One of the Criterion Channel's most enticing July releases is A Dry White Season by Caribbean director Euzhan Palcy. Her record-breaking career is a fascinating, often frustrating, piece of cinema history, full of fearless political artistry and a will to challenge the Hollywood machine. While her name isn't very well known, Palcy should be famous for all the risks she took and the astounding quality of her features. They might be few, but they are excellent. With that in mind, we invite you to explore the filmography, the story, and the genius of Euzhan Palcy…
Born on the island of Martinique, Euzhan Palcy grew up watching Hollywood movies at her village theatre. She seldomly saw any Black faces or people whose lives looked like hers. As far as she knew, such stories, such people, didn't have a place on the big screen. Her love for film and revolt at its representational lacunas were at the root of Palcy's decision to become a cineaste. The need to make films thus consumed the young woman, who, seeing no way to achieve her dreams in her homeland, traveled to Paris for her studies. There, she crossed paths with François Truffaut who, sensing the potential in Palcy, became her mentor.
After completing her studies and with the encouragement of Truffaut, the first feature directed by Euzhan Palcy was the adaptation of a book she'd been familiar with for years. Her mother had gifted Palcy with the novel Sugar Cane Alley by Joseph Zobels when she was thirteen, and the little girl became enthralled by the piece's open celebration of Martinican culture. That sort of thing was difficult, near impossible, to encounter anywhere else during the director's childhood, neither in the books her school taught or the movies she watched.
Sugar Cane Alley tells the story of a gifted young Black boy in 1930s' Martinique who comes from a rural background but gains a scholarship to study in the country's capital. It's a narrative that portrays stark racial injustice and paints a picture of personal sacrifice from the older generations to guarantee a better future for the young. The character of the protagonists' loving grandmother is especially memorable, a woman used to be treated almost like a slave at the sugarcane fields who'll do everything in her power to assure that her grandson won't live through the same hardships.
Palcy's adaptation is an astounding work, brimming with indignant fury and a humanistic gentility that makes the narrative all the more painful to experience. Palcy was influenced by Sembene, Hitchcock, Wilder, and Djibril Giop Mambéty as well as the writings of Aimé Césaire, and the resulting film language she perfected is a wonder to behold. Such greatness was impossible to ignore and, when the film premiered at the 1983 Venice Film Festival, Palcy became a name known to many a film enthusiast. For her riveting performance, 76-year-old French actress Darling Légitimus won the Volpi Cup for her performance as the grandmother in Sugar Cane Alley, while Palcy won the Silver Lion for Best First Work.
Across the Atlantic, fellow film makers and movie critics started to champion the work of Euzhan Palcy, among them Roger Ebert, helping with the opening of doors for the director in Hollywood. That's exactly where the filmmaker went next, intent on bringing her Black focused cinema to the realm of the big American studios. She'd become the first Black woman to direct a movie produced by said studios, but the road to that historical mark was a rocky one. Originally, Palcy wanted to direct an adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, but she gave up on it when Spielberg bought the rights to the book.
In the meantime, she was offered many projects by the studios, all of which she refused. Instead, Palcy pitched an idea of her own to Warner Bros., an adaptation of André Brink's A Dry White Season about a white teacher in South Africa who grows aware of the injustices of his country's apartheid regime. According to Palcy, her decision to film the novel was, in part, motivated by an attempt at weaponizing Hollywood's racial problems in her favor. She knew it'd be near impossible to get a studio to bankroll her endeavor if all the main roles were Black and the Caucasian presence was relegated to vilified supporting parts.
Her choice of A Dry White Season was a calculated one, but that doesn't mean the picture's a white savior narrative, as many accuse it of being. Far from it. Palcy was so intent on getting the perspective of Black South Africans right that she traveled undercover to Soweto to interview the survivors and biggest victims of apartheid. Going back to America and frightened that she'd be arrested, Palcy even hid some of her research inside her underwear. Many filmmakers go to extremes to get their visions on screen, but few are as brave as Palcy who risked her life for it.
Unfortunately, not everything was smooth sailing after the script was complete. A Dry White Season may have started at Warner Bros, but the film company quickly grew wary of Palcy's furious critique of the South African apartheid system as well as Universal's recent cornering of the market with Cry Freedom. Stuck at a standstill, Palcy took her passion project to MGM, who bought the rights from Warner and gave the director complete creative freedom. Blessed with such liberty, she ran with it, creating one of the most searing portrayals of racial injustice ever made in Hollywood up until that point.
The 1989 movie looks at racism as a systemic problem rather than one that only exists at the level of the individual, a rarity even today. It's also full of contempt for its white characters, even the "good" ones, portraying their ignorance as a virulent failure that's born out of unchecked privilege. This is underlined by the way Palcy shoots the movie, but also by how it's structured and cut. In the first half, the director repeatedly contrasts scenes of hideous brutality perpetrated against black bodies with the unbothered lives of white people. A sunny rendezvous with friends in Donald Sutherland's patio can be followed by such horrifying imagery as a little girl being shot by police and her older sister begging the agents to shoot her since they killed her sibling.
Still, nowadays the movie is mostly known for Marlon Brando's last Oscar-nominated performance.
Palcy indeed convinced the old actor to come out of retirement and became the only woman to ever direct him on screen, but the movie is so much more than a Brando showcase. Even the way it was cast reflects its director's boldness. The white parts are played by a variety of actors, some South African, but a lot from North America, including Brando. This results in a bunch of unconvincing attempts at South African accents. That is something that doesn't happen with the Black characters, all of them played by real African actors like Winston Ntshona. We are always reminded of the arch artifice, insincerity, and off-putting oddness of the white performers in comparison with the more grounded and naturalistic Black actors. It's clear who we're meant to sympathize with.
No matter how brilliant her film was, the experience of making A Dry White Season left Euzhan Palcy feeling emotionally bruised, deeply exhausted. It was on a trip to visit her friend Francis Ford Coppola that the director came up with the idea for her follow-up movie, a production that functioned as a balm to the soul. 1992's Siméon is a celebration of music and African culture, all things dear to its director's heart. Unfortunately, it's also widely inaccessible, making its appreciation a tad difficult. I'd like to tell you of more Palcy helmed features, but her career post-Siméon is a sad affair. According to the cineaste herself, she kept hearing that her movie ideas were too Black and that "Black isn't bankable".
If the big screen kept closing its doors to Palcy, she found a new place in the television industry, both Stateside and France. For Disney, she made Ruby Bridges, about the first African-American kid to go to a desegregated school in the South, and Showtime gave her the freedom to bring to life a docudrama about the 1971 Attica prison uprising, The Killing Yard. Some of her passion projects were left behind after many rejections, like a movie of Toni Morrison's Tar Baby with Laurence Fishburne, but Palcy's still trying to work on her old ideas. One of them is a biopic about Black aviatrix Bessie Coleman. Hopefully, we'll get to see more of Euzhan Palcy in years to come since hers is a cinematic voice that's both wanted and needed on our day and age.
You can stream A Dry White Season on the Criterion Channel and Amazon Prime. If you'd like to watch some of Palcy's later television work, Ruby Bridges is currently available on Disney+.