LOS ANGELES – Director Euzhan Palcy has made history more than a few times in her four decades in the movie business.
She was the first Black woman to direct a film produced by a major studio (MGM´s “A Dry White Season”), the first Black director of any gender to win the César Award in France, the first woman to win a Venice Silver Lion (for “Sugar Cane Alley”), the only woman to direct Marlon Brando and the first Black woman to direct an actor to an Oscar nomination (also Brando).
She blazed trails for a generation of Black female filmmakers, from Ava DuVernay and Amma Asante to Regina Hall and Gina Prince-Bythewood, and most of the time it wasn´t easy or fun.
But she was driven by a conviction that she holds this day: “I was born to make movies.”
Now after some years away from the business, she is ready, at 64, to get behind the camera again. And what better way to start a comeback than with an Oscar?
On Saturday, Palcy will get an honorary statuette at the annual Governors Awards gala, in recognition of her contributions to motion pictures.
She´s being celebrated alongside Australian director Peter Weir, songwriter Diane Warren and actor Michael J. Fox, who is getting the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, at the untelevised event.
“I felt like this was the right time for me to show up again,” Palcy, from Paris, told The Associated Press. “I was ready.”
Palcy was born in Martinique, in the French West Indies, in 1958, and from age 10 had set her sights on filmmaking even though it seemed like no one who was doing it, successfully at least, looked like her.
Her imagination was sparked by Marcel Camus´ “Black Orpheus” and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and. In the mid-70s, she left for Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne and got a master´s degree in film from the prestigious Louis-Lumière College. There she was encouraged to keep pursuing filmmaking by François Truffaut.
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