Our new filmed play is available for streaming FOR A LIMITED TIME! You can catch Code Noir March 8-31, 2022 by reserving tickets now at www.showtix4u.com/event-details/59803. Tickets are $15 for individuals and $25 for households or groups. Don’t miss it!
Code Noir is based on characters from different times and continents: real-life French General Alex Dumas, a heroic figure who flourished during the French Revolution; and Sandrine Boudreaux, a fictional modern-day New Orleans defense attorney. It stars Thandiwe Thomas DeShazor as Dumas, Carolyn Cook as Boudreaux, and Atlanta speaker, author, and media entrepreneur Michelle Taylor Willis as Dumas’ mother.
Cook originally wrote Code Noir as a play in 2019, and reworked the script for film in collaboration with Hush Harbor Lab, “a brave space for the development and production of new and innovative digital, live, and multi-media performance work” primarily by and for Black Atlanta-based artists, according to founders Addae Moon and Amina McIntyre.
The process opened up new possibilities for storytelling. “This thing we’re making is actually something new,” says Lauren Morris, who also directed the stage production. “It’s not trying to be a substitute for sitting in the room together [in the theatre], and it’s not trying to be a traditional film. It’s this new animal that we’re learning to dance with, and that’s one of the things about the process that I found to be remarkable.”
The product of a French father and African mother, General Dumas was born in 1762 in the French colony of St. Domingue, now Haiti. (The film’s title, Code Noir, refers to the document governing slavery in the French colonies.)
From daring adventures in St. Domingue, to harrowing battles while rising in the ranks of the French army, Dumas’s heroic persona made him both an intriguing historical figure and a literary inspiration. His son, novelist Alexandre Dumas, would eventually immortalize the spirit of his father’s adventures in such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.
In the film, General Dumas and attorney Boudreaux experience a timeslip, through which they meet mysteriously in the prison where he was held as a political captive in the late 1700s. Their encounter across time and space has a deep impact on both.
McIntyre says of Code Noir: “It’s about persons who are searching for a part of their history and trying to reconcile things within themselves. There’s an element of the Black Caribbean and Black Francophone people that I felt was very important to tell.”
Code Noir (Black Code) is available for streaming March 8-31, 2022 at www.showtix4u.com/event-details/59803. Tickets are $15 for individuals and $25 for households or groups.