25724; Hermantin(News)A FREE FILM FESTIVAL IN SOUTHERN HAITI ENCHANTS THOUSANDS (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Sat, Jul. 16, 2005


Miami Herald

A FREE FILM FESTIVAL IN SOUTHERN HAITI ENCHANTS THOUSANDS IN A COUNTRY GRIPPED 
BY DESPAIR.
BY CARA BUCKLEY
cbuckley@herald.com

JACMEL, Haiti - One moonless inky night this week, 4,000 Haitians gathered 
along their town's waterfront, sat down and spent the next three hours lost in 
a large window of light.

A giant outdoor movie screen flickered before them, transporting them into 
other people's lives and to faraway places they'd never otherwise see.

Haiti might be in its darkest, most anarchic hour, with murderous gangs 
besieging its capital and its economy in shreds, but in this peaceful seaside 
city, a cultural awakening is under way. Every day this week, films from Haiti 
and the world have been screened around the city as part of a wildly ambitious 
international film festival that has already achieved its founders' most basic 
aim: to infuse a stricken people with hope.

The Jacmel International Film Festival, which began July 9 and ends today, was 
different from most festivals of its kind. Films were shown three times daily 
in makeshift theaters, their crumbling walls patched with plywood, and at 
nighttime on a 18-by-25-foot screen on the city's wharf. Every screening was 
free, and without exception, packed by locals.

The incongruity between this movie festival in Jacmel and the horrors two hours 
north in Port-au-Prince, where a Haitian journalist's mutilated body was found 
Thursday, was lost on no one.

''There's always a looming sense of disaster from Port-au-Prince, and at some 
points, some members of our team were questioning whether we should do this,'' 
said David Belle, 33, one of the festival's founders. ``But I felt it was more 
important than ever.''

Belle, an American filmmaker who was romanced by Haiti 13 years ago, dreamed up 
the idea of hosting a festival here with a Jacmel native, Patrick Boucard, 49, 
in 2003.

Boucard is from a prominent Jacmel family that still owns some of the largest 
buildings in town. After hopscotching around the United States in his youth, 
Boucard returned home with his wife, Kate, two years ago to open an arts center 
by the sea.

''I love this area, and I love the people, and I want to expand the horizons of 
Haitians,'' Boucard said. ``In a selfish way, I'm preserving my environment.''

AN OASIS

If Port-au-Prince, with its kidnappings and bloodthirstiness, is Haiti at its 
most hellish, Jacmel is its oasis. The city is impoverished but beautiful in 
its near ruin, lined with grand, decrepit French colonial buildings that give 
it the feel of a lost New Orleans. Whenever Port-au-Prince descended into 
chaos, as it has again now, Jacmel kept its peace, largely because its people 
closely watch newcomers and manage to keep any probable troublemakers out.

Boucard's art center offers training to self-taught artists, but Boucard and 
Belle yearned to bring the world to Jacmel. Fifty percent of Haitians are 
illiterate; few can afford televisions, and even fewer can afford the luxury of 
a movie. Anyway, few theaters are operating.

For the first film festival, held in July 2004, Boucard and Belle scraped 
together $120,000 and corralled 85 Haitian documentaries, shorts and feature 
films. They convinced American companies to rent them equipment and rigged up a 
screen at the town's crossroads.

Half the town showed up for opening night, but the next day, the festival's 
smaller venues were curiously vacant. After some sleuthing, Belle discovered 
locals couldn't fathom entering a private venue without paying. ''They didn't 
know what a film festival was,'' Belle said. So he visited key people in each 
neighborhood to invite one and all. From then on, the screenings overflowed, 
and after the festival ended, locals dogged Belle and Boucard, asking when the 
festival was coming back.

It nearly didn't. As Port-au-Prince's violence spun out of control, Belle and 
Boucard worried about visitors' safety and feared that the thousands of locals 
gathered for the nightly film would provide an easy target should the capital's 
gang warfare bleed out. But Jacmel had opened its tiny airport, which meant 
outsiders could avoid the often perilous road from Port-au-Prince to town. In 
April, as Haiti's prospects plummeted, the pair decided the festival was a go.

Help poured in. After some persuading, such major studios as HBO, Dreamworks 
and Lions Gate lent the festival major releases -- among them Hotel Rwanda and 
The Motorcycle Diaries -- for free. Friends threw fundraisers and showed up in 
Jacmel to work without pay. A young local theater group dubbed a dozen movies 
in Creole, recorded in a hastily erected sound room. Fat donations came from 
the French and Spanish embassies, Haiti's Ministry of Culture and Crowing 
Rooster Arts, which Belle runs with filmmaker Katharine Kean, who also owns Tap 
Tap Restaurant in South Beach.

In the end, the festival offered 100 films from 30 countries and, at least in 
the daytime, couldn't match local demand.

''We cannot travel; we don't have the passports or money or visas to get to 
those places,'' said Fenton Stevenson, 27, a festivalgoer from Jacmel. ``This 
way, these places come to us.''

Directors from the Caribbean, South Africa and New York flew in to host free 
filmmaking and acting workshops that immediately ran out of space. Others, 
though, stayed away, fearing for their safety. By late this week, security 
guards were installed at the smaller daytime venues, because too many people 
were trying to shoehorn themselves in. Near bedlam ensued outside a jammed 
screening of Sometimes in April, a film about Rwanda by the Haitian filmmaker 
Raoul Peck.

SOME RISKS

''This is very new for Haiti, and I am surprised they had the guts to do it,'' 
said Peck, who hosted a filmmaking workshop. ``It's like a giant public school. 
It's another kind of food.''

But with every advance comes risk. One of co-founder Belle's greatest fears is 
that after bringing the world to Jacmel and teaching its youth to make films 
and project their realities on screen, people here will feel even more trapped 
and limited by their country's deepening failures.

Yet for one young Haitian at least, the festival offered sorely needed, if 
temporary, liberation: It lifted him out of the beleaguered Haiti of now into 
the Haiti that could be.

''There are young people here who are full of hope, and every day, at every 
moment of their lives, they think about what's to come for Haiti,'' said Jean 
Auguste, 22, a student who drank in the festival workshops.

''This helps to forget their daily life problems and helps them imagine what 
they can do tomorrow, for their families and their country,'' Auguste said.






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