“It Would be Alright if He Changed My Name”: Maxime Jean-Baptiste with World Records

LaCharles Ward is Director of the Center for African American Media Arts and Museum Curator of photography and film at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. He is a co-editor of the forthcoming issue of World Records, Volume 9: Just Evidence, appearing later this year.

Yasmina Price is a New York–based writer and film programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. She is devoted to visual culture from the African continent and diaspora, anti-colonial cinema, and the experimental practices of women artists. Her programming has been featured at Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Maysles Documentary Center, e-flux, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, Los Angeles; and The National Gallery of Art, D.C. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes and museum catalogues, with essays in The Nation, The Baffler, MUBI’s Notebook, Hammer & Hope, Criterion’s Current, Film Quarterly and World Records Journal.

Maxime Jean-Baptiste is a filmmaker who works between Brussels and Paris. He grew up in France, in the context of the Guyanese and West Indian diaspora. His film Listen to the Beat of Our Images (2021) was selected for ISFF Clermont-Ferrand, Sundance Film Festival, and IDFA, among others. His first feature film, Kouté vwa (2024), premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival.

Caroline Déodat is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. Through her films and installations, she explores the spectral dimensions of the moving image, in between fiction and experimental ethnography. Obsessed with processes of archiving and alienation, history and myths of violence, Déodat seeks ways to recompose histories and weave silenced genealogies through the convocation of haunting memories, deferred archives, and oral images. Déodat has developed a style of poetic montage in her visual practice, where she pays particular attention to polyphony. Since 2019, she has been working on experimental films, in which she uses dance, archive, music and narration to create what she terms “oral images” that expose themselves to a multiplicity of audiences.