Maxime Jean-Baptiste It Would be Alright if He Changed My Name

Filmmaker Maxime Jean-Baptiste presents a lecture-performance exploring the continuing impact of slavery on Black lives today.

It is directly inspired by his role as an extra in a BBC adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, in which Jean-Baptiste played a slave on a replica slave ship. The harsh conditions on set triggered his asthma, forcing him to leave the production.

In bringing this experience to the stage, Jean-Baptiste questions the structures of cinema and the consequences of recreating violent histories on Black bodies. By recounting this experience from the point of view of the extras, Jean-Baptiste sheds light on their struggles that are often ignored, challenging racial profiling in performance spaces and questioning the way labour is used in art.

The title, It Would be Alright if He Changed My Name, is borrowed from Nina Simone’s 1962 song about racial injustice, and refers to Simone’s decision to change her name to keep her music career hidden from her family.

Maxime Jean-Baptiste is currently writing an adaptation of this performance into a fiction feature film.

about

Maxime Jean-Baptiste is a filmmaker and performance artist based in Brussels and Paris. Born and raised in the context of the Guianese and Antillean diaspora in France, he is interested in the complexities of colonial history, focusing on archives and forms of reconstitution to conceive a living, embodied memory. His short films have travelled to numerous festivals (Berlinale, Sundance, CPH:DOX, Hot Docs, ISFF Clermont-Ferrand, IDFA...). His first feature film Kouté vwa (2024) had its world premiere at Locarno FF, won the Special Jury Award, and was released in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg in 2025. Maxime Jean-Baptiste has created several performance pieces, mixing theatre, dance and song in the context of Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Tate Modern, e-flux Screening Room among others.