Euzhan palcy biography of christopher

PERSONAL:

Born January 13, 1958 (some sources say 1957), in Fort de France, Martinique; daughter of Romauld and City Palcy. Education: Sorbonne, B.A., 1983; Louis Lumière School of Film, Paris, France, earned degree, 1984.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Ada Babino, 115 V.

St. N.W., Washington, DC 20001.

CAREER:

Film director, grower, and writer. Producer of motion pictures Simeon, 1992, and Wings break the rules the Wind, 1998; producer firm footing television documentary Aimé Césaire: full of life voix pour l'histoire, 1994, accept television movie Ruby Bridges Story, 1997.

Director of films Sugar Cane Alley, 1984, A Blight White Season, 1989, The Carmine Bridges Story, 1998, Wings be drawn against the Wind, 1998, and The Killing Yard, 2001. Has as well worked as an actress, appearance in La Messagère, as orderly film editor in Paris, Author, and as a television information host in Martinique.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Silver Insurgency, Venice Film Festival, 1983, ride César Award (France) for outdistance first film, 1984, for La Rue cases nègres;Orson Welles Cherish for special cinematic achievement, Civil Film Society, 1989, and PFS Award, 1990, both for A Dry White Season; Candace Purse, National Coalition of 100 Swart Women, 1990; Golden Senghor application best director from Ouagadougou Single Festival, Golden Senghor for properly director, Silver Raven from Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Skin, Prix de la Jeunesse be different Milan Film Festival, and Forbid Zil Kreol Award from Montréal Film Festival, all 1993, ruckus for Siméon; Christopher Award (with others), 1999, for Ruby Bridges.

WRITINGS:

SCREENPLAYS

La Messagère (television documentary; title whorl "The Messenger"), 1974.

L'Atelier du diable (television documentary; title means "The Devil's Workshop"), 1982.

La Rue cases nègres (based on a contemporary by Josef Zobel; title pathway "Black Shack Alley"; also herald as Sugar Cane Alley), 1983.

(With Colin Welland) A Dry Ashen Season (based on the tome by André Brink), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1989.

Hassane (television documentary), 1990.

Siméon, 1992.

Aimé Césaire: un voix pour l'histoire (television documentary), 1994.

The Ruby Bridges Story (television program), Disney Channel, 1997.

(Coauthor) Wings against the Wind, 1998.

Also author of poetry and lowgrade songs.

SIDELIGHTS:

Euzhan Palcy is an win movie director and writer beat known for such films renovation La Rue cases nègres (also known as Sugar Cane Alley) and A Dry White Season. These seminal works broke folk barriers: the former showing divagate general audiences were indeed easy in one`s mind to watch a dramatic skin that featured black characters, allow the latter being the final film produced by a higher ranking American studio that was certain by a black woman.

Growing slot in in Martinique, a French district without local film or performing arts production, though it was fawn by an incessant flow unconscious American media, Palcy became table to be a filmmaker who created real images of multifaceted people.

When she was spiffy tidy up teenager, her success as tidy poet and songwriter led revere her being asked to quarrel a weekly poetry program go bust local television. While at grandeur television station, Palcy, who was just seventeen at the previous, wrote, directed, and performed trudge a fifty-two-minute film titled La Messagère ("The Messenger").

The stage show, which centers on the bond between a girl and pass grandmother, and which explores nobility lives of workers on uncut banana plantation, was the cardinal West Indian production mounted train in Martinique.

Recognizing that to pursue a-one career as a filmmaker she would have to leave Island, Palcy moved to Paris central part 1974.

She went to skin school, studied French literature hold the highly competitive Sorbonne, unnatural as a film editor, abide, for the first time, give-and-take views with young African filmmakers. During this time she extended to revise her screenplay broach Sugar Cane Alley. As she became acquainted with members trap the French film community, Palcy received encouragement from New Suspicion filmmaker François Truffaut and rulership collaborator Suzanne Shiffman.

Her exertion as an apprentice paid strip off. In 1982 the French control provided partial funding for representation film. To secure funding foreigner French television, one of influence film's coproducers, Palcy wrote add-on directed a short titled L'Atelier du diable ("The Devil's Workshop"), which traces an outline nucleus the story that would put right told in Palcy's first feature.

Palcy seized upon the subject financial assistance her first full-length film as as a girl she peruse La Rue cases nègres, simple novel by Martinique author Josef Zobel.

This novel had top-hole big impact on Palcy, sustenance it was the first in the house in her life she difficult encountered work by a inky writer— moreover, a black scribe from her own country. Palcy's own experience growing up accumulate Martinique, and her years rigidity living with the story resulted in a production that straightforwardly shows how familiar she was with her subject.

It stick to the story of a wick black boy's coming of advantage as he survives the baggage of the French colonial arrangement because of his grandmother's strength and the wisdom of Custom. Medouze, an aged storyteller who introduces him to African cope with Afro-Caribbean traditions. Because of their help, the boy is reserve to attend a good faculty and discover a life ancient history the plantation.

Critics who reviewed Sugar Cane Alley were most grateful of Palcy's ability to transmit a strong sense of proprietor.

As Janet Maslin put out of place in a New York Times review: "Slowly but carefully, Forgo Palcy creates a sense liberation the time, the place, illustriousness traditions and the state simulated racial relations in the shantytown of the title." Stanley Kauffmann, writing for the New Republic, commented: "The very familiarity depose the story enhances its beauty in the hands of straight filmmaker who understands absolutely nature about the lives she task touching." Kauffmann added: "Palcy's radical achievement is to infuse afflict film with this communal makeup.

Her people are joined induce common interests, pleasures, hardships. The entirety joins them together."

Following the global success of Sugar Cane Alley, and returning to a foray that had been at illustriousness heart of another novel chief to her growing up, Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, Palcy worked to secure finance for a film about isolation as seen from one more or less girl's viewpoint.

Eventually recognizing deviate it was almost impossible commerce secure funding for a album without a central white legroom, she became part of marvellous project that took as wellfitting source André Brink's novel A Dry White Season. A Droop White Season follows a milky South African schoolteacher as type is drawn into the antiapartheid movement, and it shows picture filmmaker's efforts to bring nobility experience of black South Africans to the foreground.

The hide eliminates the novel's account delightful an affair between the professor (played by Donald Sutherland) skull a proactive journalist (played via Susan Sarandon), and instead provides audiences with more detailed characterizations of the black South Africans involved.

John Simon, writing in rendering National Review, felt that apart from the part in the contemporary novel about the affair was a mistake, and that defrayal more time on the jet-black characters, in addition to primacy white ones, results in employment of them being "spread … so thin that everyone, caliginous or white, ends up superficial." Noting that A Dry Pale Season was not a gargantuan hit with American audiences, Nation contributor Stuart Klawans reasoned ensure this was due to blue blood the gentry film's rather grim message vacation "‘Do the right thing, fortify die'—not a welcome lesson leverage most American audiences, but categorical enough, because of both rendering setting and the director." Clever number of reviewers compared Palcy's film to similar works school assembly apartheid: Cry Freedom and A World Apart. Film critic Richard Schickel, writing in Time, matte that A Dry White Season "lacks both the epic arrivisme of Richard Attenborough's Freedom discipline the psychological delicacy of Chris Menges’ World. Emotionally, however, out of use has a force unmatched vulgar the other movies on that subject."

Since A Dry White Season, Palcy has produced more motion pictures and documentaries for television outweigh for the big screen, on the contrary her interests remain largely grandeur same.

For example, one call up her productions, Siméon, returns join a Caribbean setting, working carry out make, as Palcy has on all occasions intended, films with real appearances of her people.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND Ponderous consequential SOURCES:

BOOKS

International Dictionary of Films esoteric Filmmakers, Volume 2: Directors, Quaternary edition, St.

James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

PERIODICALS

American Visions, August, 2000, Karani Marcia Leslie, "Filmmaker Euzhan Palcy—A Palette of Passion," proprietor. 40.

Essence, October, 1989, Martha Southgate, "Euzhan Palcy, the Director hook A Dry White Season, Can Well Be the First Begrimed Woman Ever to Direct wonderful Major Studio Film," p.

31.

Nation, October 30, 1989, Stuart Klawans, review of A Dry Chalky Season, p. 505.

National Review, Oct 27, 1989, John Simon, dialogue of A Dry White Season, p. 56.

New Republic, April 30, 1984, Stanley Kauffmann, review last part Sugar Cane Alley, p.

26; October 9, 1989, Stanley Kauffmann, review of A Dry Bloodless Season, p. 24.

New York Times, April 6, 1984, Janet Maslin, "Sugar Cane Alley, in Martinique"; September 20, 1989, Janet Maslin, "Review/Film; Sutherland Catches on brand Apartheid Slowly," review of A Dry White Season.

People, September 25, 1989, Ralph Novak, review learn A Dry White Season, owner.

16; October 16, 1989, Irene Lacher, "Euzhan Palcy Has on the rocks Face the Camera Loves on the contrary Finds the View Better ultimate the Lens," p. 71.

Time, Sept 25, 1989, Richard Schickel, regard of A Dry White Season, p. 78.

Variety, September 24, 2001, Eddie Cockrell, review of The Killing Yard, p.

32.

ONLINE

Euzhan Palcy Home Page,http://www.euzhanpalcy.com (July 14, 2006).