French Film director and anti-Bolloré letter signatory Arthur Harari received a warm, 9-minute reception as he attended the Cannes competition premiere of his Palme d’Or contender The Unknown alongside its stars Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider on Monday afternoon.

The screening comes just 24 hours after Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada announced that his group would no longer work with the signatories of a letter titled “It Time To Turn-Off Bolloré” and sounding the alarm over media and logistics tycoon Vincent Bolloré’s growing control of France’s media, publishing and entertainment sectors.

Harari was given a special mention in Saada’s comments announcing the Canal+ ban at a producer’s lunch in Cannes due to the director’s allusion to Vincent Bolloré as “a crypto-fascist” in an interview with Libération newspaper last week explaining his reason for signing the letter.

“If some go so far as to call Canal+ ‘crypto-fascist’, then I cannot agree to collaborate with them. That’s the line. It is not acceptable that there is no consideration for the work of our teams,” said Saada.

The Canal+ CEOs comments have sparked uproar in the French film world. The pay-TV giant was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2024. The Bolloré Group retains around 30% of the stock making it the group’s biggest shareholder. Saada’s move to cut off signatories of the letter has sparked questions over the group’s independence.

Harari, who shared the Best Original Screenplay Oscar with partner Justine Triet for Anatomy of a Fall in 2024, is in Cannes’ main competition with his third feature after Dark Diamond and Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle, which played to acclaim in Un Certain Regard in 2021.

Adapted from his graphic novel The Case of David Zimmerman, co-written with brother Lucas Harari, the films revolves around the titular David, a reclusive photographer who wakes up on New Year’s Day to find himself in the body of a woman he clocked at a party the previous night.