Isabelle Degeorges calls for an industrial wake-up call in response to the rise of duanju
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"A country that no longer controls its narratives is a country that loses its soul. And an industry that no longer controls its formats is an industry that loses its future."
It was with this quote attributed to the famous French director Bertrand Tavernier that Isabelle Degeorges recently raised the debate surrounding fiction for mobile phones.
Isabelle Degeorges, President of Gaumont Television France since 2013, heads the French television branch of Gaumont. The group, founded in 1895, is considered the oldest film and television production company still in operation in the world.
In two posts published on LinkedIn, she does not reject the duanju format. Rather, she raises awareness about what it reveals: the rise of new uses, new platforms, and new dependencies. For her, the issue is simultaneously cultural, industrial, technological, strategic, and political.
His argument places the challenge of a response not on a French scale, but on a European scale.
In her second post, she emphasizes Europe's dependence on infrastructure, platforms, operating systems, servers, and now artificial intelligence, largely governed by American law. She specifically points out that, through the Cloud Act, data hosted in France can be subject to foreign law.
Applied to the duanju format, this reasoning takes on a particular dimension. If the formats, distribution platforms, algorithmic logic, and, in the future, the production tools are designed elsewhere, France and Europe risk losing not only control over their narratives, but also over their circulation and monetization. Duanju then becomes more than just a new narrative language: it also becomes a test of digital sovereignty.
Isabelle Degeorges explicitly questions the risk that duanju will become "yet another threat to our cultural sovereignty" rather than simply a driver of growth. Aware of these new uses, she raises the alarm and calls for a renewed industrial focus on a European scale.
This concern echoes other French debates surrounding online platforms. In 2013, during the proposed merger between Yahoo and Dailymotion, French Minister Arnaud Montebourg opposed a sale that would have meant losing control of a French digital player considered strategic, arguing that this "flagship of the web" should not be handed over to a foreign group. Today, Dailymotion remains one of the leading video streaming platforms for professional media. The potential for a revival and renewed success with the general public is not out of the question, especially given the tensions inherent in globalization.
Revisited in light of duanju, this earlier episode with Dailymotion reminds us that behind emerging formats, the issue is never only one of innovation. It is also about who owns the tools, who controls distribution, and who shapes the digital future of storytelling.
Find Isabelle Degeorges' publications on LinkedIn:
Article written by Guillaume Sanjorge
