Three months after the Cannes Festival, the memory of the controversy surrounding the film Rodeo stay alive. While this feature film in the middle of the cross is about to invade theaters this Wednesday, its director Lola Quivoron returned to the controversy on the set of BFMTV.
Rodeo follows the journey of young Julia (Julie Ledru), who improvises as a motorcycle dealer to join the community of these road stuntmen. While dramatic news related to urban rodeos regularly feeds the news, the filmmaker shocked the Croisette with a brief sentence uttered in an interview with Kobini“Accidents are often caused by police officers chasing cyclists and pushing them to their deaths,” he said. Words she rates today:
“It is a complex issue. The phrase has been underlined, caricatured, there have been many misunderstandings around this phrase. It is not because I specify this reality that I forget all those that exist, all the other accidents that exist, especially mowed pedestrians (…) I think there are solutions that must be found to alleviate these tragedies.
Without denying his statements last spring: “It is a reality that I have heard a lot about, it is a factual reality. The news reminds us that there are other accidents that happen… I don’t have to justify more about that. “
“There is no urban rodeo in my film”
Lola Quivoron recalls that her film is “a fiction, not a documentary, not a report”, and she also regrets that “social networks are greatly inflating things”, and believes that the followers of this practice should have something to say: ” We have to bring them into the debate, ask them what they need to avoid going out on the street, putting themselves in danger and endangering the lives of others.” She adds:
There is no urban rodeo in my film”, which deals only with bitumen crossings, “in the sense that we do not travel by motorcycle or quad through the city: they are on paved roads far from the cities, on roads without traffic, lost in the middle of the field.”
“I have a thought for the victims”
He invites the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin to see his film: “I would like him to see the film. I was able to meet Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne very furtively and I had the opportunity to tell her to come see the film.”
“It is an illegal practice, everything must be said,” he concludes. “It is a dangerous practice, which requires a lot of training. There is a lot of information circulating precisely about the dangers within these communities (…) I want to condemn what is happening and have a thought for the victims.” In early August, an urban rodeo seriously injured two children in Cergy-Pontoise.
Source: BFM TV
