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TopFlash
MÉLISSANDRE MONATUS“ Filming Is Repairing What Society Has Broken”
Flashmag! Edition 171 Avril 2026
Some artists arrive on the scene like a silent detonation. Mélissandre Monatus is one of them. Born and raised in Paris, with a background spanning science, communications, international marketing, and the video game industry, she returns to cinema today with rare maturity and razor-sharp lucidity. Her short film LAPO CHAPÉ— a title rooted in her Antillean childhood— asserts itself as a singular artistic and political gesture. A film that seeks neither effect nor provocation, but raw truth: the truth of colorism, skin-color prejudice, and those invisible hierarchies that cut through families, communities, institutions, and sometimes even love.
In a French context where the election of several mayors of African origin has sparked revealing debates about the place of Afro-descendants in the public sphere, Mélissandre’ s work arrives like a mirror held up to a society that still struggles to look at itself honestly. But LAPO CHAPÉ is not just a film: it is a device. An experience. An encounter between strangers who, for the first time, set down their words, their wounds, their doubts, their anger— unfiltered, unstaged, unmasked..
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