The Wedding of Palo

Testifying to the miserable living conditions of Harlem's black population during the Great Depression, this short film was shot in the same year as the 1st black riot in the neighborhood, considered the forerunner of the Black Lives Matter movement. In New York's great and wealthy megalopolis, Manhattan, Harlem is a place of misery, home to nearly half a million African-Americans. Even if Harlem Sketches remains the image of a Harlem captured by a white filmmaker, and if a certain miserabilism can sometimes be identified, the film was very well received by the black community of the time and remains without doubt a rare and precious document, rediscovered by the Cinémathèque de Toulouse in its nitrate collections and restored by the CNC.

Fiction film shot during Danish anthropologist Knud Rasmussen's 7th and last expedition to Greenland. A film that finds a balance between fiction and ethnographic document, benefiting from the authenticity of the non-actors, magnificent imagery and long, lightly-edited hunting shots that convey a great sense of truth. The rivalry between two young men in love with the same woman is the dramaturgic element used to reveal the daily life and customs of the Inuit through striking images: kayak trips among the icebergs, harpoon fishing, bear hunting... And if Flaherty's Nanook remains the reference film of the genre, it opened up a largely exploited vein of which this Wedding of Palo is one of the most spectacular examples.