Excavating legacies: Euzhan Palcy interviewed by June Givanni

The conversation in Paris turns to Euzhan Palcy’s speech at the 2022 Oscars, when she became the first Black woman to win a Lifetime Achievement Award. But her renown on the international film circuit began four decades earlier with her Venice Silver Lion and French César awards for her debut feature Sugar Cane Alley (Rue Case Nègres, 1983), making her the first Black winner of either. The searing yet tender drama evoked the hardship and aspirations of labourers in the sugarcane fields of post-abolition Martinique, the island where she was born and raised.

It was at that same edition of the Venice festival where Palcy and Dr June Givanni first met, at the beginning of both their careers, and the passage in which they recall the encounter is bound in affection – and the ability both to finish and correct each other’s sentences, rather perfectly exemplifying their enduring mutual affinity.

June Givanni: My sister… 

Euzhan Palcy: In crime! Did you tell people how we met? Let people know.

The thing is, you keep saying it was in…

No! I will tell you how we met, June… OK, ‘83. I’ll tell you how. It happened in Venice, during the festival. I was in my hotel, exhausted and trying to have a little nap. A bunch of people wanted to see me and I said, “Well, I’m tired!” I mean, a lot of meetings, interviews and stuff like that. Then I heard a knock at the door and thought, “Oh, it might be one of my people.” So I said, “Yes, come in.” And I see a beautiful young Black woman who has this cute [British] accent… Then she speaks French, and I said, “Hello!” And she says, “I’m so sorry, I know I shouldn’t be doing this.. but would you mind talking to me? I won’t disturb you for long.”

All in French!

So I said, “Oh, please come in!” And you know, something that was supposed [to last] maybe 15 minutes lasted for almost an hour and a half. She tells me about herself and gets me to talk about myself and she is amazing. She says, “I saw your movie and I’m in love with the film and I want you to come to England!” You were at the…

The GLC – the Greater London Council.

Exactly. So June says, “Please, I want you to promise to come. I’ll manage it, I’ll work on this if you say yes.” And I said, “How can I say no to you?” Then we started working closely. And we’re still good friends – sisters!

We’ve worked together in so many different ways. I’ve been to your houses in Martinique and in Paris. We spent Christmas with your family by the sea. You know my family too: my son, my granddaughter. 

You are very wonderful and a hard worker, like me.

—

After this first encounter in Venice, Givanni organised community screenings of Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley in London venues like the Wood Green Library, the Yaa Asantewaa Centre in Maida Vale and Brixton’s Ritzy Cinema, indicative of her mediatory role in connecting international audiences with the emergent cinema of the Global South and the grassroots aspect of her varied programming career.

Sugar Cane Alley travelled far and wide. One of the best anecdotes in the conversation between Palcy and Givanni concerns its reception at the 1985 edition of Fespaco, the legendary biennial Pan-African film festival hosted in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, which also served as a centre for Givannïs international distribution and programming work. The festival facilitated meaningful and reparative exchanges between Caribbean filmmakers such as Palcy and their contemporaries and audiences on the African continent, and both women developed many enduring relationships there. Palcy’s recollection of events attests to the populist nature of the festival, especially during the era of Thomas Sankara, Burkino Faso’s revolutionary Pan-African president (who would attend one more edition of the festival before his assassination in 1987). In winning the festival’s first audience award, Sugar Cane Alley also became Fespaco’s first non-African prizewinner. In 2013, Palcy became the first woman to preside over the festival’s grand jury to judge the best feature film, again demonstrating her proclivity for breaking glass ceilings.

EP: People said [to me] in Fespaco, “We want to vote for that movie.” I said, “You can’t, because it’s not in competition… and it already got a lot of awards in Venice.” But they said, “No, no, no. We want to burn the theatre! We want to vote for that film!” There [was] no public award in other festivals… but they said this was the occasion to create one; the public will create its own award. It was an amazing experience, and a public audience award was created that year.

—

Another festival close to both women’s hearts was Images Caraïbes, a short-lived itinerant festival founded by the Martinican history teacher Suzy Landau, inspired by her experience visiting Fespaco. Over its three editions, each taking place on a different Caribbean island between 1988 and 1992, it sought to promote and unite the culturally and linguistically disparate cinemas of a region for the most part still finding its footing (Cuba had developed a distinct national filmic tradition). The festival was supported by Palcy’s longtime idol, mentor and compatriot Aimé Césaire, the foundational Martinican poet and politician who became the subject of her three-part documentary Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History (1994).

JG: What of the significance of Aimé Césaire in your life and career? I know you spoke about it around the time of Images Caraïbes – you were proud of it. Tell us about his influence and his link with the festival.

EP: The experience of that festival, created by the dynamic cultural historian Suzy Landau and her team, is very important. So is Aimé Césaire. When I was an adolescent, I was a great admirer of the man, his work, his poetry. That’s why, when I was listening to him talking about being banned, I said, “Oh my God, I’ve got to meet him!”

It’s thanks to my late cousin Danny, who loved his poetry, that I discovered Césaire’s work. Danny used to have lunch at my parents’ house and before going back to school, he would stand on the kitchen table and recite entire verses of Césaire’s poetry.

Césaire did so much for his people. Every time I would listen to his public speeches, that would resonate tremendously in me. I used to say, “That man is putting words on my feelings!” That was so funny. I was young and already a rebel. Everything that he was fighting for or against, I had in my heart. So at a very young age, 16 or 17, I was already trying to do whatever I could to fix the problem – to achieve and celebrate Caribbean history and cultural liberation with my little poetry, my songs.

Growing up, I followed Césaire when he was a politician in Martinique. He was the mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital – the most senior political authority in Martinique – yet because he was denouncing the politics of colonialism carried out by the French government, it was forbidden to invite him to appear on television or to speak on radio. He was banned in his own country!

Who banned him? 

The French government, of course.

And they banned him because? 

For political reasons. He was a strongly left-wing man. But for the good. Thank God he did what he did because he supported the development of the people’s culture…

And Images Caraïbes film festival, in a big and practical way. 

Absolutely. I remember one of my friends who was working as a sound engineer in television and radio had the nerve to put on the late programme one night an Aimé Césaire speech that was due to be presented in the public auditorium. He lost his job just because he snuck Césaire’s speech into the programme.

—

This understanding of the politicised power and reach of media is evident in Palcy’s desire to craft films illuminating singular Black figures and their sociopolitical reverberations – from the famed revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, who helped lay the foundations for Haiti as the first free Black republic, to lesser-known figures such as Bessie Coleman, the earliest known Black person to earn an international pilot’s license. Though they work on different sides of cinema – Palcy in direction and production, Givanni in archiving and circulation through the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive – there is a clear resonance between the figures and narratives Palcy gravitates towards and Givanni’s mission with ‘Excavating Legacies’.

JG: You’ve done a number of films that feature strong and inspirational young women and girls, but I know there’s one close to your heart: an important woman who was challenging expectations about what women can do, and determined to do something women were not supposed to be able to do at that time. It was one of your ambitions to celebrate her with a film on the big screen, and I’ve prayed that you will be able to do that. So tell us about Bessie Coleman: who she was and what was your vision for her? 

EP: When I discovered Bessie Coleman, first of all, it was a shock for me – that girl, what she did. And I recognised myself in her, with her passion as the fighter that she was. As I met people to try to raise money to make the movie, I had pictures of her. And funnily enough, people would look at the pictures of her and look at me with curiosity, not knowing who she was.

When the Academy recognised you with the Oscar, I was thinking: hopefully now the finance will come to make these passion projects which are so important. People definitely haven’t done a film about Bessie Coleman. There has been stuff on Louverture, but whether it’s received sufficient attention or depth or not, I’m not sure. So it would be good to see the Euzhan Palcy treatment of these two subjects. I hope that there will be opportunities for that. 

Yeah. They are all my wishes. I would like to see the truth come out before I leave this earth.

You have to excavate your wishes. You have to go in and pull them out. And that is what we are identifying and celebrating in ‘Excavating Legacies’. You are a legacy for cinema in general, and also for Pan African and Caribbean cinema to inspire so many young people.

—

The breadth of Palcy’s filmmaking spans not only overlooked or obscured figures, but also Hollywood stars such as Marlon Brando, with whom she worked in her 1989 MGM apartheid drama Dry White Season.

EP: Brando: I brought him back out of retirement, you know? He didn’t want to have anything to do with film and I called him and talked to him and made my case. He asked me to talk about myself [and said], “Tell me about you.” And I said, “Oh my God, that’s the worst thing you can ask me!” because I can talk about people, but I cannot talk about myself. I said, “I don’t know how to do that, but my movies can. For example, my first film, Sugar Cane Alley.” And Brando said, “Oh, what is that?”

—

Despite a self-avowed reticence, the meanderingly expansive nature of Palcy’s intimations, vividly and candidly elicited in the warmth of exchange with June Givanni, exemplify her impassioned resolve as an artist. It is a testament to how she has sustained an enduring, transnational and truly groundbreaking career. Reflecting on her mantra, and the parallel she sees between herself and her prospective subject Bessie Coleman, Palcy evidenced her own steadfastness while sharing the lesson she endeavours to pass on to younger generations.

EP: It’s what I’ve been doing, from when I was a little girl until today. I used to say to students: “When they kick you out of the door and say, ‘Get out!’, you come back; you go through the window, and keep doing that until they are fed up with you!”