Watch a recording of this event on our Youtube here
Matthieu Verdeil, 2021, 80 min. In French and English with English subtitles
Q&A with director Matthieu Verdeil and Brent Edwards
A thrilling journey in the 1920s, from Marseille to Harlem, via Jamaica, Russia, and Morocco, in the footsteps of the Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay. McKay was a rebellious figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s -- an unclassifiable author who wandered for more than 10 years in Europe, frequenting the artistic and political avant-gardes. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems that protested racial and economic inequities.
Watch the trailer here.
For over 20 years, film director and producer Matthieu Verdeil has pursued a distinctive path at the crossroads of history, memory, and artistic creation. He collaborates with contemporary artists such as Abraham Poincheval while dedicating much of his career to rediscovering overlooked figures and movements in cultural history, including Varian Fry and Claude McKay. Verdeil first became interested in McKay in the early 2000s, recognizing him as both a pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance and a forerunner of global Black consciousness. He began extensive archival research, working with French publisher Renaud Boukh (Héliotropismes) and U.S. scholars Brent Hayes Edwards and Gary Edward Holcomb. In 2021, Verdeil directed Claude McKay: From Harlem to Marseille, the first documentary devoted to the “vagabond poet.” Combining historical rigor with poetic sensitivity, the film was screened in France, the United States (New York, Washington, Chicago), Germany, the United Kingdom and beyond. Building on this work, Verdeil launched Les Années McKay (2023–2028), under the patronage of Christiane Taubira. Among its highlights was KAY! Letters to a Lost Poet — a performance blending jazz, slam poetry, and archival material — created in collaboration with actor-musician Lamine Diagne and American poet Mike Ladd. In 2024, Verdeil directed a documentary on Varian Fry, the unsung hero of World War II who saved numerous artists and intellectuals, including Marc Chagall, André Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson and Marcel Duchamp. In 2025, he completed a second documentary on Claude McKay, narrated by Gaël Faye, scheduled for broadcast in 2026 alongside new book releases and an audio album of McKay’s texts. Currently, Verdeil is preparing a new television film dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance, continuing his long-standing commitment to amplifying forgotten or marginalized voices whose legacies continue to shape our present, and to exploring the transatlantic fabric of Black thought.
Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He is the editor of the journal PMLA. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003) and the English translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa (Seagull, 2017). His most recent publications are the co-edited volume Écrire le monde noir (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2024), a collection of the interwar writings of the pioneering Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal, and Easily Slip into Another World (Knopf, 2023), the co-written autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, which won the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Book Award in Pop Music, the Jazz Journalists Association Book of the Year Award, and the American Book Award. Edwards was a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This screening and Q&A is co-sponsored by the Maison Française, Dean of Humanities, Center for Jazz Studies, and Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
It is presented in connection Claude McKAY 100 years later (2023-2028). To mark the centenary of his stay in France (1923-1928), artists, publishers, producers, directors and academics from Marseilles have joined forces to bring back to life this century-old voice of dazzling modernity. Under the patronage of Christiane Taubira, they have launched the McKay Years 100 Years Later, a series of events focusing on Claude McKay, the Jamaican-born Afro-American author and precursor of the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude, who found his novelistic inspiration in Marseilles in the 1920s, and became one of the fathers of the awakening of Black consciousness. Unpublished editions, films, shows, innovative cultural actions, musical readings, conferences and symposia... The movement is committed to promoting the author's work and producing creations that resonate with his thought today.
Visit the website : Mckay100ans.com
Event Details & Important Information
This event is free and open to the public, but please note that registration does not guarantee a seat. We intentionally overbook our events, and seating is first come, first served. We recommend arriving early.
Columbia’s campus is currently open only to Columbia-affiliated guests (with a valid CUID).
If you do not have a Columbia ID, you will need a unique QR code sent from Columbia to enter campus.
Please note that the QR code generated by Eventbrite in your confirmation email will not give you access to campus.
Columbia Public Safety will only issue one QR code per email address. If two or more names are registered on Eventbrite using the same e-mail address, only one of them will receive a unique QR code. Please use a different personal e-mail address for each guest.
To receive your unique QR code:
- You must register on Eventbrite at least 48 hours in advance
- We will submit your name and email to Public Safety
- You will receive an email from CU Public Access ([email protected]) with your unique QR code on the day of the event.
Please check your spam/junk folder if you don’t see the email, and bring a valid photo ID with you to present at campus entry points.
For more information: Campus Access Requirements
