29599: Potemaksonje (news) Third Jacmel Film Festival (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Potemaksonje@yahoo.com
http://www.haitiaction.net



The Third Jacmel Film Festival: Bringing the World to
Haiti

by Kim Ives
Already, the southeastern sea-side city of Jacmel is
considered the art capital of Haiti. Small shops
selling giant paper-mache Carnival masks, traditional
and avant-garde paintings, furniture, iron sculpture
and wood carvings are sprinkled along the city's
narrow streets. On porches and down alleys, one spies
young men and women, painting, sanding, threading and
gluing all manner of handicrafts, from kites and
placemats to baskets and mobiles.

Nineteenth century stone and brick buildings
predominate, with a few gingerbread mansions, their
pastel colors gently scrubbed and faded by decades of
Caribbean wind and sun. Ferns sprout from the walls
and gutters of the elegant old coffee warehouses,
whose tenants now include a bustling art school, a
quaint hotel, and a small film production studio.

Enter the Jacmel Film Festival. Patrick Boucard, a
scion of a prominent local bourgeois family, and David
Belle; a North American expatriate filmmaker who moved
to Jacmel a decade ago, conceived and launched the
festival in 2004 as a one time event to celebrate
Haiti's bicentennial. "It was never our intention to
have an annual film festival," explained Belle, who is
again acting as the Festival's executive director in
this its third year. "We wanted to illustrate the
history of cinema in Haiti: films made by Haitians or
foreigners set in Haiti, and we programmed 85 films
spanning 70 years."

During that bleak year when Haiti was gripped by
another bloody coup d'état, the festival was a blast
of oxygen and hope to Haiti's long suffering masses.
Thousands turned out to watch films projected on a
giant screen under the stars on the town wharf. Its
spectacular success sealed the fate of its initiators.
The population of Jacmel wanted the festival back,
literally "by popular demand." And, in Haiti, some
popular demands cannot be ignored.

The festival's third incarnation is more ambitious
than ever. The line-up includes 92 films from 29
countries from Nov. 24 to Dec. 2, culminating in a
Dec. 1 concert by hip-hop musician Wyclef Jean.
(YeleHaiti, an NGO linked to Jean, is one of the
principal sponsors of this year's festival.) Their
slogan: "Come to Jacmel and discover the world."

The festival's formula for success is simple: 1) put
Haiti's emerging cinema on display; 2) introduce
cinema from around the world to Haitians, long
confined to a diet of Hollywood and Kung Fu movies;
and 3) make it completely free to the public.

Simple does not mean easy. Haiti's dilapidated
infrastructure and dusty, humid climate are challenges
to any equipment-intensive undertaking: DVDs freeze
and skip, electricity is intermittent and
surge-ridden, technicians are few and hard to come by.
Finances are always a problem.

Furthermore, there are no movie theaters, strictly
speaking, in Jacmel. "We actually create screening
rooms by taking over buildings, bringing in our own
equipment, and renting chairs," Belle explained. "We
use a nightclub, a conference room, and a warehouse.
This year we've added a fourth venue which is a
private screening room at a fancy hotel that has been
built outside of town."

The principle venue, however, is breezy Congo Plage
(Congo Beach), where every night thousands gather to
watch films projected on a 20 by 30 foot screen framed
by swaying palm trees and a cloud-crowned moon.

Haitian feature films are, of course, the big favorite
and the centerpiece of the beach showings. Richard
Arens' "Chomeco," a buddy comedy about the
misadventures of two unemployed men married to and
living in the same house with two sisters, produced
howls of laughter from a huge crowd on Saturday.
Although hammy, the innate comic talent of its two
protagonists, Nono and Cassagnol, played by Simon
Innocent and Roberto Colas, make this film very
promising.

The next night, some 15,000 people, nearly half of the
town's 40,000 population, jammed onto the beach for
Sacha Parisot's lushly produced "La Rebelle," a drama
about a rich Haitian businessman trying to reconcile
his unruly teenage daughter with his fiancée. Although
the film and its bourgeois characters never stray from
the landscaped confines of Haiti's super-rich, it
boasts professional camera work, editing and a
sophisticated plot twist or two which make it a new
high-water mark for Haitian cinema.

Georges David Jiha's light-hearted comedy "Café au
Lait" is of a similar vein, but set exclusively in
Miami. Using the romance of a light-skinned lawyer and
a dark-skinned medical intern, the film spoofs Haiti's
racial myths with some serious jabs at tensions and
prejudices in Haitian society.

Arnold Antonin's "Le President a-t-il le SIDA" (Does
the President have AIDS?) features an emerging
Hollywood actor Jimmy Jean-Louis as Dao, a brash
charming lead singer ? the president of compas ? and
his romance with the proud but penniless Nina, played
by the talented actress Jessica Généus, who uses her
rare beauty to raise support for herself and her
mother. Paid for in large measure by the United
Nations to educate Haitians about the danger of AIDS,
the film also plums religious misconceptions and class
dynamics.

"The Haitian section," which numbered 10 films this
year, "is really exciting because, with digital
technology, more and more films are being produced in
Haiti," said Belle. "Production gets more and more
each year, and better and better. There's really a new
wave of Haitian cinema, a lot of it in Creole."

Belle has also set up a studio and sound room in
Jacmel where foreign films are dubbed in Creole
(subtitling was rejected given Haiti's high illiteracy
rate). Now 35 people are engaged in dubbing films
almost year round. "We look to dub films which are set
in similar circumstances in similar countries, similar
cultural and economic settings, that are sharing
positive messages of people addressing their
difficulties," Belle said. For example, the Festival's
team dubbed Zack Niles and Banker White's "Sierra
Leone's Refugee All Stars," a moving documentary about
six men from a refugee camp in Guinée who start a
singing group to entertain and bring hope to fellow
refugees hurt in and hiding from Sierra Leone's civil
war.

Other documentaries dubbed include Florence Ayisi and
Kim Longinotto's "Sisters In Law," about women
fighting violent marital abuse in Cameroon, Ward
Serrill's "Heart of the Game," about a women's
basketball team in the U.S., Annette Olesen's "One to
One," about the mysteries and interpersonal dramas
surrounding the near-fatal beating of a youth in
Copenhagen, and Thomas Allen Harris' "12 Disciples of
Nelson Mandela," the portrait by a son of his father,
who was a militant in the African National Congress.

The festival is now attracting the participation of
internationally prominent cultural figures. A
delegation from Cuba included Harold Gramatges, 88,
Cuba's foremost composer and musical figure; renowned
author and Cuba's former UNESCO ambassador Dr. Miguel
Barnet Lanza; prominent filmmaker Lizette Vila Espina;
painter, veteran journalist and former diplomat Victor
Mirabal, 96, and his son Richard Mirabal, head of the
Martha Jean-Claude Foundation; and Gema Suarez of the
Association of Cuban Musicians, which is part of the
National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC).

Legendary documentary filmmaker Al Maysles also
attended, holding a press conference and a filmmaking
workshop.

Haitian luminaries included novelist Edwidge Danticat,
photographer Marc Baptiste, and Wyclef Jean.

"The festival is beginning to share a more positive
image of Haiti with people around the world, beginning
with the diaspora," Belle said. "It's had a tremendous
impact on Jacmel. There's a sense of pride ? Jacmel
has always considered itself as Haiti's cultural
capital ? and this has reinforced that. "

Belle also points out that the Festival dramatically
contributes to the city's tourism and employment. "All
of the hotels are sold out, all of the restaurants are
packed, and there are the jobs that are created
throughout the year by the creole dubbing," Belle
said. "Jacmelians have been taught audio mixing and
recording and that's something that they'll be able to
go on and use. We've also done intensive workshops
with all of our projectionists. It's really paying
off. All the screenings are running for the most part
without problems, and they are running them completely
independently. That's a huge, huge accomplishment....
It's inevitable and essential that there is
collaboration from people around the world, otherwise
it wouldn't be international. But as much as possible,
the local team is becoming autonomous in terms of
skills."

Belle wants to keep moving in this direction. Now that
the festival has become an annual event ? scheduled
for the end of November, just before the Havana
Festival, instead of in July as it was the first two
years ? Belle hopes to hand it off to others soon.

"It's my personal goal to be able to turn this over as
soon as possible to local Jacmelians, so that they are
running their own film festival," Belle said, which
might be a challenge since "each year it seems to grow
in popularity by at least 30% in terms of audience
size."

Also the Festival is spreading to other parts of
Haiti. "We spend so much time and energy on putting
this thing together, it is a shame to only present it
for one week in Jacmel," Belle said. "Why can't it be
replicated and moved around to other parts of the
country?"

"That is why we've started a partnership with the
Alliance Française to use their network of centers
around Haiti to get a traveling festival to other
parts of the country. We're going in January to
Port-au-Prince, and then in February to Les Cayes and
Cap Ha tien. Simultaneously, we're creating study
guides for the films which have been dubbed in Creole.
The study guides will be distributed to schools in
those towns through the Alliance Française system.
While it's impact will not be tremendous ? maybe a few
hundred or a thousand people in each city ? it's the
beginning of us establishing the festival in other
places, and I think it is inevitable that this aspect
will start to grow."

In politically charged Haiti, Belle says that
organizers have tried to make the Festival a "neutral
space." Several pro-democracy documentaries
sympathetic to former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
were screened in past years, but also films supporting
the coup d'état against Aristide's elected government
in 2004. Last year as the coup dragged on, one
particularly vitriolic anti-Aristide film ? "GNB Kont
Atila" ? by Arnold Antonin, who is also a winless
right-wing politician, received a typically Haitian
reception during its evening big-screen debut on
Haiti's wharf. The crowd erupted in loud, boisterous
applause and cheering every time Aristide appeared on
the screen, even though he was being demonized.

There is also something inherently subversive in many
of the social issues being aired on the screens of
Jacmel, a point which Belle recognizes. "In many of
the films that we are showing, while they are not
overtly political stories and portraits, there is a
strong, but subtle, political message, which doesn't
need any explanation," Belle said. "People are very
very in tune with what truth and reality are.
Sometimes that's all that needs to be presented."

For more information about the Festival, go to:
www.festivalfilmjakmel.com

Kim Ives, until recently a writer and editor at Haïti
Progrès, is now an independent investigative reporter
and documentary filmmaker with a focus on Haiti.



____________________________________________________________________________________
Want to start your own business?
Learn how on Yahoo! Small Business.
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/r-index