French Documentary Makers: Get a life!

Just exactly HOW MANY films can the French make about the American penitentiary system? I was bored tonite - my middle name is Insomniac - and checked out the French channels and lo and behold!, yet another documentary about...yes, Huntsville.

Weasel film-makers: You don't like life in America? You find American prisons scandalous? Why insisteth so much about your feelings film after film after film?! (Btw, we have our own home-grown version of you, so your services are not required.) Could it be because of who pays for most of the cost? Seems only logical, really, that you never find a positive story to tell, now doesn't it. (Emphasis mine.)

Sixty-eight percent of all funding for French documentaries comes from market revenues, including a substantial portion (61%) from the French broadcasters who commission the documentaries.

For people who don't want to be like Americans, you are obsessed with us. I suspect that all this film-making is a good way for you people to get paid vacations to the USA without having to admit it to your friends and family. No, I don't LIKE America, I'm going zerr to make a film.

It would really be something to see some American film-makers come to France to reciprocate. Here are one or two stories I saw on the news tonite that could be a good start.

NOTE: I came across a couple of interesting articles about documentaries. Here's a quote from the one about France's fall from cinematic grace.

Pathé took a fatal strategic decision to stick to making short films when everybody else was getting into full-length feature production.
...Pathé's managerial weakness, the divergence of French cinema from the stylistic mainstream, and the catastrophe of the First World War all had combined...to topple France from the industrial and creative pinnacle it had occupied in 1908.

Just think, if Pathé and co. had picked up the ball a little earlier, we might all be watching lots of French films!