Maxime Jean-Baptiste – It Would Be Alright, 2026

Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s film draws on a disturbing experience from 2018, when he worked as an extra in a television adaptation of Les Misérables. Cast as an enslaved man, he nearly lost consciousness in the smoke-filled hold of a replica ship. The film relocates this memory to a casting session for a remake of Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, the 1997 drama about the 1839 revolt aboard the slave ship La Amistad. As a young Black actor is pressed by a white casting director to reach the emotional intensity required by the role, a Black acting coach becomes caught between them. When the actor leaves, she remains. Moving between documentary naturalism and a dreamlike register, the film leaves uncertain whether the crisis unfolds in the room or is projected onto it by the viewer. In doing so, the film probes the boundary between interpreting histories of enslavement and exposing performers anew to their violence.

With a practice situated at the intersection of film and performance, Maxime Jean-Baptiste explores how colonial histories persist within bodies, narratives and social structures. Blending fiction and reenactment, he creates spaces where personal experience resonates with collective memory. His work addresses the transmission of trauma and the formation of identities, foregrounding voices and perspectives often excluded from institutional narratives, while questioning the capacity of images to reproduce or disrupt dominant historical structures.