Culture and cinema must never bow under the pressures of trade, the French Embassy’s Cultural Counsellor, Jean Poncet, told a gathering in Melbourne, Australia this month. Speaking at a ceremony for independent film distributor Natalie Miller, who was awarded the 'Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et Lettres' (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters), Poncet said that national heritage and cultural diversity were the keys to progress and development. ‘Yet if we do not care. If we give the market forces free reign, all this could end by heaping power on the mightiest, ensuring triumph for products pre-formatted for the masses, accentuating inequality, fuelling confrontation between the dominant model and the rest of the world,’ said Poncet. Speaking of the French Government’s perspective on culture, Poncet said his Government was ‘open to exchanges of all kinds’ but would continue to refuse the ‘steamroller of uniformisation.’ ‘Our demand that creation, culture and thought be exonerated from the rules of the market forces… is not a lonely battle to defend an exception,’ he said. ‘It has become a shared demand for diversity.’