French film and television figures have said they will no longer work with actor Gerard Depardieu after a documentary showed sexist and inappropriate behavior by the star, who is now under official rape investigation, reports say Guardian.

The documentary “Gérard Depardieu: The Fall of an Ogre” aired Thursday night on public broadcaster France 2 after several women previously accused Depardieu of sexual misconduct in a recent investigation. Mediapart website per year.

The documentary showed footage of Depardieu’s trip to North Korea in 2018 in honor of the country’s 70th anniversary of independence. The actor, who traveled to Pyongyang with a television crew and knew he was being filmed, made lewd comments to and about women, repeatedly sexually harassed an interpreter and made lewd comments about a child in a detention center. horse. On Friday, MEP Manon Aubrey described the footage as “disgraceful”.

Fabien Onteniente, who directed Depardieu’s 2007 film The Disco, said he would never work with the actor again after watching a documentary in which actress Hélène Darras claimed Depardieu assaulted her on set. Onteniente said: “These are not my values, it is impossible to turn a blind eye to this type of unacceptable behavior,” Onteniente told FranceInfo news channel. He said the French film industry has a kind of omertà about sexual violence because it’s a kind of closed shop with “a lot of denial.”

Darras reported that Gerard Depardieu attacked her on the set.

“He looked at me like a piece of meat. I was wearing a very tight dress and he pulled me by the waist, then put his hand on my hips and buttocks,” she recalls. “He asks me if I want to go to his cabin. I told him no, but this didn’t change the fact that he kept groping me in between takes,” she charged.

She said she was stunned and no one on set reacted. She said she didn’t speak out at the time because she didn’t want to be “blacklisted at the age of 26.”

After speaking with the documentarians in September, she filed an official police complaint against Depardieu.

Manuel Alduy, head of cinema and international development at public broadcaster France Télévisions, said in the documentary that he had stopped any projects with Depardieu. “We shouldn’t celebrate Gerard Depardieu, it’s just not possible,” he said.

Marc Missonnier, head of France’s film producers’ union, said of Depardieu’s behavior towards women in the film industry: “There was tolerance and it was a mistake.”