Homenagens / 49ª mostra

The succession of sepia-toned photographs suggests a temporality diluted in the dust of memory. Here and there, faces and bodies emerge. Black is the color that renders visible these figures long erased by history. Aesthetics and politics are inseparable in the images of “Sugar Cane Alley” (1983), the feature that revealed Martinican filmmaker Euzhan Palcy — a Black woman from the margins — at a time when the world of cinema was hardly able to look beyond itself.

The film surprised both audiences and the jury at the Venice Film Festival, which awarded Palcy, then 26, the Silver Lion, the first for a female director and for a black director. Four decades later, “Sugar Cane Alley” continues to resonate with the same power as when it was first released.

At the time, little was known about Euzhan Palcy — or about Martinican cinema, for that matter. In her homeland, however, Palcy had already begun her pioneering career in 1974, at just 17, by producing and directing a mid-length TV film about a hardworking woman on a banana plantation. The character served as a precursor to M’Man Tine, the tender grandmother in “Sugar Cane Alley”.

After a period in France, where she studied arts, literature, and trained in photography at the prestigious Louis Lumière film school, Palcy returned to Martinique. In the short “The Devil’s Workshop” (1982), she rehearsed the form and themes that would flourish in her first feature.

An early example of what we now call decolonial cinema, “Sugar Cane Alley” creates dissonance by giving voice, perspective and history to a people for centuries reduced to mere labor.

Palcy’s script, adapted from Joseph Zobel’s semi-autobiographical novel, follows the childhood of José, one of the children of Sugar Cane Alley, a place that symbolizes countless others around the globe, where the excluded are pushed to margins. When the adults leave for grueling work in the sugarcane fields, the children seize a fleeting taste of something they will soon lose: freedom.

Palcy builds the narrative around this idea, knowing it to be utopian. There is always an adult, a boss, a white person, a teacher, or death itself lurking to punish, coerce, or strip away what the children believe is theirs. Along the way, José becomes aware that he is one of the Earth’s “damned”, and fights for the emancipation that those before him never reached.

The film’s impact catapulted Palcy’s career, and she used her visibility to confront the abhorrent system of Apartheid in South Africa, a late bastion of colonial domination. With “A Dry White Season” (1989), she entered the lineage of political cinema grounded in emotional engagement, following in the footsteps of masters such as Costa-Gavras and Gillo Pontecorvo.

The first Hollywood studio production ever directed by a Black woman, this searing thriller starred two politically committed actors, Donald Sutherland and Susan Sarandon. The legendary Marlon Brando came out of retirement for a brief but powerful role that earned him his eighth and final Oscar nomination.

Released five years before the fall of Apartheid, the film became part of the decisive wave of international pressure that helped bring the segregationist regime to an end.

To avoid being swallowed up or stripped of her identity by the Hollywood machine, Palcy returned to her roots with “Siméon” (1992). Bathed in Antillean colors and rhythms, the film affirms identities while playfully engaging with the musical genre, anticipating what the 21st century would later call “soft power.”

She then reaffirmed her commitment to the politics of affect in the documentary series “Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History” (1995), about the Antillean poet who also believed in the arts as a tool against injustice. In another documentary, “The Journey of the Dissidents” (2006), she retraces the efforts of young Martinicans who resisted Marshal Pétain’s puppet government during France’s Nazi occupation.

Palcy’s concise filmography only heightens the coherence of her trajectory, always attuned to the continuities between a slaveholding, colonial past and a present still marked by exploitation and domination.

In 2023, she received an Honorary Academy Award, recognized as “a masterful filmmaker who broke ground for Black women directors and inspired storytellers of all kinds across the globe.”

At its 49th edition, the São Paulo International Film Festival honors Euzhan Palcy with the Humanity Award, recognizing her pivotal role in shaping a counter-hegemonic discourse that continues to inspire countless filmmakers, while offering audiences the chance to rediscover a body of work that remains more relevant than ever.