L’Homme-Vertige: Tales of a City
- FRANCE, GUADELOUPE / 2024 / Creole, French / Color / DCP / 93 min
Director, Script: Malaury Eloi Paisley
Photography: Malaury Eloi Paisley, Victor Zébo
Editing: Marie Bottois
Sound: Ludovic Sadjan, Adam Wolny, Thierry Delor
Music: Magic Malik
Production Company: Athénaïse
Source: Sophie Salbot
Redevelopment is underway in Pointe-à-Pitre, a city on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, but walking the streets with camera in hand, the filmmaker finds a town that resembles a ruin. We meet a rapper with a drug addiction, a former Cuban freedom fighter recuperating from lung cancer, a taciturn poet who observes rather than intervenes, and a young woman living in a housing complex scheduled for demolition. Through the perspectives and words of local residents emerges a history of subjugation—their homeland usurped first as a colony and now as an overseas department of France—as well as a persistent will to resist such conditions. The director, herself from Guadeloupe, spent nearly five years filming in her homeland. (YM)
[Director’s Statement]
How to Belong to an Island that does not Belong to Us. A Little Piece of France Far in the Caribbean.
L’Homme-Vertige: Tales of a City is not a film about the city of Pointe-à-Pitre but rather a long drift through it, an exploration of its human landscape. It’s not a film about life in Pointe-à-Pitre but about survival . . . I imagined this film as an attempt to express this suffering, which persists and also tells of the state of the world today, and to bring out this social wandering, this wandering of the territory, by filming the voids, the states of contemplation, and the daily struggles. I wanted to show this city as a metaphor for the state of the entire island. It was the city of the people, of factory workers, of revolts crushed in blood, and of battles; it is nothing more than a ghost town haunted by bygone political and social utopias. What are the remains of history in the bodies? If we don’t know what to become or even how to live on this island and in this city, then I wanted to stop, film the details, show what “is,” what is left, and what is still resisting. The film is a search, a desire for contemplation to oppose chaos. I trace my own exploration of the territory and record my encounters with these characters, who live there in another time at a slower pace that aligns with the city’s inertia. A time that stretches and no longer has the notion of the years that pass. The time of waiting, of repeated daily gestures, of the metamorphosis of the streets over the hours. Let their existence be remembered so that we remember that these men and women have existed. Ti Chal, one of the main characters, once said to me: “Observing the street is the best way to stay in touch with life.”
Malaury Eloi PaisleyFilmmaker and visual artist from Guadeloupe, in the French Caribbean. Studied art and cinema in Paris, Montreal, and at Cuba’s EICTV. Her first short film was Chanzy Blues (2017). Has curated auteur cinema in Guadeloupe since 2017. A 2026 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin film fellow. Currently working on a hybrid documentary, Memoirs & Fictions of an Island Before Its Vanishing, and a multidisciplinary film installation with two other filmmakers between Guadeloupe, Brazil, and Senegal, in partnership with the Human Rights Film Festival in Guadeloupe and Festa Literária das Periferias. This film, shot between 2016–2023, premiered at the Berlinale, also receiving the Yennenga Golden Stallion and the FESPACO Paul Robeson Prize.