Skip to main Skip to sidebar

Residents

Nicolas Koulibale & Naïmé Perrette

Filmmakers
Fall 2025

  • Cinema
  • Washington, DC

“We aim to offer a poetic, political, and social dive into the city of Richmond and explore how hip-hop represents a vehicle for individual and collective elevation there.”

Who?

Our duo is built on our complementary skills: one has a producer’s eye and intuition that the Richmond rap scene deserves our full attention; the other is a director and visual artist, accustomed to paying attention to the dynamics of various social groups with her camera. Together, we are developing our first joint project: a feature-length documentary.

Through her various practices (video, image, sculpture, and installation), Naïmé examines the relationships to our social and geographic environments. The role of art and work in shaping identity is one of her recurring themes. Her films are dives into the underground, whether literal or figurative: deep in a Russian mine, aboard a French trawler, in the hardcore punk scene in Melbourne, and now at the heart of the Richmond hip-hop scene.

In parallel, she directs curatorial projects and conducts workshops in social settings and art schools.

After a first career in the legal field, Nicolas supports the production and development of documentary films addressing social, political, and cultural issues. Passionate about hip-hop and storytelling in general, his discovery of the richness of Richmond’s artistic ecosystem has led him towards documentary filmmaking.

For this first joint project, we aim to put into perspective the individual trajectories of two artists with a 20-year gap, understand the socio-political context they inherit, and the transformations they are contributing to.

 

Graduated with a Master’s in Animation Cinema (ENSAD – Paris), Naïmé Perrette was a resident at the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam) and was awarded the Werkbijdrage Jong Talent grant. Her work has been presented at Wiels (Brussels), the Ural Contemporary Art Biennale (Yekaterinburg), HKW (Berlin), Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), and the Museum of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro).

Graduated with a Master’s in Film & Audiovisual Production (Montpellier – Paul Valéry 3), Nicolas Koulibale has been involved in the production and development of audiovisual projects such as Machine (Best French Series 2024, Séries Mania) and Zahia, un temps d’avance (Special Culture Award 2023, Luchon Festival).

What?
In half a century of existence, hip-hop has become a cornerstone of American culture. It is now the most listened-to music genre in the world. Although the original “peace, love & unity” has inevitably diluted in the face of the hundreds of millions of dollars the industry now generates each year, thousands of artists are working behind the scenes to shape a form of rap that could be described as artisanal. Nestled between New York and Atlanta, the city of Richmond, Virginia, has grown in the shadow of its two big sisters. Without making much noise, it has now become a significant hub for this rap that stands in opposition to or complements more industrial propositions.

By drawing an intimate portrait over several years of Zuri and Nickelus F, two rappers at different stages of their careers and artistic development, we aim to offer a poetic, political, and social dive into the heart of Richmond and explore how hip-hop serves as a vector for individual and collective upliftment there.

We want to provide an experience that is as intimate and immersive as possible. But beyond the individual trajectories at play, we will focus on portraying a community, capturing the pulse of the city of Richmond, and illustrating how music acts as a true social glue there. The constellation we seek to compose feeds into a reflection on the nature of the Black American experience in a city that symbolizes the fractures of this country, where a gap of over 20 years in life expectancy separates residents based on the neighborhood they live in.

Where?

Former capital of the Confederacy, situated on the Mason-Dixon line that divided the abolitionist Northern states from the slaveholding Southern states, Richmond is a place of contrasts. Hosting several Fortune 500 companies, it remains a city plagued by poverty and violence. The birthplace of the first Black Wall Street, Richmond has always been marked by the solidarity of its African-American community. In recent years, the city has distinguished itself as a key location in the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2020, residents notably “reclaimed” Monument Avenue, a symbol of the city’s past where several statues of Confederate figures from the Civil War were erected.

In musical terms, like the singer D’Angelo, the only local artist to have gained international fame who left his first world tour to disappear for nearly 15 years, Richmond seems destined to thrive in the shadows of the spotlight. Nevertheless, all local artists sense that the city is now on the brink of change.

Our residency will allow us to engage with the local scene, and the exploration we conduct there will help us better understand the social and political depth that we want to bring to our film. We will particularly focus on two emblematic places of the local dynamic, which stand out as islands of kindness and solidarity amid a harsh society.

In partnership with

Les Films d’Ici

https://www.lesfilmsdici.fr/

Sign up to receive exclusive news and updates