Euzhan
Palcy, the director. (from
Caribbean
Cinema and "Black Shack Alley")
Palcy
first read the novel, Rue Case Negres by Joseph
Zobel,
when she was 14 years old. She reportedly wrote her first script based
on it at 17 when she went to work for the Radio Télévision
Francaise office in Fort-de-France. She is Martinican but left the
island
for Paris in 1975--which has been the base for her subsequent cinematic
career. She studied literature at the Sorbonne for her undergraduate
degree
and then earned a Ph.D. there in cinema. She studied filmmaking at the
Rue Lumiere School. She made Sugar Cane
Alley when she was
28! Palcy is also the director of A Dry White Season
(1989), an
anti-apartheid film about South Africa, a Hollywood film, but made in
Zimbabwe
and "starring" Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando (and available at
video
stores all across America). She madeSimeon in 1992,
a film inspired
by Caribbean music and written and shot from the point of view of a 10
year old girl. It is "a film about the spirit of the music and a paean
to those who perform it" (Linda Lopez McAlister). Palcy has established
her own production company. Recently, she completed a three part
documentary
about Aimé Cesaire, a poet and politician and the foremost West
Indian writer on Negritude: Aimé Cesaire: Une Voix Pour
L'histoire.
She is also working on a feature film biography of Bessie Coleman, the
first African-American woman pilot who learned to fly in France in the
1920s and on a film about Toussaint L'Ouverture.
