Presented by Penn's Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies and Public Trust
Biguine follows Hermansia and Tiquataque, a pair of lovers and musicians, as they leave the plantation behind — along with its history, its backbreaking work, its reinvention of slavery as unfair wage labor — and move to the city of Saint-Pierre in the northwest of Martinique.
Biguine or beguine is a music genre that emerged on the island of Martinique at the turn of the 20th century when formerly enslaved people began to explore a musical art praxis no longer limited by the physical and emotional constraint of shackles. The movie asks, what does music sound like in the wake of enslavement? What is the music and what are the sounds of Black Caribbean joy?
Deslauriers’s camera eye records Martinique’s many faces and places, interrogating the relationship between land, people, and the creative spirit. Meanwhile, Chamoiseau’s script leaves ample room for the music and the dance to shine, heeding Édouard Glissant’s observation that for the Antillean person, “music, gesture, dance are forms of communication, just as important as the gift of speech.”
The film will be screened in French and Kreyol with English subtitles. Director Guy Deslauriers and award-winning author and screenwriter Patrick Chamoiseau will be in conversation following the projection of the film to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of their joint film project and reflect on the role of art in the as-yet-to-be-complete project of liberation. Dr. Corine Labridy, Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, will moderate the discussion.
Cosponsored by Penn's Department of Cinema and Media Studies and Wolf Humanities Center.
Patrick Chamoiseau was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique. A novelist, playwright, scenarist, and essayist, his considerable œuvre has been rewarded with many prizes, including the Prix Goncourt in 1992 for his path-breaking novel Texaco and the Grand Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe in 1990 for his autobiographical novel Antan d’enfance. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, where he leads a course titled “From the Slave Trade to Globalization.”
Guy Deslauriers is a French director with roots in Martinique. His œuvre interrogates France's colonial history and Antillean identity. After working as a director’s assistant, notably with Oscar-winning director, Euzhan Palcy, he went on to make several documentaries for television, including Edouard Glissant, portrait d'écrivain in 1996. In 1994, with the support of his production company Kréol Productions, he directed L'Exil du roi Béhanzin, based on a screenplay by Patrick Chamoiseau. The film won several awards at international festivals. 1999 saw the release of Passage du milieu (also written with Chamoiseau), the story of a slave ship as seen through the eyes of its passengers. The film was selected for the Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals.
Corine Labridy is a native Guadeloupean who teaches Caribbean Literatures and Cultures and Francophone Black Studies in the Francophone, Italian, & Germanic Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She is particularly interested in the counter-universalist potential of laughter and the recent dystopian turn in literature from Guadeloupe and Martinique.
