This season, the Gallery Podcast is bringing you a full lineup of filmmaker artist interviews, including some masters and legends, along with the Houston Cinema Arts Society at the 2019 Houston Cinema Arts Festival.
In this interview, Claudia sat down with a living legend, filmmaker Euzhan Palcy. They discussed what it has been like for her to carry the weight of all her firsts throughout her career, the current state of Hollywood, breaking away from referring to films with black leads as “black movies”, and her first film Sugar Cane Alley (1983).
Ms. Palcy is a native of Martinique in the French West Indies. She is notable for being the first black woman director of a film produced by a major Hollywood studio (MGM) for A Dry White Season (1989), as well as being the first black director (male or female) to direct an actor to an Oscar nomination and the first black director to win a César Award. She is also the first black director to win a Venice Film Festival Award (Silver Lion).
Ms. Palcy grew up studying the films of Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Orson Welles. She left for Paris in 1975 to earn a master’s degree in French literature, in theater, at the Sorbonne, a D.E.A. in Art and Archeology, and a film degree (specializing in cinematography) from renowned Louis Lumière College. It was in Paris, with the encouragement of her “French Godfather”, François Truffaut, that she was able to put together her first feature, Sugar Cane Alley.
About SUGAR CANE ALLEY
(French title: La Rue Cases-Nègres). Set in Martinique in the 1930s, Sugar Cane Alley 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.
A special thanks to Euzhan Palcy’s team, GIVERNY Lab, and Houston Cinema Arts Society for making this interview possible.
Listen to the interview:
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