Spain’s MoreThan Films has secured international sales rights outside France to “Listen to the Voices” (“Kouté vwa”), from Brussels/Paris based Maxime Jean-Baptiste, in the run-up to August’s Locarno Film Festival where the film world premieres in Filmmakers of the Present.
Jean-Baptiste’s feature debut, the fiction film tracks young Melrick, 13, who travels from Stains in the Saint-Denis suburb of Paris to spend with his grandmother the summer holiday in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana.
For Melrick, the summer may well mark him for life. It is a return to his roots, embodied in his desire to learn how to play the drum and become part of a local drum and dance band, Mayouri Tchô Neg. He never seems happier, encountering also an early sense of his own identity as part of the Guianese diaspora in France.
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Yet it’s also his first encounter with larger ethical issues, as he finds the Guiana side to his family still devastated by the murder 11 years earlier of his uncle, Lucas, a charismatic drummer, co-founder of Mayouri Tchô Neg, and a DJ who introduced new Turbulence rhythms to the community.
Lucas’ best friend, Yannick, still rues not having taken revenge with the killers but Melrick learns from his grandmother the wiser route of forgiveness.
Written by Jean-Baptiste and sister Audrey Jean-Baptiste, herself a director, “Listen to the Voices” is at once highly personal and an introduction to issues still roiling French Guiana.
“In March 2012, I was 19 years old. I heard from France about the brutal death of my cousin in Cayenne, who was stabbed several times during a party after a fight between young people. Lucas died of his wounds on the spot,” Maxime Jean-Baptiste has said.
His family – grandmother Nicole Diomar, little cousin Melrick Diomar and Lucas’ best friend Yannick Cebret – all play fictionalized versions of themselves. A climatic concert by Mayouri Tchô Neg is shot for the film, but yields moments near to documentary.
Several stories about the director’s relationship with French Guiana intertwined in “Listen to the Voices.”Jean Baptiste tried to closely document the reality of the protagonists while creating a fiction that would be a reflection on the persistence of violence in a territory marked by the history of transatlantic slavery.
“The film is a plunge into the heart of the stories that haunt European societies ‘in return,’ to quote Aimé Césaire. A history that comes back to us, with all its violence, from that famous New World of which we once dreamed,” he added.
“We were fascinated by Maxime’s vision and his ability to create a fiction device to portray the reality of his family. Melrick’s performance was captivating, with his natural presence in front of the camera and his willingness to be both filmed and seen. The film addresses the topics of violence and mourning with deep intimacy and intelligence, while also exploring the complexities and traumas of post-colonialism in the French Guiana,” MoreThan Film co-founder Querault Pons Serra toldPvNewin a collective statement.
Spoken in French and French Guianese creole, “Listen to the Voices” continues the focus of Jean-Baptiste’s doc shorts, including “Listen to the Beat of Our Images” (2021), delivering a corrective local point of view on the construction of the Guiana Space Center as France’s spaceport; and “Moune Ô” (2022), an exposé of the survival of colonial stereotypes in the Western collective unconscious.
Co-directed with Audrey Jean-Baptiste, “Listen to the Beat of Our Images” played at CPH:DOX, Hotdocs, ISFF Clermont-Ferrand, IDFA and many other festivals. “Moune Ôwas presented at the Berlinale Forum and at True/False in the U.S.
“Listen to the Voices” is produced by Belgium’s Twenty Nine Studio & Production and France’s Spectres Production.
MoreThan Films was founded in 2020. It started out representing shorts, then docs, and from early 2023 feature, such as “The Tundra Within Me” by Sara Magrethe Oskal (Norway), “Mountains,” directed by Monica Sorelle (U.S.), Spain’s “Muyeres,” from Marta Lallana, Brazilian directors’ films – Pedro de Filippis’ “Rejeito” and “O Estranho” from Flora Dias and Juruna Mallón – and Rotterdam player “La Sudestada” (Argentina).
