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France's Cannes Film Festival is normally about glamour, red carpets, premiere, a bit of celebrity gossip, Sophie Marceau falling out of her dress again.

But this year, a major controversy erupted when the head of the French film studio Canal+ said he wanted to no longer work with around 600 actors, directors, and technicians who had signed a petition against the right-wing billionaire owner Vincent Bolloré.

We've talked about Bolloré on this podcast before, Emma.

He's a household name in France, and a very divisive figure, it's fair to say.

Just explain the background here for us.

Yeah, we might need to rewind a little bit here, because this is the latest installment in quite a long-running French political and media saga.

Uh, so Vincent Bolloré, he's one of France's richest men.

Um, he made his money in the family transport and logistics business, but over the last decade or so, he's been buying up French media outlets and converting their editorial stance to reflect his own views, which are very conservative, very Catholic, close to the far right.

The best known of his channels is CNews.

Um, it's often referred to as the French version of Fox News.

But he also owns, like, newspapers, radio stations, magazines.

Uh, they sometimes call him, like, the Rupert Murdoch of France.

He's that kind of figure.

But he's not just a media tycoon, because he's also gradually been buying up cultural institutions, and he now owns book publishers, a music publisher, a video games developer, concert venue, and StudioCanal, which is the film production arm of Canal+.

So Canal+ is probably best known as a pay TV channel.

Uh, you'll have seen it on the French TV listings.

They show a lot of sport.

But they also have a, a film and a TV series studio, and if you've seen many recent French films, you've almost certainly seen a Canal+ production.

Uh, there's some international titles as well, like the Paddington Bear films, and they also do quite a lot of co-productions with other countries.

So for example, if you've seen like a British/French co-production on a TV series, that's highly likely to have involved Canal+.

So I think it's fair to say that, uh, he's a hugely influential figure within the French media and the French cultural landscape, and that does not sit well with everyone, due not only to his hard right views, but to his willingness to use his business to promote those views, even if it means those businesses losing money.

So going back to April this year, more than 100 authors at his Grasset publishing group, which is home to some of the biggest names in French literature, they said they would leave after he ousted the longtime CEO of that company.

And then earlier in May, around 600 film industry professionals, including the actress Juliette Binoche and the director Emmanuel Marre, signed a petition which was calling on people to mobilize against what they called the growing grip of the far right on the film industry under the influence of Bolloré and Canal+.

Right, and it's that petition that has sparked a fairly feisty response, uh, although not from Bolloré himself.

Uh, yeah, no, nothing so far from Bolloré, but the head of the Canal+ Studio, a guy called Maxime Sada, he used the Cannes Film Festival to announce that he would no longer work with anyone who had signed that petition.