Words of Negroes (Paroles de Nègres)

A film by Sylvaine Dampierre

SYNOPSIS

In Marie Galante, a tiny island off the banks of Guadeloupe, in the french West Indies, the past speaks up. The island is still covered with sugar cane fields. The cane still shapes the destiny of men and sugar is still made out of their sweat in the groaning and roaring of machines.

They are workers and planters and devote their strength to the survival of their old sugar factory : Grand Anse.

It’s a cathedral of rusty iron living on borrowed time for 30 years, whose old cast iron boiler is out of breath. Here the past resurfaces, in the timeless landscapes, the anachronistic shape of the factory, the unchanged gestures of the labour, the endurance that it requires.

I bring back to the workers of the factory a part of their heritage: the transcription of the words pronounced by

slaves at the trial of their master in 1842. They seize and embody these words of Negroes, thus giving back to life a memory that still forges their present.

And soon, reconnected to a collective identity, they raise their own voices. The cane has been the instrument of their father’s damnation, and remains, against all odds, the instrument of their dignity.

Against erasure and oblivion, they break the silence of Negroes …

STATEMENT

They are these workers whose disappearance is relentlessly announced, these Caribbean plant workers, cane planters and cutters, whose existence we do not even suspect, as they are supposed to live on public aid in an unproductive renowned country. They are these black men who stand, whereas they are assigned by history as dispossessed men.

I want to pay tribute to their skills and their knowledge of the factory, before they are abolished by economic rationality. I want to portray them in their landscape, their island ruffled of cane, their painful and glorious heritage, before it is turned into a picturesque scenery in which they only play a decorative role. If it is their defeat that is coming, I want to tell their fight, their courage.

I deliberately stand at their side, the side of their distraught strength, their solitude. I walk with them from the sources of their history toward an uncertain future, in order to make their voices heard, to assert their presence.

I am profoundly moved by their courage, the constancy that they show while carrying out the most thankless tasks, by their mutual attention. I want to pass on this emotion: with Jean-Paul and David granting their gestures while they fight against the boiler, with Paul and his companions carrying their wheelbarrows of dust, with Jocelyn and his cane cutters’ team, with the youngest ones growing up in the factory … In their gesture, I see beauty, in their strength a shape of sweetness, of grace, and the expression of values such as brotherhood, solidarity.

Their work, yet directly bound to a disastrous memory, is nevertheless the instrument of their fulfillment. They assume all the dimensions of their identity, reconnect knowingly with their history.

The social transformation which comes is about to change their lives, their landscape, their relationship to the world. But I don’t consider them neither defeated nor resigned. Their beliefs falter, they are in the concern, but the film keeps on trusting in their ability to overcome, to reinvent. Even if it is a fragile dream … The movie builds up an heroic, epic vision of the work of the men of Grand Anse to reach their fragility, their humanity.

World premiere DOKLeipzig oct 21 (Fipresci Prize) / Selected at IDFA nov 21 / Frauen Film Fest Köln / Third Horizon Miami / Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival (Best documentary feature price) / FIFAC french Guyane / DECOLONIAL FILMFEST Paris …

Author and director
Sylvaine Dampierre

Based on a idea by
Sylvaine Dampierre & Gilda Gonfier

Producer
Sophie Salbot

Image
Renaud Personnaz

Sound Greg
Le Maître

Editing
Sophie Reiter

Sound Mixing
Niels Barletta

Colour Grading
Anne Sophie Queneuille

Photography
Bernard Gomez

Produced by
Athénaise

In co production with
Varan Caraïbe / Micro Climats / PRO ARTI

With the support of
Région Guadeloupe –
CNC Fonds Image de la Diversité et Commissariat Général à l’Egalité des territoires

Commissariat Général à l’Egalité des territoires

Union européenne – FEADER

Fondation pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage Fondation Esclavage et Réconciliation

Sylvaine Dampierre

Author of fiction scripts, script-doctor for fiction and documentary. She works and lives in Paris. Her films have screened and at festivals including Cinema du
Réel in Paris, FID Marseille, Fidocs Chile, DOKLeipzig, Idfa Amsterdam, IFFF Koln…

In 1993, she joined the Ateliers Varan as a trainer. In 2010, she founded Varan Caraïbe in Guadeloupe. She supervised training workshops in Guadeloupe in filmmaking, editing and web documentary.

She directed 4 documentaries for the series D’un jardin, l’autre. These films are about allotments or social gardens. In L’île, she follows a gardener who has been renting a plot of land on the tip of the Île Saint- Germain for 45 years. This allotment faces the former Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt, where he has worked all his life. In 1999, Un enclos is about the garden of the women’s prison in Rennes. In 2000, she directed La Rivière des galets, a documentary on a garden for social integration on Reunion Island. In 2003, she documented community gardens in New York in Green Guérilla

In 2002, she questioned Chernobyl and its consequences in Pouvons- nous vivre ici?

In 2009, she dedicated her first feature documentary to Guadeloupe, where her father was born, with Le Pays à l’envers. She returns to the land of her father’s childhood. She leads the investigation to the time of slavery. She goes back in time to find the traces of her name. In 1848, when slavery was abolished, the slaves became citizens. Civil registrars arbitrarily assigned them a family name.