IN CINEMA
BELONGING: MEMORY, PLACE AND CREOLE IDENTITY
KOMAN I LÉ LA SOURS and
LE ROI N’EST PAS MON COUSIN
Tickets: $15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price
Tuesday, April 9th at 7PM
Across the diasporic geographies and intimate histories of KOMAN I LÉ LA SOURS (1988) and LE ROI N’EST PAS MON COUSIN (The King is Not My Cousin) (2022), Madeleine Beauséjour and Annabelle Aventurin offer reflections on belonging. Beauséjour and Aventurin each work through language politics and creolized cultures in ways that also recall how bell hooks looked at placemaking in relation to social life and land in BELONGING: A CULTURE OF PLACE (2009). The films are woven around a black island, Réunion in the Indian Ocean and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, one by chronicling a community and the other by channeling an elder’s memories. Madeleine Beauséjour (1946-1994) was a political militant, feminist and filmmaker/editor whose KOMAN I LÉ LA SOURS, her only film, reflects her grounding motivation in establishing a cinematic and cultural claim for the Creole identity of her native Réunion. Both negotiating territories shaped by French colonization and empire, LE ROI N’EST PAS MON COUSIN likewise engages the displacements and multiplicities of Guadeloupe through the oral storytelling of Elzéa Aventurin, the filmmaker’s grandmother. These two hybrid documentaries are fluid and imaginative explorations of how individual and collective identities and memories are anchored and detached to place.
Curated by Yasmina Price and Annabelle Aventurin.
Post-screening discussion to follow!
PROGRAM:
KOMAN I LÉ LA SOURS
Madeleine Beauséjour, 1988, 22 min.
In Réunion, a young woman from La Source, a suburb of Saint-Denis, walks around and goes from house to house to visit. Mother to one and navigating a frustrated love story with a plumber, the home she nurtures is a popular place for gathering the community. Initially called “La Source City”; because the funders rejected the Creole title, the film is itself a counterforce to honor creolized languages and identities. Faced with such obstacles, the documentary fiction was made through the devoted determination of filmmaker and editor Madeleine Beauséjour. This chronicle of everyday working-class life in the 1980s—covering everything from children playing to collective mourning to artmaking—ended up having her chosen title, after the popular Creole expression “Koman i lé?” (“How are you?”)
LE ROI N’EST PAS MON COUSIN (The King is Not My Cousin)
Annabelle Aventurin, 2022, 30 min.
Bringing together poignant interview clips, excerpts of text and symbolic imagery, THE KING IS NOT MY COUSIN is a familial documentary essay centred around resilience, history, and sacrifice. Filmmaker Annabelle Aventurin chronicles her grandmother’s experience from Guadeloupe, a journey of resilience and sacrifice across the Atlantic. The pair revisit anecdotes and historical experiences whilst exploring the meaning of Caribbean identity on colonial impact. Passages of Karukera ensoleillée, Guadeloupe échouée (“Sunny Karukera, Stranded Guadeloupe”), a book written in 1980 by Aventurin’s grandmother, point to the harrowing reality and repercussions of slavery. The mixture of the fond yet wounding first-person narrative creates an authentic composition of sound and moving image.
Annabelle Aventurin is a Paris-based film archivist. She worked on the preservation and distribution of films by director Med Hondo at Ciné-Archives, the audiovisual fund of the PCF and the workers’ movement between 2020 and late 2023. She is also a programmer for various festivals and venues. In 2022, she completed her first documentary film, LE ROI N’EST PAS MON COUSIN cousin screened at numerous international festivals.
Yasmina Price is a New York–based writer and film programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. She focuses on anticolonial cinema from the Global South and the work of visual artists across the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her programming has been featured at Anthology Film Archives and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in Lux, the Baffler, the Nation, Film Quarterly, Criterion, and elsewhere.
