MovieWorld_ws: Sucre amer / Bitter Sugar (1998) DVD5

понедельник, 29 июня 2015 г.

Sucre amer / Bitter Sugar (1998) DVD5

In Sucre amer Christian Lara of Guadeloupe uses a trial to raise the question as to the right of enslaved persons to defend their personhood and their liberty, specifically, as agents for revolutionary change. Although ostensibly an appeal trial to clear the name of Major Joseph Ignace (actor Jean-Michel Martial), a Guadeloupean commander in the French army who after fighting royalists in the island on behalf of the French Republic, found himself and his armies in rebellion against Napoleon's army sent to re-institute slavery in Haiti and Guadeloupe, the trial actually serves to reveal the hypocrisy of Western bourgeois democracy in its inability or unwillingness to resolve the contradiction between a discourse of liberty, equality and fraternity, and the practice of slavery and colonialism vis-a-vis Africans present in France and the French colonies in the Caribbean.
The film contrasts the high ideals of liberty and equality expressed by the French Revolution and Napoleon, with the horrible reality of slavery. This is a subject that applies to the United States as well, a country whose democratic ideals were in direct conflict with its use of slavery throughout its first eighty years.