L’île veilleuse (The Vigilant Island)

Euzhan Palcy is a Martinican filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. Her groundbreaking career is comprised of many firsts. She is the first female and first Black director to receive a César Award (the French equivalent of an Academy Award) and a Silver Lion (for Best Director) at the Venice Film Festival, both in recognition of her 1983 film Sugar Cane Alley. She is the first Black woman to have a feature film produced by a Hollywood studio (A Dry White Season, 1989). In 1994 she received a John Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, and in 2022 she received an Honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In her prolific career in film and television, documentary and narrative, Palcy has continually depicted and examined issues of race and gender and interrogated the history and legacy of colonialism.