The penultimate episodeof *Stories of Caribbean Cinema* brings us closer to the present. Since the first installment, which focused on the 1960s, eight episodes have explored various regions, generations, and ways of portraying the Caribbean on film.
This ninth installment brings together two very different works. In *Battledream Chronicle*, Alain Bidard transports Martinique into a futuristic world built around a virtual game. In *Buladó*, Eché Janga returns to Curaçao to explore grief, spirits, and the tensions between rationality and magical thinking. You are now on the ninth episode out of ten. The first eight are already available on Richès Karayib. The next installment will conclude this chronology with Haiti and Guadeloupe.
2015: MARTINIQUE – BATTLEDREAM CHRONICLE, BY ALAIN BIDARD
This film is an exception in this chronology: in fact, it is one of only two animated feature films from the Caribbean film industry. A remarkable feat: both were created entirely—both visually and in terms of sound (particularly the voice acting for several characters)—by Alain Bidard of Martinique. *Battledream Chronicle*, heavily influenced by manga aesthetics, is set in a futuristic world in the year 2100, in which real-world nations compete against one another through a virtual game called Battledream.
The losers see their nation (in this film, Martinique is one such nation) completely dominated by the victors, and their collective memory erased. Reduced to slavery, the inhabitants of the conquered nations must regularly bring a certain amount of credits (“1,000 XP”)—just as, in times past, a certain number of bundles of sugarcane had to be cut—to the Inquisitors, on pain of seeing their community wiped out.
As we can see, this film offers numerous references to the history of slavery and colonialism through subtle allusions. Martinique managed to resist within the Battledream , Martinique will be the last nation to stand against the Empire—known as Mortemonde—and will defeat it. Notably, the great final battle will be led by two female protagonists, who at times wear Creole earrings and at other times a headdress made of madras cloth (“ maré-tèt ” in Creole), as quintessential Caribbean women.
They are clearly the center (“ poto-mitan ” in Creole) of the film’s action: the “femifocality” of Caribbean cinema is gaining momentum. As for Alain Bidard’s second film, *Opal* (2021), it tackles the difficult issue of incest with great sensitivity.
Opal, the daughter of the king and queen of a futuristic kingdom, struggles to escape from her castle and is regularly subjected to visits from her father—whose face is dominated by a horn (an obvious phallic extension)—who takes “her magic” from her. Through the imaginative lens of animated film, Alain Bidard tackles the thorny issue of sexual violence against children—and, more specifically, young girls. More than ever before, women are taking the reins in Caribbean cinema.
2020: CURAÇAO – BULADÓ, BY ECHÉ JANGA
Buladó is one of those films that fully embodies the Caribbean cinema’s capacity to surprise. We follow a teenage girl haunted by the premature death of her mother, whom she never knew, caught between her naturally authoritarian father, Ouira, a police officer, and her eccentric grandfather, Weljo, who speaks with spirits, teetering on the brink of madness.
Based on a plot that has been explored before and relatively predictable conflicts, Eché Janga creates a spellbinding film by highlighting the unique features of the landscape on the small Dutch island of Curaçao—which resembles a desert where a Western might be filmed—as well as the high caliber of its cast and the beauty of Papiamento (Papiamentu), a creole language born from the fusion of Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and words of African and Amerindian (Arawak) origin, spoken on various Dutch islands in the Caribbean.
The conflict between the father and the grandfather effectively embodies the everyday duality between European rational thought and magical thinking, of African or Native American origin, which still permeates many Caribbean societies today, where rituals are regularly practiced in a surprising syncretism of beliefs often noted by ethnologists. Young Kenza (played by the remarkable Tiara Richards) goes so far as to tell her father—who, like her, is of mixed race—that he is “desecrating” the bed of her recently deceased dog: “You’re really a white man!”—meaning that he is behaving like a Westerner.
The young girl’s gradual grieving process, as her mother “speaks” to her, is intertwined with the unapologetic irrationality of her grandfather, superbly portrayed by Felix De Rooy, the father of Dutch-language Caribbean cinema. Indeed, he converses with the spirits of the Indigenous peoples who were dispossessed of their lands—spirits whose anger does not seem to have subsided.
Here we find ourselves doubly immersed in a visually rich mysticism where dreams and reality often blur. This film, a superb cinematic reflection on grief, concludes with these words in voice-over: “Death is always there. Those who learn to live with it are as free as the wind.” Buladó was selected by the Netherlands to represent the country at the 2021 Oscars.
About the Author
Guillaume Robillard holds a Ph.D. in film studies; he is a professor and researcher, a documentary filmmaker, and a specialist in Caribbean cinema and artistic production. He is the author of two books: *Conquest of Space and Time: Caribbean Cinema (Éditions Jannink, “Hypothèses d’Art,” 2023) and Decolonial Cinema: Characters in Caribbean Cinema (Presses Universitaires des Antilles, “Arts et Esthétique,” 2024).
