Latest news with #ClermontFerrand
Khaleej Times
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Khaleej Times
French documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophuls dead at 97
Oscar-winning filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, who blew the lid off the myth that France resisted its World War II Nazi occupiers in The Sorrow and the Pity, has died aged 97, his family said. Ophuls, who was the son of renowned German Jewish director Max Ophuls, "died peacefully on May 24", his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert said in a statement. Ophuls rocked France with 1969's The Sorrow and the Pity, about the occupied French provincial city of Clermont Ferrand during the time of the collaborationist Vichy regime. It quietly demolished one of the country's most cherished myths—that France and the French had always resisted the Germans—and was banned from public television until 1981. Through a jigsaw of interviews and newsreels, it showed how collaboration with the Nazis was widespread, from the humblest hairdresser to the top of high society. Ophuls played down his feat, stressing that he was not trying to judge France, and was just working on a TV commission. "For 40 years, I've had to put up with all this bullshit about it being a prosecutorial film. It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French," he insisted. "Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?" he added. Despite being over four hours long, his film struck a chord with a generation, drawing crowds to the cinemas at a time when documentaries were rarely shown on the big screen. Fled Nazis Ophuls was born Hans Marcel Oppenheimer in Frankfurt, Germany on November 1, 1927, to German actress Hilde Wall and director Max Ophuls. He fled for France with his father and the film directors Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, before escaping across the Pyrenees mountains and arriving in the US in 1941. He grew up in Hollywood, going on to serve as a GI in Japan in 1946. Returning to France in 1950, he started out as an assistant director, working on his father's last film Lola Montes in 1955. He made an unsuccessful entry into fiction with Banana Skin in 1963, starring the star duo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, before shifting to documentary when hired by French public television. Hotel Terminus - The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie won him an Oscar for best documentary in 1989. But his 1994 documentary The Troubles We've Seen, about war reporting in Bosnia, was a commercial flop. He spent several years afterwards holed up in southern France not working. His return with Un voyageur, a travelogue, in 2013, packed the cinema at the Cannes Film Festival. He was philosophical about the influence of his father. "It helped me to get work. More than anything, it helped me to be modest about my achievements. I was born under the shadow of a genius, and that spared me from being vain," he said.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AFYREN Achieves "Responsible Care® Confirmed Diagnosis" Certification and Published Its Second Sustainability Report
AFYREN confirms its proactive approach to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with: the award of the "Responsible Care® - Confirmed Diagnosis" certificate by France Chimie for its AFYREN NEOXY industrial site the publication of its second sustainability report, structured in accordance with the requirements of the CSR directive (CSRD) CLERMONT-FERRAND, France & LYON, France, May 27, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Regulatory News: AFYREN (Euronext: FR0014005AC9 - ALAFY), a greentech company offering industrial customers bio-based, low-carbon products through a unique fermentation technology based on a circular model, announces that it has received the "Responsible Care® - Confirmed Diagnosis" certification from France Chimie for its AFYREN NEOXY industrial site. AFYREN has also published its sustainability report for the 2024 financial year. In order to strengthen stakeholder recognition of its CSR approach, the company decided to undergo an external review by "Responsible Care® - Confirmed Diagnosis", led by France Chimie, in accordance with the CSR framework for the global chemical industry. This certification reflects the growing structure of AFYREN's CSR policy, marked in 2024 by the signing of the Responsible Care® charter by the management team of AFYREN and AFYREN NEOXY. Responsible Care is the global chemical industry's voluntary initiative for the safe management of chemicals and a shared commitment to continuously improve health, safety, and environmental performance through ethical practices, transparent communication, and sustainable innovation. Led jointly by the QHSE (Quality, Health, Safety, and Environment) and CSR teams, the assessment, which took several months and included around 20 interviews with various departments within the company, resulted in the development of a realistic and ambitious CSR roadmap incorporating concrete actions plus short- and medium-term deadlines tailored to the company's specific characteristics. "The external perspective and action plan developed by the Confirmed Diagnostic support enabled us to prioritize the actions to be taken and strengthen our preparation for upcoming certifications. The particular attention paid to monitoring product quality is in line with our commitment to better serving our customers" explains Sabine DOSSAT, QHSE Manager at AFYREN. The Responsible Care® diagnosis also highlighted AFYREN's pioneering role in non-financial communication, particularly its voluntary reporting approach. In line with its stated commitment to transparent communication on its commitments, AFYREN is publishing its second sustainability report in accordance with the nature and framework proposed by the CSR Directive. This report traces the company's progress, incorporating new performance indicators and examples of concrete actions. This report is part of AFYREN's ongoing commitment to improving its CSR performance, as confirmed by the positive trend in the Company's non-financial ratings over the past five years. Caroline PETIGNY, Director of CSR, Communications and Public Affairs at AFYREN states: "We have very high standards in terms of CSR, and our model is centered on responsible governance, limited environmental impact, and a strong social commitment to serving a robust and resilient industry. This requirement involves transparency about our commitments and our drivers for improvement. We see CSR reporting as a powerful tool for mobilizing teams, ensuring accountability, engaging with our stakeholders, and promoting the company's actions. The CSR approach is of great significance for our Company that we will continue to develop in the years ahead." The sustainability report can be viewed and downloaded in a dedicated section of the company's website: About AFYREN AFYREN is a French greentech company, founded in 2012, focused on providing innovative, sustainable solutions to reduce reliance on fossil-based resources. AFYREN's proprietary, nature-inspired fermentation technology valorizes local biomass from non-food agricultural co-products to produce 100% biobased, low-carbon carboxylic acids. The company's sustainable solutions address decarbonization challenges in a wide variety of strategic sectors, including human and animal nutrition, flavors and fragrances, life sciences, materials science, plus lubricants and technical fluids. AFYREN's competitive, plug-and-play, circular technology enables manufacturers to adopt sustainable solutions without modifying production processes. The company's first industrial plant, AFYREN NEOXY, a joint venture with Bpifrance's SPI fund, is based in the Grand-Est region of France, serving primarily the European market. AFYREN is also pursuing a project in Thailand with a global leader in the sugar industry and is building its presence in the Americas, based on existing distribution agreements. At the end of 2024, AFYREN employed 130 people across sites in Lyon, Clermont-Ferrand and Carling Saint-Avold. Committed to continuous innovation, the company invests 20% of its annual budget in R&D to further develop the range of sustainable solutions. AFYREN is listed on Euronext Growth® Paris since 2021 (ISIN code: FR0014005AC9, ticker: ALAFY). For more information, visit and follow us on LinkedIn View source version on Contacts AFYREN Director for ESG, Communications and Public Affairs Caroline Investor Relations Mark Reinhardinvest@ NewCap Investor Relations Théo Martin / Mathilde BohinTel: +33 1 44 71 94 94afyren@ Media Relations Nicolas Mérigeau / Gaëlle FromaigeatTel: +33 1 44 71 94 98afyren@ MC Services AG (international) Investor Relations Bettina Ellinghorst Media Relations Dr. Johanna Kobler, Shaun Brown Tel: +49 89 210 228 0afyren@
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Marcel Ophuls obituary
Although Marcel Ophuls, who has died aged 97, became a film director like his prodigious father, Max, he managed to avoid comparisons by taking the route of documentaries rather than fiction. Certainly, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), his documentary on the behaviour of the citizens of the French city of Clermont-Ferrand during the second world war, and the Oscar-winning Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), a detailed biography of the notorious Gestapo chief, put Ophuls on a level that made any reference to his father an irrelevance. Yet the cosmopolitan Max, who made his exquisite films in Germany, France, Hollywood and Italy, had a great influence on the life and personality of his son, if not the films. When Hans Marcel Oppenheimer was born in Frankfurt, his father was the creative director of the prestigious Burgtheater in Vienna, and his mother, Hilde (Hildegard) Wall, was one of the leading players in the company. 'It was inevitable that I should follow them into show business. I was born under the shadow of genius,' said Marcel, who took on his father's pseudonym, later dropping the umlaut. (The Jewish Max had borrowed the name Ophüls from an aristocratic German family.) In early 1933, after the Reichstag fire, the family fled to France, while Max's first big film success, Liebelei (Playing At Love), was showing in Berlin. Max continued to direct in France, while Marcel attended a local school, only for the family to go on the run again after the Germans occupied France in 1940. The family finally arrived in Hollywood, where Marcel went to Hollywood high while his father was working for the studios during the 1940s. Some of the friends of his parents he remembered meeting were Preston Sturges, Bertolt Brecht (with whose daughter he went to school), Louis Jourdan, Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton. At the age of 19, Marcel volunteered to serve with the US occupying forces in Japan, after which he rejoined his parents, who had settled in Paris. His first film job came as assistant to John Huston on Moulin Rouge (1952); he was given the task of making film tests of Zsa Zsa Gabor. He was then credited as assistant director ('essentially making the coffee') on films by Julien Duvivier (Marianne de Ma Jeunesse, 1955) and his father (Lola Montès, 1955), on which he used the name Marcel Wall to avoid accusations of nepotism. After making a 20-minute black-and-white short, Matisse Ou le Talent de Bonheur (1960), Ophuls, on the suggestion of his friend François Truffaut, was offered the chance to direct and write his first fiction film, the German segment of the five-part portmanteau picture Love at Twenty (1962). The novice director's rather touching piece about a womanising business executive who falls in love with a woman after she has had his child stood comparison with the efforts of Renzo Rossellini, another son of a famous director father also making his debut, though the sketches by Truffaut, Andrzej Wajda and Shintarô Ishihara were more memorable. Keen to follow his father as a director of fiction films, Ophuls made Banana Peel (1963), a lightweight comedy thriller with a nouvelle vague touch starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo. It caused a minor ripple at the box office, but his second feature, Faites Vos Jeux, Mesdames (Fire at Will, 1965), starring Eddie Constantine, sank completely. It was his last venture into fiction, except for a couple of plays for German television in 1970: Zwei Ganze Tage, an adaptation of Sacha Guitry's Faisons Un Rêve, and Goethe's Clavigo. Ophuls then joined ORTF, the French national television station, where he made Munich, Ou la Paix pour Cent Ans (Munich, Or Peace in Our Time, 1967), a 172-minute documentary on the Munich crisis, juxtaposing newsreels, movie clips and interviews, a technique he continued throughout his subsequent work. 'Documentary is a sufficiently narrow form that was in a kind of corset. From my first reportage for ORTF, I tried to emancipate it. I realised that it was useless to prepare the questions in advance, even when you are going to shoot a difficult interview. The importance is to choose a first question that will stimulate the interlocutor. Without spontaneity, there is no point in making a documentary.' In The Sorrow and the Pity, 251 minutes of footage and interviews with inhabitants of Clermont-Ferrand who lived through the war, Ophuls proved himself a probing, incisive and fluent interviewer, ruthlessly exposing the degree of collaboration among the French citizenry. He also talked to members of the resistance and some of the Nazi occupiers, intercutting archive material of Adolf Hitler in Paris and famous figures of the day going about their business – for example, French film stars blithely setting off to tour Germany. The soundtrack of songs is a masterpiece in setting period and ironically counterpointing the realities of the subject. Commissioned by ORTF, who declined to show it, the film went on cinema release in France, where its ugly revelations courted both acclaim and bitter controversy. In finally uncovering the still unwelcome topic of collaboration, Ophuls opened the way for film-makers to re-examine the period of German occupation. He then went to the German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, for which he made The Harvest of My Lai (1970), a scathing inquiry into the massacre perpetrated by American troops in the Vietnamese village in March 1968, and its repercussions in the US. The BBC rejected A Sense of Loss (1972), Ophuls's examination of the problems of Northern Ireland. Taking a firm partisan position – Catholics good, Protestants bad – the film failed to shed much light on the subject. Much more impressive and enlightening was the 278-minute The Memory of Justice (1976), which compares German war crimes with the French and American tactics in Algeria and Vietnam respectively. Using the Nuremberg trials as a starting point, Ophuls, through effective montage technique, intercutting newsreel footage and contemporary interviews, makes the film a personal search for truth. This monumental film, of which Ophuls was most proud, was almost destroyed by the BBC, one of the producers. It balked at the pubic hair seen in a sauna sequence, among other things, and another director was brought in to recut the footage. Happily, the film was rescued by an intrepid production assistant, who stole a print and smuggled it to the US, where it was premiered in its intended form. Hotel Terminus, Ophuls's investigation into the life of Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon', was, he claimed, structured along the lines of Columbo, with the interviewer as the TV detective in the old raincoat. Ophuls, who never feigned impartiality in his films, is still able to try to understand Nazis such as Barbie or Albert Speer, and expose what Hannah Arendt famously called 'the banality of evil'. In November Days (1991), Ophuls was at his most Columbo-like, chipping away at East Germans' recollections of living in the GDR, and their reactions to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and reunification. Veillées d'Arme (The Troubles We've Seen: The History of Journalism in Wartime, 1994) took Ophuls to Bosnia, where he begins an almost four-hour merciless inquiry into the relationship between war and the media, with multiple interviews, sometimes set against clips from films (including Lola Montès) for ironic effect. In 2013, he summed up his life and career in a film memoir, Ain't Misbehavin' (Un Voyageur), in which he revisited many of the places and people of his past. He showed a particular delight at the scene in the film Annie Hall in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton queue to see The Sorrow and the Pity. For some years before his death he worked on a documentary about Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, titled Des Vérités Désagréables (Unpleasant Truths). In 1956 he married Regina Ackermann. She survives him, along with three daughters and three grandchildren. Marcel Ophuls (Hans Marcel Oppenheimer), film-maker, born 1 November 1927; died 24 May 2025 This obituary has been revised since Ronald Bergan's death in 2020.
New York Times
26-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Marcel Ophuls, Myth-Shattering War Documentarian, Is Dead at 97
Marcel Ophuls, the German-born filmmaker whose powerful documentary 'The Sorrow and the Pity' exploded the myth of widespread French resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War II, has died. He was 97. Mr. Ophuls died on Saturday, Agence France-Presse news agency reported on Monday, citing a statement from his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert. The agency did not provide a cause of death or say where he had died. Mr. Seyfert could not immediately be reached for comment. Mr. Ophuls had directed several minor feature films before vaulting to fame in 1969 with 'The Sorrow and the Pity,' his four-and-a-half-hour documentary on wartime Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial city located almost at the center of France. In a dispassionate, incisive style, he interviewed shopkeepers and farmers, bankers and entrepreneurs, teachers and lawyers who either collaborated with the Nazis and the Vichy regime or actively resisted the occupation — but who in most instances had turned a blind eye to the roundups of Jews and anti-Nazis. When the film was first shown in Paris cinemas, it was met with shock, outrage and tears. It stripped away the myth — fostered by Charles de Gaulle when he returned to France with the victorious Allied armies in 1944 — that a vast majority of his compatriots were either open or secret supporters of his resistance movement. Originally produced for television, 'The Sorrow and the Pity' was banned from French airwaves until 1981. Conservative politicians denounced Mr. Ophuls, calling his work a 'prosecutorial film' that unfairly portrayed the French as cowardly or worse. 'It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French,' Mr. Ophuls insisted in a 2004 interview with The Guardian newspaper. 'Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?' 'The Sorrow and the Pity' used French and German wartime newsreels of Vichy's leaders — Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain and his ambitious protégé, Pierre Laval — as well as footage of Adolf Hitler visiting France in the wake of his conquering army. Adding to the documentary's broader perspective were interviews with Anthony Eden, Britain's foreign secretary during World War II; Pierre Mendès France, the Jewish future premier who escaped Vichy imprisonment and fled to Britain, where he joined de Gaulle; and Christian de la Mazière, the notorious Parisian journalist and businessman who fought with a Waffen SS regiment of Frenchmen. But the true protagonists of Mr. Ophuls's film were the ordinary citizens of Clermont-Ferrand, whom he and his colleague, André Harris, a journalist, interviewed at length. They included two farmers, brothers who fought in the resistance, the older one captured and sent to a concentration camp; a shopkeeper who took out newspaper ads to explain that he and his family had always been Catholic despite their Jewish-sounding last name; and two schoolteachers who claimed not to remember the cases of colleagues persecuted by the Vichy regime. Also memorable were interviews with the former Nazi garrison commander of Clermont-Ferrand, who fondly recalled the passivity and collaboration of most of the locals in contrast to his previous service on the Russian front. Mr. Ophuls went on to direct a half dozen other documentaries, most notably the Oscar-winning 'Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie,' a 1988 film about the former head of the Gestapo in the French city of Lyon. But 'The Sorrow and the Pity,' which was also nominated for an Oscar but failed to receive the prize, remained his undisputed masterpiece, perhaps in part because Mr. Ophuls brought his own complex, profound relations with France to the making of the film. Marcel Ophüls (he later dropped the umlaut) was born Nov. 1, 1927, in Frankfurt, Germany, the son of Max Ophüls, the director of the classic films 'Liebelei,' 'La Ronde' and 'Lola Montès,' and Hildegard Wall, an actress. After Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Ophüls, who were Jewish, fled to France, becoming French citizens in 1938. When the Nazis invaded, the family escaped to the United States and settled in Hollywood, where his father directed several of his films. His son became a U.S. citizen and served in the Army. Marcel moved back to France in 1952. In 1956, he married Regine Ackermann. Aided by his father's reputation, Mr. Ophuls tried to become a feature film director. 'I was born under the shadow of a genius,' he told The Guardian. 'I don't have an inferiority complex — I am inferior.' Critics disparaged the three feature movies he directed, though one of them, 'Banana Peel,' a 1963 detective film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, was moderately profitable. In 1967, Mr. Ophuls directed his first documentary, 'Munich or Peace in Our Time,' about the 1938 diplomatic surrender by Britain's prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, to Hitler's territorial claims over Czechoslovakia. The film combined archival material and interviews with ordinary witnesses of the era, presaging the technique Mr. Ophuls used to remarkable effect in 'The Sorrow and the Pity' and later documentaries. 'I never take a note or rehearse a question before interviews,' he told Francine Du Plessix Gray in a 1987 New York Times article. 'All my discoveries must occur during the shooting in order for the viewer to share my own sense of surprise.' Mr. Ophuls began working on his masterpiece in 1967 for French state television, where he and Mr. Harris were reporters. But both were dismissed for their sympathetic coverage of the Paris student and labor protests in 1968. 'The Sorrow and the Pity' was completed the following year with financial and technical assistance from Swiss and German state television networks. Though it was broadcast in neighboring countries, the documentary was banned from French television and shown in only a few Parisian movie houses. The controversy helped ensure the film's critical and commercial success when it was brought to the United States in 1971. A.H. Weiler of The Times called it 'a surprisingly educational and fascinating experience despite its inordinate length.' The film also paved the way for revisionist scholarly accounts of wartime France, including Robert O. Paxton's 'Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944,' published in 1972, and Henry Rousso's 'The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944,' published in 1994. Mr. Ophuls followed 'The Sorrow and the Pity' with 'The Harvest of My Lai,' a 1970 documentary about the massacre of civilians by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War, and 'The Memory of Justice,' a 1976 documentary that examined the Nuremberg trials to suggest that the victorious Allies sometimes displayed hypocrisy in judging Nazi war criminals. He released 'Hôtel Terminus' in 1988. The documentary on Klaus Barbie — the escaped Gestapo officer who lived in Bolivia after World War II until his 1983 extradition to France, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity — earned Mr. Ophuls an Academy Award for best documentary feature. The biggest problem with the documentary, Mr. Ophuls conceded, was his inability to interview Barbie or show him on trial because of his refusal to appear in court. Mr. Ophuls chronicled his own life in 2013 with an autobiographical documentary, 'Ain't Misbehavin',' recounting his early days in Germany and touching on his and his father's work. Mr. Ophuls acknowledged the contradictory strains that being a Jewish refugee from Nazism wove into his life and work. Despite his dual U.S. and French citizenships and his choice to live and work in France, he also still considered himself German. In a 1988 interview with James M. Markham for The Times, he pointed out that his wife was German and had been a member of the Hitler Youth. 'My brother-in-law was in the Hermann Goering Division,' Mr. Ophuls said. 'I don't believe in collective guilt.'
Malay Mail
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Malay Mail
Oscar-winning filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, who exposed Nazi collaboration in France, dies at 97
PARIS, May 26 — Oscar-winning filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, who blew the lid off the myth that France resisted its World War II Nazi occupiers in The Sorrow and the Pity, has died aged 97, his family said Monday. Ophuls, who was the son of renowned German Jewish director Max Ophuls, 'died peacefully on May 24', his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert said in a statement sent to AFP. Ophuls rocked France with 1969's The Sorrow and the Pity, about the occupied French provincial city of Clermont-Ferrand during the time of the collaborationist Vichy regime. It quietly demolished one of the country's most cherished myths – that France and the French had always resisted the Germans – and was banned from public television until 1981. Through a jigsaw of interviews and newsreels, it showed how collaboration with the Nazis was widespread, from the humblest hairdresser to the top of high society. Ophuls played down his feat, stressing that he was not trying to judge France, and was just working on a TV commission. 'For 40 years, I've had to put up with all this nonsense about it being a prosecutorial film. It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French,' he insisted. 'Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?' he added. Despite being over four hours long, his film struck a chord with a generation, drawing crowds to the cinemas at a time when documentaries were rarely shown on the big screen. Fled Nazis Ophuls was born Hans Marcel Oppenheimer in Frankfurt, Germany on 1 November 1927, to German actress Hilde Wall and director Max Ophuls. He fled to France with his father and the film directors Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, before escaping across the Pyrenees mountains and arriving in the United States in 1941. He grew up in Hollywood, going on to serve as a GI in Japan in 1946. Returning to France in 1950, he started out as an assistant director, working on his father's last film Lola Montes in 1955. He made an unsuccessful entry into fiction with Banana Skin in 1963, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, before shifting to documentary when hired by French public television. Hotel Terminus – The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie won him an Oscar for best documentary in 1989. But his 1994 documentary The Troubles We've Seen, about war reporting in Bosnia, was a commercial flop. He spent several years afterwards holed up in southern France not working. His return with Un voyageur, a travelogue, in 2013, packed the cinema at the Cannes Film Festival. He was philosophical about the influence of his father. 'It helped me to get work. More than anything, it helped me to be modest about my achievements. I was born under the shadow of a genius, and that spared me from being vain,' he said. — AFP
