This year’s Philadelphia BlackStar Film Festival returned to film lovers, artists, and curious thinkers with a 10:30 am screening of Jean Maxime Baptiste’s enthralling documentary Kouté Vwa, directly translating to Listen to the Voices. As the Suzanne Roberts theater filled slowly that rainy July morning, I found myself in awe. Unfolding on screen was a captivating meditation exploring the infinite nature of grief.

Since the start of its festival run in 2024, this documentary has traveled widely, screening at festivals and independent theaters around the world, highlighting the tenderness of French Guiana, a region typically exempt from cinematic conversations.

In Kouté Vwa, Baptiste constructs a visual landscape where memory and the present are inextricably bound. Delicately playing with form, this film dissolves the distance often found in documentary filmmaking, oscillating between traditional observational scenes, archival footage, and moments where the camera is intimately absorbed. It follows Melrick, a young boy on the cusp of adolescence, during a visit to his grandmother, Nicole. Eleven years have passed since the untimely death of his uncle, Lucas Diomar, better known to the community as DJ Turbulence, yet his loss continues to reverberate through the lives of Melrick, Nicole, and Yannick, Lucas’s best friend.

While the nexus of Kouté Vwa is the violent and premature loss of Lucas Diomar, Lucas himself is never physically present in the film. His image appears only in fragments: on a mural and in print images from a community parade that celebrated his life and legacy. The film allows Lucas to emerge through the intimate memories of those who loved him most.

Set in French Guiana, an overseas department of France in South America, Baptiste delivers a visually lush experience where suave, gold-adorned characters invite audiences into life in a territory bearing the weight of its colonial rule.

Melrick, with his wide, searching eyes, is the emotional core of this documentary. We follow a boisterously curious young boy from France during his summer vacation, anticipating eighth grade. Though there is a clear duration of his stay, Melrick is neither a tourist nor merely a visitor; rather, he occupies an in-between space that mirrors the dual condition of French Guiana: simultaneously autonomous and dependent, familiar and foreign, home and elsewhere.

This country feels instinctive to Melrick, his friendships, his bond with his grandmother, and his participation in a local music group, as he learns to play the drums like his uncle Lucas, grounds him within the community. There is no performance of discovery typically associated with encountering a new place. Instead, his awe, in which audiences are invited to share, is in moments reflecting on the beauty of French Guiana.

Baptiste captures Melrick at a liminal moment, navigating the curiosities of adolescence, while developing a deeper understanding of the larger forces that shape his world. Melrick’s innocence is acknowledged but never isolated from the realities of grief and colonial structures that define his present.

Early in the film, a scene between Melrick and his friends riding bicycles and talking about their dreams encapsulates this duality. Their youthful camaraderie and easy laughter coexist with an acute awareness of the colonial conditions surrounding them. French Guiana remains tethered to the republic through a complex colonial legacy: French by law, yet often regarded as peripheral in practice. The boys speak about the gentrification happening in their hood, Mont Lucas, predicting a slow start before engulfing all they know. They joke about what they would do if they were the president of French Guiana. Playfully recognizing that they can’t be a president because they are not independent, but “Just imagine,” one says.

Kouté Vwa’s greatest strength lies in this tango of imagination and inheritance, allowing audiences into the most intimate constructions of life within a colonial territory, one where there is an everyday reckoning with independence, nationality, and statehood. Baptiste resists framing these realities as moments of shocking discovery; instead, they are present through a quiet, almost mundane awareness; a weight that even the youngest and most innocent are never fully spared from.

Yannick Carbert and Nicole Diomar are two delightful powerhouses to watch in this film, but it’s Nicole, tattooed, pierced, and sporting a half-shaved head of gray hair, who immediately enchants. Carrying the unimaginable loss of her son, Lucas, we see how she learns to live with her grief, never denying it, but also never allowing it to consume her.

There is a real radicalism in the way Nicole moves through the world. She is candid and self-assured, speaking to Melrick about being single, abandoning the church, and her life in French Guiana. Her sense of self is rooted in an openness not born from rebellion, but from a refusal to let loss, age, or expectation define her. Most of her moments with Merlrick are captured intimately, with the camera kissing their faces as they exchange thoughts and teases. It’s in these many intimate moments throughout the documentary that we see Nicole become more than an elder and matriarchal figure; she is a companion, someone with whom Melrick can test and articulate his expanding worldview.

One of the film’s most affecting moments comes during a drive to Melrick’s drumming performance in honor of Lucas, when the conversation turns to the men responsible for his violent death. Melrick challenges his grandmother’s presumed piety, questioning how she can forgive. Nicole meets his challenge without defensiveness, recounting an encounter she had with one of Lucas’s killers after his release from prison. In this exchange, honest, vulnerable, and raw, Baptiste captures a cross-generational moment of healing, born from the courage to speak openly.

Yannick serves as the film’s most visceral link to Lucas—his best friend, his brother. Tall and striking, with locs cascading down his back, Yannick is deeply marked by the loss of his best friend. Present the night Lucas died, the weight of that moment lingers in his every pulse. In one of the film’s earliest scenes, we see him reflecting on his desire to leave French Guiana, not out of disdain, but in reflection of the violence and hardship he’s experienced. His words reflect the complex relationship he has with the colonial territory he calls home.

In the scenes between Yannick and Melrick, Baptiste captures the gentle mirroring between their bodies, one grown and one still growing. As stoic as he may appear, Yannick is the current that keeps Kouté Vwa in flow. We watch him in deeply enchanting sequences processing grief, crying as a mural of DJ Turbulence comes to life, mentoring Melrick, and gently continuing the role Lucas once held.

Kouté Vwa’s brilliance lies in how it traces this triangulation of healing across generations, across love and loss, and across the ever-present question of home.