I had a good ethnographic (and seriously long) day yesterday, kicked off by the Black Paris course and ending with a late, late dinner with my friend. I actually saw a movie called Haiti Chèrie, and after the film was showed, there was a talk back with the Director and the VP of the French bureau of Amnesty International.
Plus d'infos sur ce film
The film was riding the wave of documentaries (notably Sugar Babies and The Price of Sugar) and discussions surrounding Haitian sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic. Tens upon thousands of Haitians cross the border each year to find work and end up in these bateys, or plantations, and just as many are born into the life, with no chance to escape without at best risking death. The majority of the workers are undocumented, and those that are born in the bateys are not considered Dominican due to a series of racist, exceptional laws that exclude Haitians from the jus soli rule. The workers are essentially slaves, working for next to nothing--if that at all. Some plantation owners will pay them in money script that is only valid in the plantation stores themselves, while other owners will call the police to have the Haitians deported conveniently on payday.
This particular film was a "fiction" that centered on three main characters, a young married couple and a random young boy who was living in the same shanty. Haiti Chèrie depicts life in the batey, and then follows them on their way out with the help of a sympathetic doctor on the plantation. Seemed nice enough, but the director failed to take the film to a deeper level and ended up simply creating a film with white-liberal-shock-value. There were a number of non-artistic, and in my opinion unnecessary scenes in the film, including a random character defecating in the sugar cane (no outhouses) or the young wife giving the young boy a hand job--neither scene contributed to the overall plot or message of the movie, at least not in the same way that the attempted-rape scene (there's a clip in the trailer) does. The fact that there are no outhouses can be addressed by the documentaries. Simply having a scene of a non-character defecating only gives you more images of the poor, inhumane savage.
Another scene that upset me was a shot of the madness at the border. The camera focuses on a bunch of people waiting with arms overhead reaching for papers being handed out by the border patrol. Though most of the people are turned to the side, a woman is directly facing the camera. She sees the person filming and, glaring at the camera, deliberately pulls down her shirt, visibly annoyed. The scene struck me as a real one, not staged at all, and the director confirmed that that was the case. This woman was caught on camera indisposed, her dignity robbed of her, yet you as the director chose to include it anyway. What. The. Hell.
The ending of the film is the icing on the cake. So the young boy ends up staying in the DR, but the couple goes on to cross the border. They're wandering around the border village in Haiti, looking for food and a place to rest. The first house they come to, they ask the woman for food, and she says, Sure come in!, and then says some nonesense, then proceeds to laugh hysterically. The camera focuses on her face, her teeth are all jacked up, and she's just laughing, laughing, laughing, and the couple realizes the woman is crazy and back away. Another unnecessary scene. Outside, the young girl faints and they find another home, where an old man lets them rest. They leave, and are walking along the street when the po-po stops them. The police are unnecessarily aggressive, and slam the husband against the wall and search him. They take all his money, and the girl is yelling "Is this the way they treat Haitians in Haiti? Why are you bothering us? We've done nothing! We're only trying to get food and shelter!" and off screen you hear a gunshot--the hubbie was shot dead (for the whole audience it was an unexpected moment.) The po-po are talking amongst themselves, "Why did you do that?" "I don't know, he was resisting." "What the hell man, you can't be going around killing people like that, what's wrong with you." "Oh well." "You got anything off of him?" "Yeah, some money."--blah blah blah (I'm not sure if this part was translated or not, but I understood the dialogue.) The po-po walk away, leaving the girl quietly sobbing over the young man's body. The movie ends shortly after that, with a fast-foward a few months--you find out the girl was pregnant (the movie opened with the funeral of her still-born child.)
What's my main beef with the end? The couple is in serious danger all throughout the trip in the DR. The moment they get to Haiti, they're killed? The message: the Haitians are crazy (literally, in the case of the old woman laughing), while the DR is just evil, with a few good apples (the doctor).
Credits roll, and we the audience find out that the actors are real workers in the batey, and are still there.
Do I even have to say the director was a white man?
The audience was mixed, which was the only positive. The questions were mediocre--one guy tried to get all indignant and was like, "Well, why did you depict the guards as aggressive and kill the guy? In my opinion that's not how Haiti is, not anymore..." and many of us groaned. OF COURSE that's how Haiti is--just this past week, there was a kidnapping that despite a ransom payment ended in a murder, and the death of a schoolboy who was left to die after being jumped by classmates. The police didn't do jack shit--they rarely do unless their palms are greased. That's not the point though. This movie, as a fiction, had a chance to give some hope, give some agency, some depth to the situation. All he ended up doing was sensationalizing it. He contributed nothing to the discourse already started by the 2007 documentaries. I asked him what his point was, but he didn't answer the question, choosing the focus on the "human aspect" of the film as a fiction. Another person asked what course of action he would take as a means of protest, and he couldn't really answer--no wait, he blamed the US, as the largest importer of Dominican sugar. So, yup, it's not his fault or responsibility, it's the States. He's just telling it like it is.
Fuck I don't even know if the actors were even paid. This asshole made a movie that is making money off of their lives, and they will never even see it--the money nor the film.
I told my mother about the film, and she was all about the depiction of Haitians as a people to be pitied, "or else, who will help us? We need to see the beauty and the poverty of Haiti." But seriously, for the people who even know that Haiti exists, who doesn't already know the poverty and corruption? Every time Haiti is mentioned in the news, it gets introduced in the same way: "Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere,..." and every once in a while "Haiti, one of the most corrupt nations in the world,..." We know, already, fuck. How about once in a while you write, "Haiti, the nation consistently screwed over by the US,..." or "Haiti, who was forced to pay for their recognition as a nation by France, and subsequently in economic ruins ever since,..." or even, "Haiti, the proudest Black nation in the Western Hemisphere..." But no, we have to capitalize on the backs of struggling Haitians, stripping them of their dignity and reinforcing an image of desperation and corruption.
Merde.
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