This article appeared in the April 11, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Listen to the Voices (Kouté vwa) (Maxime Jean-Baptiste, 2024)

Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s intimate debut feature Listen to the Voices (Kouté vwa) follows 13-year-old Melrick Diomar as he spends a summer with his grandmother Nicole in Cayenne, French Guiana. The film is ostensibly fictional, though all the characters play versions of themselves, and the central event around which the narrative turns is very real: roughly a decade before the action of the film, Melrick’s uncle and Nicole’s 18-year-old son—Lucas Diomar, a popular local DJ—was murdered. The fallout of that tragedy, both personal and political, provides the basis for Melrick’s coming of age. We watch him grapple with violence and its effect on his family through conversations with his grandmother, who favors forgiveness, and Lucas’s childhood best friend, Yannick, who desires revenge.

Jean-Baptiste bathes his tenderly observational footage in crepuscular light that suggests a liminal zone between night and day, reality and dreams, life and death. Gentle interactions between Melrick and Nicole provide a thoughtful and reflective buffer from the full weight of the tragedy. Rather than lending itself to something dour or polemical, the memory of Lucas’s death becomes the basis for Melrick’s gradual understanding of how to situate himself in relation to the postcolonial context that defines his reality. Though deeply personal at its core—Melrick is also Jean-Baptiste’s cousin—the film’s spirit echoes with the collective call contained in its title.

For those who are just being introduced to your work, can you say a little bit about yourself, your practice, and what led you to make Listen to the Voices?

Moune Ô, my last short film, premiered three years ago at Berlin, and it was an experimental documentary made from archival footage. In that film, I was asking similar questions regarding violence and French Guiana to the ones I explore in Listen to the Voices. What is French Guiana? What is the postcolonial condition of this country, which is very specific because it’s essentially still a French colony? In Moune Ô, I wanted to reflect on that, through footage taken from a big-budget film in which my father had a role as an extra [Jean Galmot, aventurier (1990)]. I had a lot of problems with this older movie—it was full of stereotypes about Guianese people, and I needed to deconstruct these images. This process of reusing images in Moune Ô, and also in my 2021 short Listen to the Beat of Our Images, helped me to think: OK, I can now make images of French Guiana. Before, there were so many images in my head that were stereotypes.

Moune Ô was a collaboration with my father, and Listen to the Voices was also quite collaborative. There is a lot of collaboration [in my films], and there is also a lot of love for the people I am working with. That is the link between the two.

How did you come to focus on Melrick as a character?

It’s not explained in the film, but Nicole is my aunt and Melrick is my little cousin. Lucas, who died in 2012, was also my cousin. We’re all close, so I’ve known Melrick forever.

I think it was interesting for Melrick, Nicole, and Yannick to think of themselves as characters. Everything is based on real events and people, but the treatment and the form are quite fictional in the way we build actions and sequences. This allowed me to have distance from the story, even though it’s my cousin who died. But it was also good for Melrick, because it was more playful for him to be a version of himself—he is not [exactly] what you see in the film. It was also hard sometimes, because they aren’t professionals. There are lots of limits, and you can’t cross every boundary. This is their life, and if you cross the boundary you can reopen wounds or traumas that destroyed this family. We had to go about the film with a certain awareness of the fact that we are remembering a trauma—so let’s do it with care and love.

How did you build the narrative of the film?

It was a lot of work, and I did it with my sister, Audrey Jean-Baptiste, who co-wrote the film. Since the story we are telling is so concrete, I couldn’t use the same approach as I did for Moune Ô, for instance. That film is quite cerebral, and as I was working with Nicole and Melrick, [I found] that they were so grounded in reality that I had to change my way of working. We have this simple narrative, like a coming-of-age film, in which Melrick learns the secrets of his family and how they will impact him. But we also leave spaces for experimentation, for moments outside of that narrative space—for instance, the blue-shaded parts with Yannick, which are like dreams.

I think these sequences feed into the visual identity of the film, which creates the feeling of a liminal space. That can be an overused term these days, but in your film, it’s actually something you feel very concretely. These scenes are shot in this blue dusk light, and we kind of glide through it. Can you talk about how you arrived at this stunning and cohesive visual sensibility for the film?

I have a lot of references, but my first references are the people I’m working with. I did many interviews with Nicole; fewer with Melrick, because it was not really his thing. They told me a lot of stories and I thought, “Oh, we will go into these feelings and stories with them, into their states of mind.” Nicole has a very different state of mind than Yannick, for example. Yannick is so stuck on this night in 2012 when Lucas was murdered—it’s like a nightmare that he cannot wake up from. He’s stuck between reality and dreams. He told me about a dream he had just after the murder, where he dreamed he was on a bike with Lucas. I can’t tell you the whole dream—it has so much aesthetically inside it—but when he told me his dream, I felt I needed to recreate it in Listen to the Voices, so the viewer could feel it. It’s not theoretical: this state of mind is really coming from Yannick.

Audrey and I also love Roberto Minervini. His film What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (2018) has a strong aesthetic and brings us very close to the characters; it also talks about race, but in such a sober manner. We are talking about a Black neighborhood in French Guiana [in our film], and there are so many images about these neighborhoods in the media. How do we avoid this cliché? How can we be close to the people who live in this neighborhood, and to their life and their laughter? There are so many films today and from before that lack this life; so many films about poor neighborhoods have these stereotypes and fatalism. I’m tired of that. Minervini’s film is amazing because there is violence and trauma, but the characters are alive. That was an inspiration for us.

Do you have any creative dialogues or relationships with Caribbean filmmakers? I’m thinking of someone like Miryam Charles, who touches on very similar themes, but with reference to Haiti. 

It’s great that you are talking about Miryam Charles, because I know her. She told me about [her film] Cette maison (2022) when she was still writing it, and I told her, “Oh my god, I’m also working on a similar story about violence in the Caribbean context.” It inspired me a lot, even though we work in totally different ways.

There is a new generation from the Caribbean saying, “We are not just a beautiful place. We have stories to tell, and it’s up to us to tell these stories.” But there’s also a link that needs to be made between the people who are living in French Guiana and the Caribbean and [those of] the diaspora, whether in Europe, the U.S., or Canada. Cette maison is great because it’s in between the diaspora and the people who stayed in Haiti. This is the new generation that is no longer going off to France, but is coming back to the country their families left, and rebuilding something.

Inney Prakash is a film curator and critic based in New York City.