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 based in Brussels and Paris. Born and raised in the context of the Guyano-Antillese diaspora in France, of a French mother and Guyanese father, he is interested in the complexity of Western colonial history by detecting and portraying the survival of past traumas in the present. In doing so, he delves into archives and types of reenactments that imagine living and embodied memories. His film Listen to the Beat of Our Images (2021) was selected for ISFF Clermont-Ferrand, Sundance Film Festival and IDFA, among others. His first feature film, Kouté vwa (2024) premiered at the 77th edition of Locarno Film Festival and received the Special Jury Prize as well as the special mention from the First Feature Awards.