The Haiti Lab hosts an annual series of Haitian films, curated by Jacques Pierre, Instructor of Haitian Creole and Haitian Studies.
This year's films highlight the diversity of Haitian life and culture. All films are free and open to the public. They will be screened in the Ahmadieh Family Conference Hall in the John Hope Franklin Center (Room 240). Parking available across Trent Drive in the Pickens parking lot.
March 10, 2017 – 7:00 pm
The Other Side of the Water: the Haitian Journey of a Rara Band in Brooklyn
Directed by Jeremy Robbins and Magali Damas (2010), 52 minutes. In English
The Other Side of the Water follows the dramatic 20-year journey of a group of young immigrants who take this ancient music from the hills of Haiti and reinvent it on the streets of Brooklyn. It’s a story on an unlikely band that comes to speak for a larger community, and a music that manages to create a new meaning of home in the Diaspora.
March 31, 2017 – 7:00 pm
René Depestre: We Can’t Miss an Eternal Life – a film by Arnold Antonin (2016), 120 minutes. French and Haitian Creole with English subtitles
Eminent son of the 20th century, a poet as feisty in his beliefs as in his dissents, René Depestre was close to the most prominent political and literary personalities of this century. This film shows him in the company of his Haitian countrymen as well as with Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sedar Senghor, Edouard Glissant and Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, as he tells us about his political and literary struggles, celebrates love, sex, the female body and his erotic safaris. We discover a 90 year-old rebel searching for eternity, at the top of his poetic art, with the brilliance of a great writer who dreams of living in "the great house of the humanities.”
April 6, 2017 – 7:00 pm
Of Men and Gods
Directed by Anne Lescot and Laurence Magloire (2002), 52 minutes. Haitian Creole with English subtitles.
A frank look at a largely unexplored area, Of Men And Gods examines the daily existence of several Haitian men who are openly gay. Prevalent, yet still taboo, homosexuality and gay culture are allowed to flourish within the context of Haiti's Vodou religion.
April 21, 2017 – 7:00 pm
Tiga: Haiti, Dream, Creation, Possession, Madness
Directed by Antonin Arnold (2001), 54 minutes. French and Haitian Creole with English subtitles.
Followed by a reception of Haitian food.
The life and work of Haitian painter Jean-Claude "Tiga" Garoute. At one end of a Caribbean island dominated by madness and chaos, there is an artist philosopher. His dream is to make all the people of this island find the hidden creator within each of them and become free. For that he became one with the madness of the country. He became one with its hallucinations. He convoked Ubu, he looked at Dada, he questioned all the Gods of Voodoo. He wanted to decipher all the signs of his people.
