Sugar Cane Alley

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