Kouté vwa (Listen to the Voices) by Maxime Jean-Baptiste

Kouté vwa (Listen to the Voices)

Los Angeles Filmforum and Human Resources present:

As part of Cinema Land at Human Resources

Los Angeles Premiere plus a pre-recorded Q&A with filmmaker Maxime Jean-Baptiste!

Monday, September 21, 2026, 7:30 pm

Human Resources, 410 Cottage Home St, Los Angeles, CA 90012

NOTE THE CHANGE IN DAY AND LOCATION

Tickets: $7-15 sliding scale; free for Human Resources [?] and Filmforum members

An elegy, but also a celebration, Kouté vwa (Listen to the Voices) portrays a family and a community as they experience grief, joy, and reconciliation in the wake of tragedy.

Melrick, a 13-year-old boy, spends his summer vacation with his grandmother Nicole in Cayenne, French Guiana. His presence and his desire to learn how to play the drums brings back the memory of Nicole’s son and Melrick’s uncle, Lucas. Also a musician, Lucas died in tragic circumstances 11 years earlier. Faced with the grief that haunts his family and Lucas’s best friend’s desire for revenge, Melrick seeks his own path to forgiveness.

“With a subtle blending of documentary and fiction, this beautiful and delicate film also reflects on inherited violence and grief, not just on the familial level but on a historical and colonial one.” –Wexner Center for the Arts

“Kouté vwa is a celebration of holding onto what is, while mourning what has been lost. Through this intergenerational relationship stories of community, unbridled youth, friendship and reconstruction come to life. Within the mundane of the day-to-day lives joy and a fierce hope.” – Lesedi Oluko Moche

“[The film’s title] succinctly sums up its poetic program: a polyphony of entangled testimony. Drawing on the deeply personal source of the story, the film summons these various voices and opens up a resonance chamber between them. “ –Pierre Jendrysiak and Leonard Krähmer, Variety

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/1126859964

Maxime Jean-Baptiste (born 1993), based between Brussels and Paris, grew up in the context of the Guianese and West Indian diaspora in France. As a filmmaker, he delves into the complexity of Western colonial history by detecting the survival of past traumas in the present. His audiovisual and performance work focuses on archives and forms of re-enactment as a perspective for conceiving a living, embodied memory. “Nou voix” (2018) received the Jury Prize at the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux in Paris. “Listen to the beat of our images” (2021), co-directed with his sister Audrey, was selected for CPH:DOX, Hotdocs, ISFF Clermont-Ferrand, IDFA and many other festivals. “Moune Ô” (2022) was presented at the Berlinale Forum and at True/False in the USA. Kouté vwa (2024) is his first feature film and had its world premiere at Locarno Film Festival, where it received the Special Jury Award Cine+, and also won the Prix Scam at the Festival En Ville and the Yellow Robin Award at the Curaçao International Film Festival.

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This summer, Human Resources transforms back into its origin as a movie theater including proper sound, acoustic treatments, carpet, comfortable seating, snacks, and amenities to showcase the archival facet of performance and video art. CINEMA LAND features artist retrospectives, cult films, experimental animation, video art programs, live film scores, rare 16mm and archival prints in Chinatown six nights a week. Join us!

Human Resources is supported, in part, by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, The Mike Kelley Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Ruth Foundation for the Arts.

For more information about Human Resources, visit: https://www.h-r.la/

Los Angeles Filmforum screenings are supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2026 is our 51st year.

Kouté vwa (Listen to the Voices)

Directed by Maxime Jean-Baptiste

2024, HD, color, sound, 76 minutes

“In March 2012, I was 19 years old. I heard from France about the brutal death of my cousin in Cayenne, who was stabbed several times during a party after a fight between young people. Lucas died of his wounds on the spot. It took me a long time to find the right way to deal with the tragedy of his death. Several stories about my relationship with French Guiana, where my family came from, are intertwined here. I tried to get as close as possible to the protagonists, but I also tried to invent a fiction that was also a reflection on the persistence of violence in a territory marked by the history of transatlantic slavery. The film is a plunge into the heart of the stories that haunt European societies ‘in return,’ to quote Aimé Césaire. A history that comes back to us, with all its violence, from that famous New World of which we once dreamed. My film tries to create the sensitive and delicate conditions for an intercultural dialogue which, as we know, has become very tense in our societies because of the resurfacing of buried histories. This film is therefore intimate, but it also aims to be a tool for discovery, debate, and social cohesion.” –Maxime Jean-Baptiste

Official Website: https://morethan-films.com/project/koute-vwa/