The earlier returns in all its ugliness and torment in Sylvaine Dampierre’s rigorous documentary which challenges the preconceived notion that the march of time robotically parallels the march of progress. In 1842 inside the Guadeloupe archipelago, an enslaved man named Sébastien was accused of sorcery by his grasp, and left to die in his cell. Centuries later, workers at a sugar manufacturing facility in Marie-Galante, the island the place Sébastien died, study out transcipts from the trial surrounding his lack of life.
In opening a portal to the cruelty suffered by Sébastien by the fingers of his masters, who had been acquitted, the film attracts a hyperlink to labour exploitation endured by the manufacturing facility workers in modern-day Marie-Galante. Their jobs are precarious and expendable. As employment options on the island are scarce, the workers have little various nonetheless to be subjected to gruelling circumstances for inadequate wages. Scenes the place the boys harvest sugar cane beneath the burning photo voltaic eerily mirror passages from the historic courtroom paperwork, which describe the bodily toil of space work in harrowing factor. Slavery is prolonged abolished, however the current system of exploitation continues to go away little firm to the workers.
Wrapped in a cacophony of hissing sounds and grinding metals, sequences shot contained within the manufacturing facility have a disquieting magnificence, as they concurrently evoke the rhythm of the workers’ daily rituals and reveal the bosses’ neglect for his or her wellbeing. Technologically outdated, and even maybe dangerous to operate, some machines seem as earlier as a result of the manufacturing facility itself, which opened in 1996. In elevating consciousness of the hazardous ambiance expert by the workers, Dampierre’s film powerfully traces how the hierarchies of the earlier proceed to foster social inequalities inside the present.