM

Rimini celebrates centenary of legendary Italian director Federico Fellini

Italian resort Rimini this week marked 100 years since the birth of director Federico Fellini, whose visual dreamscapes revolutionised cinema in a career spanning almost half a century.

Published: 22 January 2020 09:06 CET
Rimini celebrates centenary of legendary Italian director Federico Fellini
A still from La Dolce Vita in the exhibition 'Fellini 100 : Immortal Genius'. Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP

Dozens of events are being held around the world and in Italy this year to remember Fellini, considered one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.

The winner of a record four best foreign language film Oscars, he is famed for films set in Rome such as 'La Dolce Vita' (1960), and most of his films were shot in Cinecitta's Studio 5 outside the capital.

But he set his 1973 masterpiece 'Amarcord', a semi-autobiographical comedy about an adolescent boy growing up in 1930s fascist Italy, in the Adriatic resort of Rimini, where he was born on January 20th 1920.

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The city is marking the centenary with a special exhibition and is due to open a museum dedicated to Fellini, who died in 1993, by the end of the year.

“Rimini is everywhere in Fellini's cinema, the countryside in his films is Rimini's countryside, the sea in all Fellini's films is Rimini's sea,” said Marco Leonetti of the Rimini Cinematheque which helped put on the exhibition.

The show includes some of the more spectacular costumes from his films, as well as frequently erotic extracts from the sketchbooks of his dreams he created for his psychotherapist over a 30-year period.


Costumes on display at the 'Fellini 100 : Immortal Genius' exhibition. Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP

'The maestro from Rimini'

Originally an artist and caricaturist, Fellini paid to watch films as a child at Rimini's Fulgor cinema by drawing caricatures, and his films remain caricatures of society.

“If you take Fellini's films, like 'Amarcord', 'La Dolce Vita', 'I Vitelloni', when you watch them all, it's as if you're flicking through a history book, you travel through the history of our country, the history of Italy, from the 1930s to the 1980s,” Leonetti told AFP.

READ ALSO: Fellini's La Strada: a vision of masculinity and femininity that still haunts us today

Fellini was initially appreciated more abroad than in Italy, where he frequently scandalised the conservative society of the 1950s.

His films embodied a sense of irony, the ability to invent, and a sense of beauty, said Leonetti. “These are the three qualities of his art, qualities which also created 'made in Italy', and that's why Fellini, besides having told the story of our country the best, is also the person who best represents it,” he said.


A photograph of Federico Fellini. Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP

Fellini has inspired generations of directors since, including Britain's Peter Greenaway and Spain's Pedro Almodovar. US director David Lynch, who shares the same birthday as Fellini, in 1997 declared his love for the “maestro from Rimini”.

“There's something about his films… They're so magical and lyrical and surprising and inventive. The guy was unique. If you took his films away, there would be a giant chunk of cinema missing,” Lynch told filmmaker Chris Rodley.

Fellini played “a shameless game of reflections and autobiographical projections” with his actors, the exhibition said.

The exhibition 'Fellini 100. Immortal genius' ends in March but will then travel to Rome and on to cities including Los Angeles, Moscow and Berlin.

By AFP's Charles Onians

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