La Fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage (FMA) recently shared that a preview screening of Mathilde Damoisel’s new documentary film— Le sucre, pour la douceur et pour le pire [Sugar, for sweetness and for worse]— will take place at Forum des Images (in Paris, France) on September 30, 2025, at 7:30pm. A second screening will take place on October 7, at 9:00pm. It will also be televised from September 30, 2025, to March 29, 2026, on arte.tv.
Coproduction: ARTE France, Hauteville Productions, Inicia Films, and Wonder Maria Filmes (France, Spain, Portugal, 2025). For more information, visit FMA.
A preview evening with the team will be held in partnership with the foundation on Tuesday, September 30th at 7:30 p.m. at the Forum des Images in Paris.
The FME is a partner of this two-part 52-minute documentary, which traces the global history of sugar and its links to slavery and the globalization of trade.
A health scourge, sugar is also inseparable from capitalism and the crimes linked to colonization and slavery. Well-researched and dynamic, this fascinating and scandalizing historical account is the ultimate appetite suppressant.
For five centuries, land and humans have been exploited to satisfy the demand for sugar across the planet. Its legacy of racism, overconsumption, and environmental disaster weighs heavily, but not enough to stop the modern barons of this ever-expanding industry, which is now reinventing itself as an ecological miracle with bioethanol, also derived from sugarcane.
Mathilde Damoisel’s documentary, informed by archival material comparing garish advertisements from the 1950s with the chilling testimonies of sugarcane cutters, offers an edifying panorama of this sugary ogre through the ages and highlights, through striking examples, its absolute inseparability from globalized capitalism. It also recalls this astonishing scientific fact after a century of advertising hype: sugar serves no purpose for the human body. [. . .]
Excerpts translated by Ivette Romero. For full article (in French), see https://memoire-esclavage.org/la-fme-partenaire-du-documentaire-le-sucre-pour-la-douceur-et-pour-le-pire
Also see https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/118256-001-A/le-sucre-pour-la-douceur-et-pour-le-pire-1-2/
La Fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage (FMA) recently shared that a preview screening of Mathilde Damoisel’s new documentary film— Le sucre, pour la douceur et pour le pire [Sugar, for sweetness and for worse]— will take place at Forum des Images (in Paris, France) on September 30, 2025, at 7:30pm. A second screening will take
