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Kouté vwa (Listen to the Voices)

Directed by Maxime Jean-Baptiste

2024, HD, color, sound, 76 minutes

Los Angeles Premiere, Co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum

An elegy, but also a celebration, Kouté vwa (Listen to the Voices) portrays a family and a community as they experience grief, joy, and reconciliation in the wake of tragedy.

Melrick, a 13-year-old boy, spends his summer vacation with his grandmother Nicole in Cayenne, French Guiana. His presence and his desire to learn how to play the drums brings back the memory of Nicole’s son and Melrick’s uncle, Lucas. Also a musician, Lucas died in tragic circumstances 11 years earlier. Faced with the grief that haunts his family and Lucas’s best friend’s desire for revenge, Melrick seeks his own path to forgiveness.

“With a subtle blending of documentary and fiction, this beautiful and delicate film also reflects on inherited violence and grief, not just on the familial level but on a historical and colonial one.” –Wexner Center for the Arts

“Kouté vwa is a celebration of holding onto what is, while mourning what has been lost. Through this intergenerational relationship stories of community, unbridled youth, friendship and reconstruction come to life. Within the mundane of the day-to-day lives joy and a fierce hope.” – Lesedi Oluko Moche

“[The film’s title] succinctly sums up its poetic program: a polyphony of entangled testimony. Drawing on the deeply personal source of the story, the film summons these various voices and opens up a resonance chamber between them. “ –Pierre Jendrysiak and Leonard Krähmer, Variety