The Killing Yard

Euzhan Palcy is a film director writer and producer from Martinique, French West Indies. She is notable for being the first black female director produced by a major Hollywood studio , for A Dry White Season; as well as being the only female filmmaker who directed Marlon Brando whom she brought... back to the screen after a gap of nine years. Ms Palcy is also the first black artist to win a Cesar Award . Born in Martinique, Euzhan Palcy grew up studying the films of Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Orson Welles. She left for Paris in 1975 to earn a master's degree in French Literature, in theater at the Sorbonne, a D.E.A. in Art and Archeology and a film degree from renowned Louis Lumière College. It was in Paris, with the encouragement of her "French Godfather", François Truffaut, that she was able to put together her first feature, Sugar Cane Alley . Shot for less than $1,000,000, it documents through the eyes of a young boy the love and sacrifice of a poor black family living on a Martinique sugar cane plantation in the 1930s.
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