Film Screenings / Programs / Series
STRUGGLE OF MEMORY: FORGETTING HAITI, REMEMBERING AYITI
February 9 – February 26
February 9-26, 2024
All struggles for liberation are struggles of memory. In 1804, the masses of Saint-Domingue rose up to challenge the systems of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. A rebellion turned into the Haitian Revolution and created the first Black Republic. Taking place almost a century before the invention of cinema, this worldmaking event could not have been recorded via the moving image. Yet both the stifling and resurfacing of the Haitian Revolution have been cinematic concerns – especially considered alongside a more recent historical episode: the dynastic dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean “Baby Doc” Claude Duvalier, who ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986. Through the lens of two historical acts 150 years apart, Haitian Cinema has developed in an ongoing tension between repression and liberation, between forgetting and remembering.
Haiti first appeared on film through the often-uninformed gaze of hostile outsiders. Most damaging was the image created through American Cinema, as early as the 1932 WHITE ZOMBIE. Sensationalizing fictions and documentaries painted a picture of a troubled, savage island of total otherness – which served to justify the U.S. occupation between 1915 and 1934. Extending the claims for autonomy and self-determination made by the revolution, many Haitian filmmakers have corrected and replaced these false, exotifying stereotypes with their own forms of audiovisual narration and recollection. During the Duvalier dictatorships, this emancipatory, subversive and creative potential of Haitian Cinema was brutally stifled and censored. Although most could only work in exile, Haitian filmmakers both documented and have continued to revisit that period of contested memories.
This film series encompasses three broad categories of filmmakers: Haitians, diasporic or hyphenated Haitians, and non-Haitians. Maya Deren’s DIVINE HORSEMEN, Jac Avila & Vanyoska Gee’s KRIK? KRAK! TALES OF A NIGHTMARE, and a program of shorts made between 1938 and 2020 reveal both changes and continuities in how foreigners have interpreted the island and its citizens. Most of the programs here are by contemporary artists and filmmakers working inside and outside of Haiti, both collectively, in the case of the “The Living and the Dead Ensemble”, and individually, in the case of Haitian-Canadian Miryam Charles and Haitian-Americans Michèle Stephenson, Guetty Felin, and Michelange Quay. Across a wide range of styles, genres, shared histories, and scattered geographies, their works deal with questions of identity, migration, loss, belonging, and endurance. Likely the most recognized filmmaker in the series, Raoul Peck's crucial debut HAITIAN CORNER will screen alongside other works focused on Haiti. Finally, there are the pillars of early Haitian Cinema: Arnold Antonin, who has made crucial contributions with his extensive, militant, and predominantly non-fiction filmography; Rassoul Labuchin, a Marxist poet; and Jacques Arcelin. Their cumulative contributions have amounted to a monumental effort of imagination and political education in Haitian Cinema.
“Struggle of Memory: Forgetting Haiti, Remembering Ayiti” centers on remembrance, as it explores how the island – as Ayiti and as Haiti – has been represented, forgotten, and remembered. This is not a question of “good representation” and “bad representation” but of power and autonomy over the means of representation and storytelling. Thus, the importance of language and making films in Kreyòl, for both genuine accessibility to the island’s majority and for political self-determination. Documenting the everyday lives and ordinary experiences of Haitians has been central to a cinema that serves as a people’s history and archive of collective memories. Ayiti and Haiti: a people and a place whose legitimate right to make, remake, and narrate themselves continually returns to the necessity of looking back to go forward.
“Struggle of Memory” is guest-programmed by Yasmina Price, who wrote the introduction above.
Special thanks to Carlos Adriano; Arnold Antonin; Jac Avila; Miryam Charles; Guetty Felin; Raoul Peck; Michelange Quay; Michèle Stephenson; Matthew Barrington (Barbican); Valentine Blassel (Cinéma Defacto); Paul Corbanese; Léa Daudon (mk2 Films); Annouchka de Andrade; Christina Demetriou (Oyster Films); Adèle Dupuy (Velvet Film); Efuru Flowers (Flourishing Films); Anaïs Gagliardi (Memento International); Carlos A. Gutiérrez (Cinema Tropical); Louis Henderson; Edda Manriquez (Academy Film Archive); Olivier Marboeuf (The Living and the Dead Ensemble); Colleen O’Shea (Women Make Movies); Sandra Schulberg (IndieCollect); TiCorn; and Moira Tierney.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT IN PERSON – FEB 9!
Rassoul Labuchin
ANITA
1981, 45 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Haitian Creole with English subtitles.
Centered on the titular Anita – a young peasant girl working as a maid – Rassoul Labuchin’s film denounces the practices of child domestic labor. Made by one of Haitian cinema’s key figures, the story also doubles as a metaphor for the dependency and servitude imposed by U.S. imperialism. In clear defiance of one of the most repressive years of the Duvalier political regime, ANITA was immediately censored and removed from distribution. Undeterred, Labuchin and his team toured the film through provincial cities and the countryside, in a mobile effort of political education and community building. It was hugely popular with Haitian audiences and media as a poetic portrayal which felt true to the socio-economic and political realities of the island – and also widely celebrated when it was released internationally. ANITA brought an importantly gendered perspective to the documentation of the Duvalier years, while also honoring the friendship between the protagonist and another girl, Choupette, in a tribute to the forms of rebellion which might sometimes seem too minor to be registered. It was also the first Haitian film to be shot in Kreyòl.
“ANITA turned out to be a turning point in the history of Haitian cinema, breaking from the stifling commercial network to build a real audience among the masses in the streets and alleys, from the outskirts to the small rural Catholic or protestant churches, and interacting with the emerging labor movements, cooperatives, and community, neighborhood, and youth organizations.” –Michaëlle Lafontant-Médard
Fri, Feb 9 at 7:15 and Fri, Feb 16 at 7:00. Following the screening on Feb 9, series curator Yasmina Price will be joined in conversation by Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat, who was present for and contributed to the early history of Haitian Cinema. She is the author of the novels “Breath, Eyes, Memory” and “Krik? Krak!”, amongst many others, as well as editor of “The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora” in the United States, and more. Danticat has won numerous literary awards and fellowships including the MacArthur and Ford Foundation "Art of Change."
Raoul Peck
HAITIAN CORNER
1988, 98 min, 16mm-to-digital. In English, French, and Haitian Creole with English subtitles.
Raoul Peck is the most widely-known Haitian filmmaker, and his debut feature HAITIAN CORNER anchored a cinematic trajectory with political purpose. The film is a collective portrait of Haitian identity in exile while being centered on the story of Joseph Bossuet. A poet and factory worker who moves to New York, he often visits the “Haitian Corner” bookstore, a space frequented by many fellow exiles from the Duvalier regime, whose daily lives are the rhythm of Peck’s film. Before escaping, Joseph had been imprisoned and tortured for seven years by the dictator’s brutal paramilitary secret police, the Tonton Macoute. When he spots one of his torturers one day in New York, Joseph is plunged back into traumas that are both individual and shared, as the film touches on vengeance, state terror, and class struggle. HAITIAN CORNER serves as an exploration of how the past always disrupts and coexists with the present, of what people hold onto and leave behind, and of the central importance of memory. The film was very popular in Haiti and received international acclaim.
“[Peck is] the best Haitian filmmaker for his film HAITIAN CORNER which made me relive my season in hell and which brought me to believe that the future will be enchanting.” –Rassoul Labuchin
Fri, Feb 9 at 9:15 and Sat, Feb 17 at 8:45.
Arnold Antonin
HAITI: THE WAY TO FREEDOM / AYITI MEN CHIMIN LIBETE / HAÏTI LE CHEMIN DE LA LIBERTÉ
1975, 90 min, 16mm-to-digital. In French and Haitian Creole with English subtitles.
Committed to making political films about Haiti’s history and dedicated to the collective memory of his fellow Haitians, Arnold Antonin is one of the pillars of Haitian Cinema. He entered filmmaking through anti-dictatorship militancy, and his monumental debut feature, AYITI MEN CHIMIN LIBETE, retraces the struggle of Haitian people for their sovereignty. It chronicles Taïno resistance to the Spanish conquest, transatlantic slavery, the rebellion of 1791 and founding of the first Black Republic, the return to the plantation economy and eventual peasant revolts, the American occupation and the beginning of the Duvaliers’ rule. Celebrated as the first Haitian feature film, it comprises a collage of footage of daily life, visual and textual archival materials, photographs, drawings to fill in the gaps, and interviews with militants and organizers such as Rodophe Moïse, Ulrick Jolly, and Justin Castera. AYITI MEN CHIMIN LIBETE was an openly anti-Duvalierist denunciation that functioned as both a history lesson and a call to arms for the Haitian people. Initially made with a Kreyòl voiceover to be accessible to the Haitian masses, it was quickly translated into French, Spanish, English, Italian, and German to circulate widely as internationalist propaganda aimed at militants, students, and workers. The closing title card, with a wink to Marx’s Thesis Eleven, says it all:
“This film may be used in the anti-Duvalier struggle by anyone, with due credit to the makers. This film sets out to expose to Haitians what happens and what has happened in their country, in order to change things. This is an appeal to all that they unite to crush the criminal and depraved Duvalier dynasty. Finally, it tries to inform other peoples about the continued struggle of the Haitian people against local and foreign exploitation.”
Sat, Feb 10 at 6:30 and Sat, Feb 17 at 4:15.
Raoul Peck
MOLOCH TROPICAL
2009, 107 min, DCP. In Haitian Creole, English, and French with English subtitles.
“Inspired by the kingdom of 19th-century king Henri-Christophe, one of the revolutionary leaders who won for Haiti its independence from French colonial rule, but set in a modern milieu, MOLOCH TROPICAL presents a fictionalized portrait of the final days marking the collapse of a regime. The hot air is thick with a tightly coiled tension at President Jean de Dieu’s palatial fortress outside Port-au-Prince. His security force rattles with civil unrest and international diplomats one by one turn their backs on the president’s summit invitation. Hobbling around his quarters, de Dieu erratically exerts scraps of control as his authority rapidly disintegrates into humiliation. Using symbolism and an almost Shakespearean madness that reverberates across modern governments, Peck meticulously drapes the poetic across the political in a searing critique on the universal malady of absolute power corrupting absolutely.” –TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL
Sat, Feb 10 at 9:00 and Sun, Feb 18 at 5:00.
Arnold Antonin
NAIVE ART AND REPRESSION IN HAITI / ART NAÏF ET RÉPRESSION EN HAÏTI
1976, 45 min, 16mm-to-digital. In French and Haitian Creole with English subtitles.
Antonin’s fourth documentary historicizes and condemns the triple exploitation – commercial, political, and ideological – of what is known as “l’art naif” or “naïve art.” The style was identified and coveted by the American art market (with C.I.A. approval) to support a primitivized image of Haiti and Haitians. In addition to feeding a lucrative and exploitative artistic commerce at the mercy of American interests, “l’art naïf” was also weaponized by the Duvalier dictatorship for its own ends. NAIVE ART AND REPRESSION IN HAITI includes numerous interviews with artists. A comment by one of them is a chilling testimony: “I can’t make anything I want to. I’m a slave to an American capitalist who wants to satisfy his escape fantasies. If I made another type of painting, I wouldn’t be able to sell it.” Antonin’s documentary functions to both expose the collusions of art and power, while ultimately calling for a renewed and autonomous Haitian artistic and cultural production.
Arnold Antonin
RADIO HAÏTI-INTER: LE DROIT À LA PAROLE
1981, 14 min, 16mm-to-digital. In French and Haitian Creole with English subtitles.
This film is a tribute to the collective struggle of journalists and writers against the censorship of the Duvalier regime. Made while many of them had to leave the island and Antonin himself was in exile in Venezuela, RADIO HAÏTI-INTER recreates one of their typical independent radio broadcasts at a time when these were banned. The mixture of fact and fiction makes this something of a “docu-fiction”, with appearances by Lilianne Pierre-Paul, Compère Philo, Harold Isaac, Jackson Pierre-Paul, Vivianne Nicolas, Henry Alphonse, and Raymond Davius. Even at the heights of repression, this speculative experiment created an imaginary opening for subversive voices which the government never succeeded in fully silencing.
Total running time: ca. 65 min.
For more info about Arnold Antonin, visit www.arnoldantoninfilms.com and www.youtube.com/@arnoldantoninhaitifilms2554
Sun, Feb 11 at 4:15 and Sat, Feb 17 at 7:00.
Jac Avila & Vanyoska Gee
KRIK? KRAK! TALES OF A NIGHTMARE
1988, 78 min, 16mm-to-digital. In English, French, and Haitian Creole with English subtitles.
Although both are named after a Haitian form of oral call-and-response storytelling, KRIK? KRAK! TALES OF A NIGHTMARE is in some ways the opposite of “Krik? Krak!” (1995), Haitian-American writer Edwidge Dandicat’s short story cycle which chronicles women’s experiences of belonging, immigration, and identity at the level of the everyday. Evident in the title, the documentary is instead frankly sensationalizing – bringing together newsreel footage, interviews, and fictional segments in a feverish and surrealist twist on the documentary genre. Capturing the terror and misery of the Duvalier period, it does however make critical connections between the dictatorship and American imperialism.
Sun, Feb 11 at 6:00 and Mon, Feb 19 at 9:00.
SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Rudy Burckhardt HAITI 1938, 15 min, 16mm
The production of this travelogue by Swiss-American photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt must be contextualized by the 1915-34 U.S. invasion and occupation of Haiti. Yet this record of Port-au-Prince also deserves attention because it formally avoids the racist, exoticizing, and stereotypical depictions that were the cultural arm of American imperialism. Instead, it offers an enduringly moving glimpse into the mundane rhythms of everyday life, focused on bustling markets, street scenes, the inside and outside of homes, trees, and landscapes.
Humberto Solás SIMPARELE 1974, 30 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Spanish with English subtitles.
The Cuban director best known for the revolutionary epic LUCÍA (1968) shot another sort of historical film on people’s resistance taking place on the neighboring island of Haiti, made in collaboration with Haitian artists. SIMPARELE was made a few years into the beginning of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s rule and doubled as a condemnation of the dictatorial dynasty.
“SIMPARELE is history interpreted through people’s art. The film synthesizes the primary forms through which the Haitian people have expressed themselves in the centuries since the island’s colonization by the French and the massive importation of African slaves to fuel its plantation economy. It is a composite of dance, theatrical tableaux, poetry, song, folk painting, legend and religious ritual. SIMPARELE acknowledges the powerful role which Afro-Haitian culture has played in these people’s political struggle as both repository for people’s history and the raw material from which that history can be reconstructed and transformed.” –Louise Diamond & Lyn Parker
Moira Tierney RADIO HAÏTI 2001, 4 min, 16mm
New York’s Haitian community takes it to the bridge to protest a year of mortal policing, Easter 2000.
Sarah Maldoror REGARDS DE MÉMOIRE 2003, 24 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.
Sarah Maldoror’s lyrical and militant contributions to Pan-African Cinema focused on global revolution, the many roles of women, Black culture, and the everyday. Filmed in Martinique, Haiti, and France, REGARDS DE MÉMOIRE centers on the writer Édouard Glissant and his fellow Martinican, the poet and political figure Aimé Césaire. Tracing shared histories of colonization and transatlantic slavery from Senegal to the Caribbean, the documentary evokes the memories of the Haitian Revolution and legacy of Toussaint Louverture.
Carlos Adriano BRAZIL IS THEE HAITI IS (T)HERE / O QUE HÁ EM TI 2020, 16 min, digital. In English, French, Haitian, and Portuguese with English subtitles.
“On March 16, 2020, in Brasília, the capital of Brazil, an anonymous and unknown Haitian man challenged the chief of the nation: ‘Bolsonaro, it’s over. You are not the President anymore.’ This film-poem is a counterpoint between this act of protest, and the catastrophic military operations held by the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, commanded by Brazil.” –SHEFFIELD DOC FEST
“[The film] deserves an obvious word: masterpiece. It comes directly from your rage, indignation, revolt – thanks to all your deep knowledge about images and how to work with them. It’s what we call in France: ‘un classique instantané’, a human work which encapsulates its time with genius and deserves to be transmitted to all the generations while the humanity still exists.” –Nicole Brenez
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Sun, Feb 11 at 8:15 and Mon, Feb 19 at 6:45.
Michelange Quay
EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY / MANGE, CECI EST MON CORPS
2007, 107 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
A deserted colonial mansion in Haiti is populated with three almost anonymous characters. With a minimal narrative and highly stylized look, this first-feature by Haitian-American Michelange Quay is an allegorical diagnosis of power told in silences and gestures. EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY unfolds as an enigmatic and surreal staging of the racial and sexual politics inherited by colonization and enslavement. As is named in the title, food and more broadly consumption, are central vehicles for the film’s tableaus and bridging of Haiti’s past and present. Thickly visual and shot in captivating 35mm, EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY maintains an ambivalent tension between its dreamy, feverish aestheticization and irredeemable structures of violence.
Preceded by:
Michelange Quay
THE GOSPEL OF THE CREOLE PIG / L’EVANGILE DU COCHON CREOLE
2004, 19 min, 35mm-to-digital. In French and Haitian Creole with English subtitles.
Quay’s short film is an impressively condensed treatment of Haitian history through the “Creole Pig.” The animal serves as a metaphor and a symbol, calling up Voudon practices, national identity, and exploitative dynamics. With an elliptical, meditative approach, the film also functions to expose class antagonisms and the ongoing predatory actions of the U.S. in Haiti.
Total running time: ca. 130 min.
Mon, Feb 12 at 7:15 and Fri, Feb 16 at 8:30.
Miryam Charles
THIS HOUSE / CETTE MAISON
2022, 75 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In French and Haitian Creole with English subtitles.
A haunting and tender meditation on displacement, grief, and memory. Haitian-Canadian filmmaker Miryam Charles’s debut feature is dedicated to her 14-year-old cousin Tessa, whose tragic death in 2008 was the origin point for the filmmaker’s contemplation of their family’s history of migration and relationship to Haiti. Shot in lustrous 16mm, Charles renders traumatic histories with a loving touch, recalling classics of Black women’s diasporic cinema such Martina Attile’s DREAMING RIVERS (1988) and Julie Dash’s DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (1991). THIS HOUSE moves between sensitively artificial interiors and vibrantly realistic landscapes, offering a cinematic wake for the irrecuperable loss of a beloved young girl – and the solace of impossible elegy.
“In this ornate experimental documentary, Charles presents meticulously gathered Haitian soundscapes, an assortment of Caribbean flora, precious keepsakes, and staged recollections. With these elements, she conjures a reunion across realms, showing a family that is still standing despite being profoundly changed by what they have suffered.” –Nataleah Hunter-Young
Preceded by:
FLY, FLY SADNESS / VOLE, VOLE TRISTESSE 2015, 6 min, 16mm-to-digital
An anonymous narrator describes the aftermath of a mysterious explosion in Port-au-Prince that transforms the voices of all its individual inhabitants into one single voice.
A FORTRESS / UNE FORTERESSE 2018, 6 min, 16mm-to-digital
After the death of their adoptive daughter, a couple goes to Haiti looking for her relatives. There, they meet with a DNA specialist who might have the power of resurrection.
SECOND GENERATION 2019, 5 min, 16mm-to-digital
A few days before her wedding, a young woman learns that her fiancé is accused of sexual assault. She goes to Haiti to confront the alleged victim.
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Tues, Feb 13 at 6:45 and Sun, Feb 18 at 8:00.
Guetty Felin
AYITI MON AMOUR
2016, 88 min, DCP. In English, French, Haitian Creole, and Japanese with English subtitles.
“Set in Haiti five years after the devastating 2010 earthquake, Guetty Felin’s magical realist tale avoids the kinds of images of the disaster that saturated screens around the world. In his depiction of young Orphée’s grief over the loss of his father beneath the rubble of decimated buildings (represented in ghostly images that float beneath the ocean’s surface), Felin refuses to tell a story of victimhood. Instead, she gives the narrative back to the Haitian people, whose lives cannot be reduced to headlines. And as her characters begin to heal, Felin suggests that the island will too.” –AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL NEW YORK
“Felin taps into her past work in the documentary field, infusing the realities of modern-day Haiti with a lyrical touch. From its verité-style moments of Jaures the fisherman laboring by the beach to the theatrical scenes between muse Ama and her author, the film makes its fluid tonal shifts at a lulling, rhythmic pace.” –Cameron Bailey, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Tues, Feb 13 at 9:00 and Wed, Feb 21 at 6:30.
The Living and the Dead Ensemble
OUVERTURES
2020, 132 min, digital. In French and Haitian Creole with English subtitles.
“The Haitian revolution was a test case for the ideals of the French Revolution: What does the promise that all men are brothers who enjoy the same inviolable rights even mean as long as colonies and slavery exist? Nothing, according to the enslaved inhabitants of Haiti, who rebelled against the owners of the sugar cane plantations in 1791. In 1961, Antillean writer Édouard Glissant dedicated his play ‘Monsieur Toussaint’ to their leader Toussaint Louverture, which in turn serves as the basis for OUVERTURES. Louis Henderson, Olivier Marboeuf and the theater group The Living and The Dead Ensemble film themselves rehearsing the play in Port-au-Prince. The result is an experiment in three parts: a study retracing Louverture’s steps, an analysis of shared authorship and collective filmmaking and finally the outburst of a magical reality in which the spirits of the dead are alive.” –BERLINALE
Wed, Feb 14 at 7:15 and Tues, Feb 20 at 8:15.
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Michèle Stephenson
STATELESS
2020, 97 min, digital. In English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole with English subtitles.
In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army, based on anti-Black hatred fomented by the Dominican government. In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929. The ruling rendered more than 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity, or a homeland. In this dangerous climate, a young attorney named Rosa Iris mounts a grassroots campaign, challenging electoral corruption and advocating for social justice. STATELESS traces the complex tributaries of history and present-day politics, as state-sanctioned racism seeps into mundane offices, living room meetings, and street protests. At a time when extremist ideologies are gaining momentum in the U.S. and around the world, STATELESS is a warning of what can happen in a society when racism runs rampant in the government. Filmed with a chiaroscuro effect and richly imbued with elements of magical realism, STATELESS combines gritty hidden-camera footage with the legend of a young woman fleeing brutal violence to flip the narrative axis, revealing the depths of institutionalized oppression.
Thurs, Feb 15 at 6:30 and Wed, Feb 21 at 8:45. The screening on Thurs, Feb 15 will be followed by a Q&A with Michèle Stephenson and Clarivel Ruiz, the founder of Dominicans Love Haitians Movement!
Maya Deren, Teiji Ito, and Cherel Winett Ito
DIVINE HORSEMEN: THE LIVING GODS OF HAITI
1954/81, 52 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
With a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren traveled to Haiti begin to assemble an anthropological study of Voudun. She gathered the footage over the course of visits to the island between 1947 and 1952. Dance and choreography were foundational to her artistic practice, which also melded them with her experimental filmmaking into a form of “choreocinema.” This significantly shaped the footage she collected for DIVINE HORSEMAN, which is particularly attentive to embodied rituals and ceremonies. Early in her career and before beginning this project, Deren had been a secretary to Katherine Dunham – the famed African American dancer, choreographer, and ethnographer who pioneered a participatory cross-cultural interlacing of dance and anthropology in her Haitian and Trinidadian fieldwork. Although Deren continued her research for years, explored initiation into Voudun practices, and published a book of the same name in 1953, she was unable to complete the film. It was posthumously edited by her husband Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel Winett Ito. The resulting work, drawing voiceover commentary from Deren’s book, accentuated the more anthropological aspects of the documentary study. Yet it also retains the hallucinatory, hypnotic, and poetic qualities of Deren’s earlier cinematic experiments.
Thurs, Feb 15 at 9:15 and Tues, Feb 20 at 6:30. Following the Feb 20 screening, there will be a conversation with Obden Mondésir, Archivist at the CUNY Haitian Studies Institute, and Fabrice Nozier, curator at large whose work focuses on the intersection of film and social justice.
Benjamin Dupuy & Kim Ives
BITTER CANE / CANNE AMÈRE
1983, 75 min, 16mm-to-digital. In English and Haitian Creole with English subtitles. Produced by Mouvement haïtien de libération (MHL) in conjunction with Haiti Films (Matthew Anderson, Pennee Bender, Dee Dee Halleck, Kim Ives, Kyle Kibbe). For decades, the directing credit was attributed to a fictional nom-de-guerre, “Jacques Arcelin”. Now we can finally reveal the directors’ real names. The film will be screened from a new 4K restoration by IndieCollect, created with support from the Golden Globe Foundation.
“Filmed clandestinely under the Duvalier dictatorship, BITTER CANE is a documentary classic about the exploitation and foreign domination of the Haitian people. From peasant coffee farms in the rugged tropical mountains to steamy U.S.-leased or -owned sweatshops in the teeming capital, the film takes the viewer on a journey through Haitian history to a deeper grasp of the country’s political economy. Shot on 16mm, it was produced by Haiti Films, a collective of Haitian and North American filmmakers, who worked in close collaboration with the Haitian Liberation Movement (MHL), an underground revolutionary organization. […] After the fall of Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier’s regime in 1986, students and popular organizations projected the film on movie screens, walls, and bed-sheets in Haiti’s countryside and cities to raise political consciousness and understanding of the difficult anti-imperialist struggle that lay ahead.” –HAÏTI LIBERTÉ
Sat, Feb 24 at 4:45 and Mon, Feb 26 at 7:30. Filmmakers Kim Ives and DeeDee Halleck in person for both screenings! We expect Kyle Kibbe to join as well on Mon, Feb 26.
