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Sugar Cane Alley

Texas Premiere of New Restoration

with dir. Euzhan Palcy

Nov 16, 2019, 07:00 PM Museum of Fine Arts Houston $12.00 Get Tickets

Sugar Cane Alley begins with sepia-toned postcards views of old Martinique, as if to emphasize that the film which follows is going to take us far beyond nostalgic distance and exotic local color. An audience pleasure as well as an adventurous work of cinema, Euzhan Palcy's Sugar Cane Alley established her as a major new filmmaking talent. Set in Martinique in 1931, the film paints a rich impasto of native life under French colonial rule, filtered through the coming-of-age of a bright, sweetly, opportunistic black boy learning to reconcile the value of his shanty-town roots with the educational opportunities that beckon him to the big city. Although Palcy displays a masterful command of storytelling, atmosphere, comedy, and characterization, this rainbow of a movie is anything but sedate and old-fashioned: keyed on kinetic, offbeat cutting rhythms that refract the graceful arc of the action into pointillist flurries of movement, textures and color, it achieves a blend of artful casualness, unsentimental humanism, and clear- eyed social consciousness whose like has perhaps not been seen since the early masterpiece of Jean Renoir and Vittorio De Sica. Adapted from Joseph Zobel's 1950 novel La Rue Cases-Nègres.

Film followed by Q&A with dir. Euzhan Palcy.

Supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy

Country, Year France, 1983
DirectorEuzhan Palcy
WriterEuzhan Palcy
CastDarling Légitimus, Garry Cadenat, Douta Seck, Joby Bernabé, Laurent Saint-Cyr
ProducerMichel Loulergue, Alix Régis, Claude Nedjar, Jean Luc Ormières
LanguageEnglish Subtitles, French
Runtime103 MINS, 0 SECS
GenreNarrative
SubjectLiterature
Event TypeFilm, Panel
Special Guests

Euzhan Palcy

When she directed Sugar Cane Alley in 1983, Euzhan Palcy put the French Caribbean on the cinematography map, winning The Silver Lion, Best Actress Award at the Venice International Film Festival and a Cesar (French Oscar), breaking the directorial glass ceiling in French cinema. She continued her journey as a film trailblazer in 1989 with A Dry White Season, a bracing drama made at the height of apartheid and in so doing became the first black female director produced by a Hollywood studio, MGM/ UA. Among her other films is the colorful musical fantasy Simeon.