NYAFF 2012 Preview -
Guadeloupean "Elza"
(A Young Woman's Search
For The Father She Never Met)
Festivals by Tambay | March 30, 2012
A film I first alerted you all to back in May of 2011, here's a recap... Released in Paris in April 2011, with no word at the time on whether it'll travel (though it screened in Martinique as well), is Mariette Monpierre's Le bonheur d'Elza (which I believe translates to English as Elza's Happiness, although, you French speakers out there can correct me if I'm wrong); although the NYAFF festival schedule just calls it Elza.
Synopsis reads:
Bernadette, a single mother in Paris, tries to provide her daughters with everything. She is thrilled when her eldest daughter, Elza, is the first in the family to graduate from college earning a master's degree summa cum laude. But Elza breaks her mother's heart by running away to their native Guadeloupe in search of a distant childhood memory: the father she barely remembers.
Since that post, the film has screened at Pan African Film Festival (this past February), and will thankfully be heading to New York next month, for the New York African Film Festival, where I hope to finally see it.
The 80-minute film will screen on April 12 and 15, so you've got 2 chances to see what is being billed as "the first feature narrative film to be directed by a woman filmmaker from Guadeloupe."
Last time the only trailer available was in French without subtitles; now there's a subtitled trailer which I embedded below: