NOU VOIX
Maxime Jean-Baptiste | France, French-Guayana 2018 | 14 Min. | Creole, Pidgin with engl. Subtitles
SUNDAY, 11.05. | 7:45 pm
De France, Saal 1 | TICKETS
Part of the Short Film Program IN FOCUS: sonic frictions I
What does it mean to build the memory of a movie set? What does it mean to build the memory of absence? Absence in performed representation. By remixing and scrubbing VHS footage from Jean Galmot Aventurier (1990) cracks start to appear. The original documentary centers the namegiving colonial adventurer and reenacts the trial around his murder that was followed by the lynching of six Guianese citizens. The filmmaker’s father acted as an extra, embodying one of the fourteen defendants (Les Insurgés) during the trial in court. In slowing down, rewinding and interrupting the original footage, voices of the ghosts behind these images are uncovered. They question colonial narratives and their cinematic stagings while calling on us to care for voids and to listen between and back to retrieve sounds of grief and resistance.
Director: Maxime Jean-Baptiste
Camera: Maxime Jean-Baptiste
Editing: Maxime Jean-Baptiste
Sound: Patrick Housen
Production: vk drome
BIOGRAPHY
Maxime JEAN-BAPTISTE (1993) is a filmmaker who works between Brussels and Paris. He grew up in France, in the context of the Guyanese and West Indian diaspora. As an artist, he is interested in the complexity of Western colonial history by detecting and portraying the survival of past traumas in the present. In doing so, he delves into archives and types of reenactments that imagine living and embodied memories.
