The team of Artus’ film “A little thing in addition”, with actors with mental disabilities, a big success with already more than 3 million admissions, took the steps of the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
The film team, all smiles, was very applauded and walked the red carpet to the sound of “Bande Organise”, a hit from the Marseille collective 13′Organisé, headed by the rapper-star Jul, played by the DJ of the climb steps. We could also hear “Clic clic pan pan” by Yanns, a title present in the film.
“There are eleven actors with disabilities and four classics, four boring ones we’ll say,” the comedian and actor Artus had fun recently on France Inter, specifying that the latter were himself, Clovis Cornillac, Alice Belaïdi and Céline Groussard.
This comedy, which aims to laugh with disabled people and not at their expense, is already one of the successes of the year. Father and son on screen, Clovis Cornillac and Artus play two little thugs who hide in the middle of a summer camp for young people with mental disabilities, in order to escape the police. Artus poses as a boarder and Clovis Cornillac as his educator.
Asked about the reasons for the success, Artus felt that “in this somewhat anxiety-provoking era, it’s a film that does good”, and which allows us to discover “a population that we don’t often see, people in difficult situations. of mental disability”.
A platform to facilitate visibility for disabled artists
“A little extra thing” was not selected at Cannes. Actors with disabilities have already walked the red carpet in 2019 for “Hors Normes” by the filmmaker duo Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache. In 1996, the film “The Eighth Day” by Jaco Van Dormael won a joint acting prize for Daniel Auteuil and Pascal Duquenne, an actor with Down syndrome.
Furthermore, the actresses Léa Drucker, Alexandra Lamy and even Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache signed a column, on the Libération website on Wednesday evening, for a “reform of the status of intermittent workers in the entertainment industry, towards disabled artists” in the cinema and on TV.