The Media Research Center’s Gabriel Hays ranted in a July 13 post headlined “Filthy Hollywood Film With Lesbian Nuns and Virgin Mary ‘Dildo’ Makes Waves at Cannes”:
Surprise! A French shock Jaques director hates the Catholic Church and has created a movie calculated to outrage the faithful and win plaudits from the elites. Showgirls director Paul Verhoeven’s latest flick is an anti-Catholic porno.
Benedetta is a profane trash heap about 17th century lesbian nuns that’s full of violence and extremely gratuitous sex scenes between women whose vocations are supposed to involve a life of dutiful chastity before God. Supposedly it’s based on a true story. And of course this kind of disgusting, subversive content sets just the right mood for the foreign film fest circuit, and apparently Benedetta is all the rage at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
One little problem with Hays’ rant: “Benedetta” is not a “Hollywood film.” According to Wikipedia, the film was shot in Europe in the French language. The film’s two main producers, Said Ben Said and Jerome Seydoux, are Tunisian-French and French, respectively. A third producer, Michel Merkt, is also French.
This is simple stupidity on Hays’ part, making a lazy assumption that all films are “Hollywood films.” People in other parts of the world make movies too, but Hays is apparently too ideologically nearsighted to realize that. And apparently the MRC has no editors (or at least none who do anything meaningful), so Hays’ lazy mistake slipped right on through, even though it’s right there in the headline.