Martinique-born director Euzhan Palcy returns for Oscar honour

LOS ANGELES (AP):

Director Euzhan Palcy has made history more than a few times in her four decades in the movie business.

She was the first black woman to direct a film produced by a major studio (MGM’s A Dry White Season), the first black director of any gender to win the César Award in France, the first woman to win a Venice Silver Lion (for Sugar Cane Alley), the only woman to direct Marlon Brando and the first black woman to direct an actor to an Oscar nomination (also Brando). She blazed trails for a generation of black female film-makers, from Ava DuVernay and Amma Asante to Regina Hall and Gina Prince-Bythewood, and most of the time, it wasn’t easy or fun.

But she was driven by a conviction that she holds to this day: “I was born to make movies.”

Now, after some years away from the business, she is ready, at 64, to get behind the camera again. And what better way to start a comeback than with an Oscar? Palcy will get an honorary statuette at the annual Governor’s Awards gala to recognise her contributions to motion pictures on Saturday. She’s being celebrated alongside Australian director Peter Weir, songwriter Diane Warren and actor Michael J. Fox, who is getting the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the untelevised event.

“I felt like this was the right time for me to show up again,” Palcy, from Paris, told AP. “I was ready.”

Palcy was born in Martinique, in the French West Indies, in 1958, and from age 10, had set her sights on film-making even though it seemed like no one who was doing it, successfully at least, looked like her. Her imagination was sparked by Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus and the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. In the mid-70s, she left for Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne and got a master’s degree in film from the prestigious Louis-Lumière College. There she was encouraged to keep pursuing film-making by François Truffaut.

But she couldn’t find anyone to give her money to make her first feature, Sugar Cane Alley, even after she got an important grant from the French Government that would typically pique the interest of financiers. “I had a degree from the most famous film school in France, and it was not enough,” Palcy said. “I was still black, I was still a woman, and I was still young.”

Still, she managed to make Sugar Cane Alley from nothing, and it went on to be a great success, winning the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and a César for Best First Work.

The film was an adaptation of Joseph Zobel’s semi-autobiographical novel about Martinique in the 1930s, the Africans working the sugar cane fields and their white owners, and notably resonated with the people of Martinique who told her they’d never seen themselves on screen before.

Palcy went on to make A Dry White Season, for which she convinced Brando, who had been retired for nine years, to take a role. For that, he received his eighth and final Oscar nomination.

She also made Ruby Bridges for the Wonderful World of Disney and The Killing Yard, a TV film about the Attica Prison riot, before deciding to leave the film industry a decade ago.

Then earlier this year, she had a feeling that the time to come back was now. Soon after, she got an honour in France and 24 hours later got the phone call about the honorary Oscar.

Now she just hopes people don’t put her in a box, thinking she’s just a “political film-maker”.

“I want to make all kinds of movies,” she said. “I can do any genre.”

Palcy does want to make one thing clear: Though she is forthright about the struggles and adversity she faced, she wants people to know that she is also a very positive person.

“It was not a complaint,” she said. “But if they ask me about it, I will be honest.”