My father had recordings of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sarah Vaughan. What inspired you to focus your attention on Paris with this film?Īlan Govenar: I have been intrigued by the idea of Paris since I was 4 years old. It’s a place where I feel at peace and at ease.”įrance-Amérique : A filmmaker and a writer, your first interest was Texas history and African-American music.
This sentiment is summed up in the first few seconds by New York actor and playwright Akin Babatunde: “Paris is a place where I belong. The reasons that led them to France are as diverse as their own personal stories, but the expatriates featured in Alan Govenar’s film all have one thing in common: They all enjoy a certain freedom in France – individual, creative, sexual, spiritual – that they would never have had in the United States. “I came here knowing that I would be able to write without being bothered by the kind of thoughts that ruined my life in the United States,” he says in the documentary. “If I had stayed there, I would have gone under.” This was echoed by poet James Emanuel, who fled the United States in 1984 after his son was beaten by the police and committed suicide. “I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in France but I knew what was going to happen to me in New York,” he later remembered. He left behind 23 plays in French and a short story, Le Mulâtre (The Mulatto), now considered a classic in abolitionist literature.Īuthor James Baldwin arrived a century later, driven out of America by racism and homophobia. While there, the young man became friends with writer Alexandre Dumas, and was the first African-American to find success in France.
In slavery-era America, it was customary for the elite Black classes in New Orleans to send their children to study in Paris. Victor Séjour arrived in France in 1834 at the age of 17.
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