A 15-year-old bride became the face of slavery's cruelty. The truth is messier.
The life of Mrs. Desbassayns is exceptional in more than one way in the history of slavery on the island of Réunion. Married at the age of 15 to the forty-year-old Henri-Paulin Panon Desbassayns, this young Creole woman named Hombeline Gonneau immediately embarked on an extraordinary journey. She found herself, in fact, at the head of the most powerful landowning family...
Direction
William Cally refuses easy villainy without letting anyone off the hook.
Writing
Deconstructs how 'Madame Desbassayns' became shorthand for evil.
Acting
Stéphane Thomas captures the performance of respectability itself.
Director
William Cally
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Madame Desbassayns is still so infamous in Réunion that her name gets spray-painted on walls during protests—this doc actually made some locals angry for 'humanizing' her.
Director William Cally spent seven years in archives because surviving enslaved people's testimony about Hombeline specifically was almost destroyed; plantation families kept her letters, not their grievances.
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