Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

ARTS-HAITI: Around the World in Eight Days

Amy Bracken

JACMEL, Dec 13 2006 (IPS) - Some 100 Haitians squeezed into a sweltering Town Hall to see Al Gore lecture in Creole in “An Inconvenient Truth”. Hundreds more gathered before a screen on the beach to hear Sierra Leone’s Refugee Allstars sing, in Haitian Creole. And many returned a week later for “Sisters in Law”, a Cameroonian documentary on domestic violence, again in their own language.

The wizard behind bringing heady, talky documentary films to a largely illiterate, Creole-speaking audience is a petite, dreadlocked 46-year-old former New York City cab driver, who returned to her homeland to help give people what they lacked. To Paula Hyppolite, that included entertainment, education, and a glimpse into other worlds.

Jacmel’s annual international film festival, now in its third year, spanned eight days in November and December, bringing over 90 films from 29 countries to a town with no movie theatres. All films were free and open to the public. But that was not enough to make them accessible to the masses.

Blessed with an intricate constellation of cultural references from a life of many lives, Hyppolite slipped naturally into the role of dub-master. In her 21 years in the U.S., Hyppolite was a student, a hairdresser, a secretary, a travel agent, and an insurance broker, before getting her hack license and pager and renting a cab. Born in the north of Haiti and raised in Port-au-Prince, Hyppolite would return in 1996 to yet another side of the country: a southern mountain community of coffee growers outside Jacmel.

Under Hyppolite’s direction, a plywood recording studio was built in an abandoned coffee plant, with a generator-powered air conditioning unit to blast in a chill before the long, and ultimately sweaty dubbing takes. Forty young men and women from the community circulated in and out of the foam-lined room from May through November, assuming roles from a Brazilian highjacker in “Bus 174” to Kenyan women fighting female circumcision in “The Day I Will Never Forget”.

Hyppolite said she told her dubbers not to act, just to read clearly. But she insisted that they try to understand the movies, the cultural contexts, and the characters.

Translation required the same. Haitian Creole is an unusual language, with words predominantly derived from French, with a West African syntax. The vocabulary is small, with the specific meaning of words often dependant on context. And idioms are pervasive.

Because it was impossible to interpret much of the English diplomatic and technical language literally, she would instead focus on the feelings behind the words and what would make her neighbours understand those feelings.

And by most accounts the gap was successfully bridged from exotic, dialogue- and narration-driven films to a largely under-educated, un-movied audience.

To U.S. filmmaker David Belle, who co-founded and now runs the festival, the community’s isolation is not a barrier.

“Even though many of them had never really seen films before, there’s such a rich tradition of storytelling here that they know what a good narrative is,” said Belle. “They know what timing and delivery is, and I think what it comes down to is really where their interests lie. And clearly they are most interested in seeing films about themselves.”

In selecting foreign films, Belle has focused on those that deal with issues relevant to Haiti – problems such as poverty and racism, and cultural pleasures such as music and dance. Unlike so many Hollywood films, none of those in the festival portrayed material wealth as the norm. With that out of the way, viewers were able to draw thematic connections between the movies and their lives.

And Hyppolite said that each year the audience – now estimated in the tens of thousands – has become larger, more patient, and more participatory.

The screening of “An Inconvenient Truth” was part of a series of films that were followed by community discussions. For hours, panelists and the audience shared reactions to the film, discussing everything from deforestation to melting icecaps. Other films in the series were followed by lengthy, often heated talks about community development, violence against women, and AIDS.

After viewing the dubbed documentary “12 Disciples of Nelson Mandela”, a group of boys said they were moved by the film. Fifteen-year-old Junior Pierre said he was inspired by the narrative style. “When someone explains their life, it’s something extraordinary. I’d like to write about my life and my country. It’s empowering,” he said.

The film’s maker, Thomas Allen Harris, said he had been hoping for this reaction. Harris, a U.S. citizen who had made the film about his South African stepfather, was visiting Haiti for the first time. He called it “a blessing” that dubbing enabled his film to reach such a broad audience.

“To be quite honest, I had this awful idea,” Harris said of the dubbing. “I thought it was going to be totally an affront stylistically and aesthetically for me.”

“But as it turns out, they have it down. They had to understand the whole arc of the film, the transformation of the different characters, their lives, the cost of exile, and they had to actually feel it.”

Another filmmaker, Jorgen Leth of Denmark, who presented his documentary “News Scenes from America”, about New York before 9/11, said he too overcame an aversion to dubbing. “Against my nature I accept it,” he said. “I’ve made 42 films. I’ve been making films for 40 years. I’ve been to a lot of festivals, and I’ve never seen them dub the films. It’s a really impressive trait, and it made this festival really special, really a people’s film festival.”

Hyppolite had, for decades, thought about what she could bring to Haiti. “For the time I spent in the U.S., I kept wondering, ‘What is it that I can do to bring something back to this country that I love so much, to these people who I am part of?'” she said. “I had this movie going on in my head. I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.”

Since returning to Haiti 10 years ago, Hyppolite has tried giving her neighbours some of the small things they need, and which wealthier people in the U.S. take for granted, like body soap, toothpaste and bread. And now movies.

She said residents of the United States don’t realise how lucky they are to have so much access to books, films and the Internet. “The access to information is really, really [limited] here, and the film festival offers a worldwide trip in eight days.”