When I saw Michelange Quay’s Eat, For This is My Body at Sundance in 2008, I called it “the rare Sundance title that unquestionably bears the mark of an obstinately independent vision. It’s by turns exhilarating and totally confounding, and it’s certainly not always successful, but it is always a challenge.” The film, which went on to screen at New Directors, New Films and all over the world, comes back to New York tonight as part of a program at the French Institute hosted by none other than Jonathan Demme. How did that come about?

In an email this morning, Quay called Demme “the coolest pen pal I’ve ever had!” Quay sent Demme a copy of his feature last year through a mutual friend, and the two filmmakers subsequently struck up “a very intense and warm correspondance.” It turns out that Quay’s surrealist allegory on Haitian culture is right in Demme’s wheelhouse.

“Haiti has a very rich cultural pantheon that [Demme] knows well as a collector of Haitian art,” Quay told me. “It’s a country where a lot of film, especially documentary has been made about the “situation” there - politics, dictatorship, on the most prosaic level -  but has hardly at all been used as a source for inspiration for a poetic, auteur vision on the big screen. There are antecednts in literature, like the writers, Franketienne, or Rene Depestre, as well as in painting, but cinema about Haiti is really very….anecdotal up till now.  I think all that speaks to him because as well as a Haitian enthusiast, he’s a film rebel too.”

The event, which includes a screening of Quay’s short The Gospel of the Creole Pig and a conversation with the two filmmakers, happens tonight at Florence Gould Hall, starting at 7. There are further details on the Alliance Francaise’s website.