The French National Day celebrations on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille prison by the French proletariat that signalled the start of the revolution will largely be an online event this year due to the COVID-19 crisis.
The celebrations had commenced online from July 1 with various programmes across multiple online platforms associated with the Embassy of France and the Consulates across India.
Bastille Day (July 14) would feature the streaming of several programmes from the Embassy of France and Consulate General of France in Puducherry and Chennai, on their respective Facebook pages.
Catherine Suard, French Consul General in Puducherry, will lay a wreath at the French War Memorial at 8.30 a.m.
According to a press note from the Consulate, the French National Day, which is usually an event of elaborate celebrations with guests and invitees has been scaled down this year due to the COVID 19 pandemic situation. “A decision was therefore taken to celebrate this event virtually in 2020- it would therefore be a digital French National Day this year.”
Emmanuel Lenain, Ambassador of France to India, will deliver a National Day message followed by an address by Ms. Suard at 12.45 p.m.
One of the highlights of the online programmes hosted by the Consulate on its Facebook page ( https://www.facebook.com/France.Pondichery/ ) is the premiere of Water Matters , an artistic exploration of the relationship between humans, cities and water.
The film by Delphine Delas and Nicolas Louvancourt of the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP) fuses pictorial and digital work to interpret geographic, social and economic issues.
The project, supported by Région Centre-Val de Loire, a French administrative region, offers a retrospective on what the streets once were, what they are at present, and what they could be in future. Water Matters will stream at 6.30 p.m.
The People of Waste is another interesting film to be streamed at 11.15 a.m. that unravels what happens to garbage after it is dumped?
Through the example of Delhi, the film directed by Rémi de Bercegol, Grant Davis and Shankare Gowda, explores the transformation of a piece of plastic waste into a resource, through filmed interviews with diverse handlers of waste living in the shadow of consumer society — through the collection, sorting, reselling, cleaning, shredding and transformation of waste, from the stigmatised garbage picker at the bottom of the chain to the industrialist at the top of the pyramid who re-injects the recovered materials into the formal economy.
Other highlights of the day-long online programmes include the trailer of the film “Cap sur les francophonies de Pondichéry”, Eloquentia – Alliance Francaise of Madras, a quiz by Allince Francaise in Thiruvananthapuram, ‘Who has the right’, a song by students of Lycée Français international school, a film on waste management, and a presentation of the ‘Volontariat’, a service organisation.
