Film screening Black Panther : Wakanda Forever. PARAS GRIFFIN / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP
Three months after the release of the blockbuster Black Panther Wakanda Foreverthe French Minister of Armed Forces and Defense expressed his indignation on Twitter at a scene that shattered the image of the French Army.
“I strongly condemn this misleading and misleading representation of our Armed Forces. I think and pay tribute to the 58 French soldiers who died defending Mali at its request against Islamist terrorist groups.was indignant this Sunday on Twitter, the French Minister of Armies and Defense Sébastien Lecornu.
The object of his wrath, a message on the social network of journalist Jean Bexon who recalled a scene in Black Panther Wakanda Forever, featuring French mercenaries intent on stealing the famous vibranium, a fictional resource from Wakanda. However, points out the journalist, “the bad French mercenaries who operate in Mali are dressed as soldiers of Operation Barkhane”, denouncing a form ofpropaganda».
The sequence in question shows the queen of the powerful African kingdom, at the UN, ordering the looters to kneel before launching into a speech pointing out the danger that the possession of such a resource by ill-intentioned powers would represent. Right after, it is explained during a radio flash that “the attackers were hired by the French government“. A scene already perceived as a snub, when the film was released last November, against the French army whose presence in Mali was generating great tension at the time.
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Jean Bexon was then widely poured out on the subject. “A symbolic staging, to the detriment of France“, he accused on the conservative news site Boulevard Voltaire . Black panther, Wakanda forever : a weapon of massive disinformation against france? he headlined again in L’Incorrect . Point is no exception. “Trial against Western imperialism”a movie that “sounds a little too much like a badly digested essay on postcolonial theories”considered the weekly then.
The presence of mercenaries in this fiction does not fail to make one think of those, very real, of the Russian group Wagner, which established itself in the Central African Republic then in Mali after the departure of the French troops. A paramilitary company one of whose means of financing is to… grab mining resources.
Read alsoWagner, abuse of the army: the junta in Mali refutes the accusations
This Sunday, on twitter, Jean Bexon came back extensively on the film, extracts in support. “This sequence from American Marvel/Disney studios has not been noted, either by the media or by the political sphere. However, it forms a serious informational attack which discredits the French military presence in Mali”, he writes in particular.
Enough to anger the French Minister of Armies and Defense, three months after the theatrical release of the Marvel blockbuster. Sébastien Lecornu’s entourage emphasizes “the anger of the minister seeing the film”. The ministry admits the freedom of a “artistic work” of which France does not claim either the withdrawal or the censorship. On the other hand, “there can be no revisionism on France’s recent action in Mali: we intervened at the request of the country to fight against armed terrorist groups far from the story told in the film, namely a French army which comes plunder its natural resources“, specifies the AFP. This resoundingly successful second part of the adventures of African superheroes, directed by Ryan Coogler, made the best start of 2022 across the Atlantic. In France, the film exceeded 3 million viewers in just four weeks of release.
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