A quarter of the land of Martinique is severely polluted following decades of unregulated use of chlordecone, a highly toxic insecticide used to treat banana plantations, the source of the island’s chief agricultural export industry.

Florence Lazar is a French filmmaker and visual artist. For the past 20 years, her videos, photographs, and art installations have been shown in museums and contemporary art centers in France and abroad. An early video work, Les Paysans (2000), made in response to the armed conflict that saw the violent break-up of the former Republic of Yugoslavia, deals with responsibility in the face of military conflict. Like Les Paysans, her subsequent films often construct narratives in places that are in crisis: Kamen – The Stones (2014); Les Bosquets (2011); Prvi Deo (2006). Kamen – The Stones won the Institut Louis Marcorelles award at the Cinéma du réel festival, in 2014. A retrospective of her photographic, video and film work was held in the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2019. Her work has been shown at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Cottbus, Germany and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.