WELCOME > SCHEDULE > SCREENINGS > KOUTÉ VWA

HEART OF HAWICK
SATURDAY 3 MAY
19:30 – 21:15 / 76′ + Q&A

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Maxime Jean-Baptiste will be present for the Q&A.

This film has descriptive subtitles. The introduction and Q&A will have BSL interpretation.

Content warning: contains strong language; discussion of death, murder, violence. 

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

Following To Yield, his spellbinding lecture performance commissioned for Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2023, Maxime Jean-Baptiste returns to Hawick for the UK premiere of his award-winning debut feature, Kouté vwa. A hybrid documentary vividly exploring community and youth amidst the prolonged fallout of colonial violence in French Guiana, the film powerfully expands on themes explored in the artist’s earlier performance.

Kouté vwa opens with real-life video footage of the funeral of 18-year-old musician and DJ Lucas Diomar, the artist’s cousin who was murdered during a birthday party in his hometown Cayenne in 2012. The film subsequently changes modes, establishing Melrick (Melrick Diomar) as the teenage protagonist of what begins to unfold as a film of ostensible fiction. But Melrick is performed by Lucas’s real-life nephew, while his onscreen aunt Nicole – with whom the boy is spending a summer away from his home in France – is performed by the late musician’s own mother. It’s a conceit that affords Jean-Baptiste a range of techniques in examining the lasting impact of his cousin’s brutal death on their family and wider community.

In scenes where Melrick meets and hangs out with his late uncle’s pals – particularly Yannick (Cébret), played by Lucas’s actual best friend – the film has a spontaneity and humour not easily achieved in conventionally scripted work; other scenes, between Melrick and Nicole, have a layered intimacy that few documentaries can reach. That Melrick is of an age nearing that of Lucas when the latter died lends an additional power to the film’s central absence. Jean-Baptiste, who co-scripted the film with his sister Audrey, follows and focuses on his central subject’s face with an agility and tactfulness that capture the young performer’s endearing character with exceptional economy.

The film, whose title translates to Listen to the Voices, upholds immense generosity towards its collaborators. Jean-Baptiste doesn’t merely invite his subjects to open up about their personal grief and communal loss, but also to involve one another in a collective act of listening. Consider, for instance, the untold lifetimes of unutterable heartache implied by that single cut, two thirds through, from video footage of Nicole in the aftermath of her son’s murder to a present-day conversation in which she tells Melrick the value of forgiveness. Whether by dialogic or purely cinematic means, Kouté vwa is less a film of bearing witness than of working through.

This screening is presented in partnership with Open City Documentary Festival and Tate.

PROGRAMME