"I close my eyes. The crowd makes me smile, breaks my body, and that's the end"
By presenting the festive events which escorted the projection of the film "Jean Galmot aventurier" by Alain Maline, where the filmmaker’s father played a role, the images of Moune Ô reveal the survival of the colonial inheritance within a Western collective unconscious always marked of stereotypes. From little gestures of daily life, the resistance toward oppression comes in its own rhythm.
“Through a formal and political rewind, Jean-Baptiste's technologized modifications of the premiere footage create a retroactive challenge to colonial memory.”
“Through a formal and political rewind, Jean-Baptiste's technologized modifications of the premiere footage create a retroactive challenge to colonial memory.”
Maxime Jean-Baptiste is a filmmaker based between Brussels and Paris. He was born and raised in the context of the Guyanese and Antillean diaspora in France, to a French mother and a Guyanese father. His interest as an artist is to dig inside the complexity of Western colonial history by detecting the survival of traumas from the past in the present. His audiovisual and performance work is focused on archives and forms of reenactment as a perspective to conceive a vivid and embodied memory. His first film NOU VOIX (2018) was selected in about thirty festivals and art exhibitions and was awarded the Jury Prize at Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris (FR). His second movie, LISTEN TO THE BEAT OF OUR IMAGES (2021), co-directed with his sister Audrey Jean-Baptiste was selected at CPH:DOX (Special Mention), Hotdocs, ISFF Clermont-Ferrand, Sundance Film Festival, IDFA among many others. His next film, MOUNE Ô (2022) will have its world premiere at the Berlinale (Forum Expanded), in february 2022.
