Emerging film cultures: Spotlight on post-disaster Haiti

Alignment and aim of Jacmèl’s film school

‘Jollywood’ is the term applied to the recent film production derived from the Ciné Institute, the only film school in the French-speaking West Indies. It is situated in Jacmèl, a city of 40,000 inhabitants and capital of the South-East Department. To celebrate Haiti’s independence bicentennial in 2004, the city hosted the Film Festival Jacmèl and provided various workshops and training sessions in film production for local young people. The unexpected great interest in this initiative led to foundation of the film school in 2008, which aimed at creating a local film industry.

The Ciné Institute provides a two-year college education with free tuition; school capacity permits the admission of only 25 to 35 students per year. Therefore, the film school has identified several prerequisites as part of the admission process. For instance, candidates must be 20 to 35 years old and high school graduates. In addition, prospective students are required to present a record of their work experience in the cultural sector and describe their goals in filmmaking. The training division, Ciné Lekol (‘film school’ in Haitian Creole), is oriented toward acquiring film and television production skills in documentary, narrative, advertising, film and music video techniques. ³ In late June 2015, the Ciné Institute counted approximately 150 graduates who had successfully been trained in all available film formats in the curriculum.

Considering that the ultimate aim of the film school is to establish a self-sustaining local film market in Haiti with local and global distribution and reception, the film school’s curriculum is not especially oriented toward training that meets higher aesthetical standards and content-based theoretical reflections. For this reason, since its inception the programme has focused on making use of local resources based on a lowest-budget and fast-track production model. For example, one major project in the first year of the curriculum is to produce a short film with ‘dix gourdes’ (equivalent to 25 cents in Haitian currency). Despite the limited means of production, some such films gain international recognition, such as Mais toi ma fleur, directed by former Ciné Institute student Frèro Pierre, which was shot in one day and on a 10-cent budget. The example of a 10-gourde film drastically illustrates to what extent the training model is a highly challenging one in the sense that it has to optimally respond to the general lack of access to resources in Jacmèl.

This aspect gives rise to reflection on the economic viability of local film cultures that are still at their respective beginnings while international intervention strategies tend to dominate the school. For instance, both the training and ongoing funding structure of the Ciné Institute rely mainly on US- and Canada-based initiatives. In addition, the actual corpus of staff represented in all training sectors are mostly non-Haitian professionals (mainly from the United States, France and Canada), and local staff members are not adequately represented nor do they occupy top positions at the film school. In recent discussions, the director of the film school, David Belle acknowledged the lack of representation of local staff (Belle, 2015). Another point relates to the fact that a distribution industry has not yet been sufficiently established. Graduates of the two-year course have not been able to create an economically viable film industry, nor has the graduate programme sufficiently responded/evolved to establish one. As a matter of fact, facilitating distribution skills and practice would be the major prerequisite needed to dovetail with the school’s ultimate aim of establishing a sustainable film industry on a local scale. The multiple challenges in the present and future cinematic landscape become most palpable during the transition from being a student in training at the film school to an aspiring professional in the emerging film industry. Even though four cohorts of students had graduated by 2015, a noteworthy lack of distribution models and exhibition venues persists. As a consequence of this shortage, new admissions to the film school halted in 2015. At the time of writing, the film school was focused on further training for current students and graduates aimed at assisting young filmmakers in creating distribution models for film productions. The outcome of the recent halt in admissions remains to be seen.

Production models and exhibition networks

In this section, I argue that Haiti’s virtually non-existent film historiography, as well as the almost complete absence of local distribution and reception models, can be considered to actually present a viable, although highly challenging, ground for emerging film cultures of the recently established film school. In order to support this claim, it is necessary to situate the context of Haiti’s film and media culture on both national and international scales, including their history, scholarly research, access, exhibition networks, audiences and reception, as well as respective influences on the locally emerging film market.

There are currently two main types of cinema that act as pre-production and outreach models for the film school. First, the cinema of the diaspora communities figures as a prominent influence for emerging filmmakers, even though they are rarely accessible to a larger audience in Haiti in terms of regular film releases. Included here are certain transnational independent feature film and documentary co-productions with the United States, France and Canada by filmmakers who reside outside the country, such as Guétty Felin and Laurence Magloire. Apart from internationally acclaimed film director Raoul Peck and Haitian film pioneer Arnold Antonin, a broader audience outside the country does not necessarily know current films made in Haiti. The second influence shaping Haiti’s film cultures are B movies and TV shows. These kinds of films are gaining large audiences in Haiti, as they validate local popular cultures. Imported telenovelas, mainly filmed in Latin American countries (e.g. Venezuela), are shaping the aesthetic and narrative practices of fast-track feature productions. Included here are productions such as Ricard Sénécal’s Baricad (released in 2001) that had both a nationwide outreach and transnational reception in Haiti’s diasporic communities in places such as Miami, Boston, New York City and Montreal. As a considerable number of filmmakers (mostly film school graduates) have explicitly pointed out, models of already existing productions that follow the same grammar, such as Baricad or the more recent production Ré-Incarnation, serve as major referents for future substantial productions of low-cost media cultures. The film school’s first feature film Ré-Incarnation was released in 2015 and was entirely produced and directed by former Ciné Institute students Frèro Pierre and Donald Charles, the latter now being a current staff member of the film school.

Nevertheless, a considerable obstacle for these emerging film productions to obtain extensive visibility is the paucity of screening venues in Haiti. There is currently only one dedicated cinema-screening hall functioning in the entire country, in Cap-Haïtien, in the northern part of the country, screening mainly foreign productions (Pierre, 2015). The re-opening of the Ciné Triomphe in Port-au-Prince has been postponed many times. It was reopened in June 2015 (Speros, 2015) but still does not provide screenings on a regular basis. Most film-viewing venues are renovated dance halls and clubs that show predominantly US (mainstream) films in dubbed French versions. Screenings of films made by resident Haitians take place mostly in hotels located in Port-au-Prince and other large cities, but these screenings are not affordable for most Haitians due to high admission fees (up to 2,000 gourdes, equivalent to more than US $30). In addition, there is no nationwide film subsidy programme or film archive in existence. However, several local and mostly mobile and/or pop-up screenings organized via grassroots networks manage to partially compensate for inadequate conventional film exhibition networks. Frequently, these exhibitions also take place in non-urban venues, such as public spaces (main squares in smaller cities or travelling cinema in rural areas), and attract a local audience. In these cases, the circulation of films through informally staged exhibition channels tends to reach a more diverse audience and creates a greater plurality of exhibition venues. This produces and performs cultures of both dominant and marginal agents, as it makes possible processes of hybridization. This border crossing between established and emerging exhibition/reception networks is a form of ‘minor transnationalism’ (Lionnet and Shih, 2005: 5). Cultural expression becomes at this point a visible space of informal exchange and participation of more and less artistically informed protagonists such as filmmakers and a general audience that does not have great exposure to these exposed film cultures on a regular basis.

All of the abovementioned factors effectively impede establishing a national marketplace. The transnational exhibition of locally created films primarily takes place in international film festival circuits with a strong thematic and geographical showcase for African cinema, diasporic African cinema or Caribbean cinema. Popular venues in North America are black film festivals and African film festivals, such as the Haiti Film Fest in New York City, Caribbean Tales and the Toronto Black Film Festival in Toronto, and the Montreal International Black Film Festival in Montreal, the latter two of which were launched and directed by Fabienne Colas, also known as an acclaimed actress in Haiti’s popular cinema (e.g. Ricard Sénécal’s Barikad, 2001). For instance, the most recent (2015) Montreal International Black Film Festival, formerly called the Montreal Haitian Film Festival, dedicated an evening slot to screening films by Ciné Institute graduates: Alexandrine Benjamin, André-Deave Oxance Décime, Wood-Jerry Gabriel and Keziah Jean, all of whom figured in multiple roles, such as producer, director, artistic director, screenwriter and post-producer. This showcase, entitled Jollywood, La Nouvelle Vague du Cinéma Haïtien / A New Wave of Haitian Cinema), spotlighted the aspiring professionals’ multiple skills, which certainly served to promote the multidirectional orientation of the film school. Regarding transnational and guerrilla migrant cinemas, Grassilli emphasizes that filmmakers are likewise (involuntarily) obliged to manage the balancing act of performing multiple functions and personally investing in their films (Grassilli, 2008: 1244). Therefore, being involved in multiple professional functions is also a palpable indicator that upcoming filmmakers are facing the drawbacks of working in a film industry that is still in its early stages. The Jollywood event was programmed in the section titled Cinéma sans Frontières / Cinema without Borders (FIFBM, 2015: 26) and reached a large festival audience of mainly diasporic communities of Haiti. These films only rarely receive regular screenings in theatres.

Haiti’s virtually absent exhibition networks parallel its film historiography. Although Haiti came into contact with cinema at almost the same time as other countries around the world, ⁴ the nation’s film cultures to date have been peripheral and sporadic. Weakness of the nation-state and long-standing income and wealth inequities are major determinants of Haiti’s historical and socio-economic conditions. From the beginning, decades of occupation, colonialism and dictatorship, as well as the economic and tectonic turmoil in the recent past, have strongly regulated or made almost impossible Haiti’s film production. ⁵ The socio-economic background of students and graduates of the film school mostly mirrors Haiti’s complex situation. Indeed, students from non-urban areas and certain regions face even greater challenges in having access to resources. It can be stated that, on the one hand, an almost non-existent film historiography overshadowed by global influences on local visual cultures shapes Haiti’s production models. On the other hand, the lack of local screening venues and exhibition networks reinforces a transnational outreach. Thus, the local prolificacy and global orientation of Haiti’s emerging film cultures demonstrate that both aspects are influenced by and intervene in the broader contexts of geo-political debates in global cinema.

Translocal film cultures: their aims and challenges

A major characteristic of both influences on Haiti’s film cultures – the cinemas of diasporas as well as imported telenovelas – is the search for the local as a form of cultural and socio-economic capital. The hybrid encounter between local digital on-site media production and transnational co-productions manifests their shared search for Haiti’s specificity as both the site of production and the context for their respective narratives. The idea of establishing a local film market narrating local stories, using local and mostly already existing settings, is a driving factor for most of the filmmakers, as my ethnographic research revealed. Several of the international filmmakers involved at the time of the film school’s foundation have actively supported this intention. Independent filmmakers such as Guétty Félin and Michelange Quay continue to be involved in the ongoing training offered at the film school by giving master classes and workshops. As interviews and group discussions with young filmmakers have shown, these independent established (diasporic) filmmakers serve as major role models for young people with regards to their diverse styles of production, storytelling and outreach to an international audience (Posch, 2017).

The Ciné Institute’s manifesto, entitled Manifes Jollywood, aims at understanding cinema’s role in Haiti and at ‘establishing catalysts for film practices’ (MacKenzie, 2014: 2) outside dominant narrative paradigms. Thus, it provides a set of regulations for locally created productions in terms of making use of local settings and resources, vis-à-vis filming, scriptwriting and guidelines for community-based cast and crew members (Posch, 2015). Focusing strongly on the creation of local images relies on the assertion of the local as being exceptional since Haiti has not been extensively covered in locally produced images to date. Hence, bringing to the fore local images also points to a potential to be culturally and economically exploited, since at the same time the instrumentalization of the local generates a marketable idea for a transnational audience. Labelling the local not only encourages on-site film production, it also advances a way of capitalizing on a key component that is currently marketable in transnational distribution. In these ways, the recent focus on the local also runs parallel to increasing attention in scholarship to the drawbacks of globalization. This points to how, among other things, promoting the return to the local runs the risk of being exploited as a commodifying practice, where marginality and a lack of visibility are essentialized and become products to sell.

From a transcolonial standpoint, the film school’s putative aim of adapting to and creating out of a local setting intrinsically creates a double bind. The economic support of representatives of an internationally renowned film and media market had a determining influence on the founding of and fundraising for the Ciné Institute, which ultimately reinforces a Global North versus Global South dialectic of centre versus periphery or centre versus margin-oriented practices. Most organizations and individuals providing funding promote and implement development-oriented actions, thereby shaping the educational agenda of the film school in Haiti. The two years of film school training are based on a European-American curriculum in terms of conceptual and aesthetic references (such as the selection of an almost exclusively internationally acclaimed film corpus as a visual examination for students). The access to funds, albeit with a humanitarian agenda, make being connected to the institute (temporarily) indispensable and thereby impedes the growth of self-sustaining film production by the young generation of filmmakers. An example of this dynamic is Keziah Jean’s recent engagement as a photographer and editor for a US-based non-governmental organization (founded by Hollywood actor Sean Penn), which is income-producing for one, but which does not enable her to generate a local, self-sustaining film production output for the other. The film school attempts to meet the filmmaker’s demands by creating a self-sustaining and sustainable film industry that reaches out to local and transnational audiences. However, its model has been criticized by (local and international) professionals in the larger cultural sector for not being locally representative in terms of its internal structure (such as proportional representation of local staff members in the training and production sections).

An (emerging) industry that creates new spaces of popular cultural expressions and reflections constitutes the opposite of what Ramon Lobato defines as a home-grown video industry (e.g. Nollywood), which consists of informal creative industries that are entirely generated without any backing from state, international or non-governmental organization (NGO) structures (Lobato, 2010: 338). The most prevalent cinema cultures to be produced in Haiti – transnational independent productions and the appropriation of popular cultures as low-cost productions – interact with another emerging type of cinema. This type consists of mostly NGO-(re)sourced film productions that predominantly serve an international humanitarian marketing purpose (Pierre-Louis, 2011), such as the ones produced by the Ciné Services division of the film school in Jacmèl. This division is an additional branch that was created as a follow-up to the film school’s pivotal initiative. Its purpose is to create short-term engagements (such as contracts and film projects) for graduates who then collaborate with and are trained by internationally based filmmakers. The division serves as a platform for commissioned productions and its outputs are mostly NGO documentaries and advertising productions. Haiti’s emerging film production aims to be entirely home-grown and independent, yet NGO-(re)sourced film projects run counter to those aims as they tend to have an ideologically marketable outreach for an international audience. On the downside, Haiti’s dependence on and post-disaster (re-)engagement with NGO-based initiatives engender increasing controversy, as the film school’s geo-political incentive results in a double-edged range of film production. The primary focus of international press releases for the film school, for instance, are fundraising campaigns by US and Canadian celebrities, such as Paul Haggis, Ben Stiller and Sean Penn (Artists for Peace and Justice, 2013), whose initiatives can be further described as ‘celebrity humanitarianism’ (Richey, 2016).

International media and local agency in post-disaster Haiti

The distinct divide between the Global North versus the Global South has recently been made even more apparent by the images issuing from the unequal media coverage of post-disaster Haiti. On 12 January 2010, an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 on the Richter scale struck Haiti. In the aftermath of the earthquake, Haiti was the centre of attention for international (mass) media coverage; meanwhile horizontal, local image production seemed to fade from the spotlight. The post-disaster media coverage marginalized Haiti’s cultural presence on a global scale and therefore (re)inscribed it in an anachronistic spatio-temporality (Shohat and Stam, 2000: 391). This marginalization has an effect on both real and imagined local and diasporic spaces and geographies (Jackson, 2011: 8). In almost all of my interviews, local and transnational filmmakers, as well as cultural professionals on the ground, acknowledged both short-term and long-term post-disaster impacts and marginalization with regard to cultural production, even without being explicitly asked about the post-earthquake effects.

The international media representation of post-earthquake Haiti exemplified ongoing US control of the nation’s political economy in the way coverage predominantly expressed transnational interests and international policies rather than national and regional concerns. This situation illustrates the unevenly distributed economic capital and the (un)availability of goods in Haiti versus the United States with regard to (natural) disaster preparation and management. An unequal distribution of media coverage was reconfirmed once more during Hurricane Matthew, a Category 4 storm that hit Haiti in October 2016 and wreaked havoc in southern Haiti. The devastating (post-)disaster effects in Haiti were barely mentioned in international print and social media, whereas the potential danger of Hurricane Matthew hitting the south-eastern US coast in Florida was extensively covered. In this regard, the following tweet is most pertinent: ‘So great to have Haitians on the ground posting pictures. Or else, we’d only have pix of pigs and trash from US/West press #MatthewHaiti’ (4 October 2016).

The international media coverage in post-disaster Haiti had a major impact on both the orientation and output of the film school. The training model was created first and foremost for students who do not necessarily have access to an educational model outside Haiti due to the lack of economic means. In post-disaster Haiti, international humanitarian logistics limits capabilities for mobility while simultaneously producing disconnections within urban areas and more generally within the entire island, resulting in what Sheller calls ‘the islanding effect’ (Sheller, 2013: 194). As access to communication systems and information technology was temporarily almost completely shut down when the earthquake hit Haiti, and the island was therefore disconnected from international media outputs, several students of the Ciné Institute were able to provide essential visual data on the ground. Sheller’s claim was certainly true in the case of Haiti’s post-disaster condition, although emerging filmmakers in Haiti positioned themselves one step ahead of being reproduced by international humanitarian logistics as (disconnected) subjects with limited rights to mobility (Sheller, 2013: 187, 199) due to the earthquake. Several interviewees, such as Keziah Jean, Pierre-Lucson Bellegarde and David Charles, confirmed their difficulty in being able to access methods for outreach/external communication, such as available technology right after the earthquake; despite this they were able to utilize the intact technical equipment on location and to provide almost exclusive, first-hand local footage as visual material for international media stations such as CNN and Agence France-Press (AFP).

In this way, my fieldwork demonstrates that the politics ⁶ and policies of local and international media distribution on and in so-called minor, peripheral Caribbean spheres gave rise to various extemporary film and media practices, such as audiovisual coverage in camp settings right after the displacements in post-earthquake Haiti, that shaped new outputs in local media. Therefore, these practices display a hybrid momentum of (political) agency through (civic) visual engagement on a local scale. ⁷ Since Haiti acted as a ‘multirelational site’ ⁸ (Bongie, 1998: 143) of real and imagined hybridity (Brah and Coombes, 2010), discourses of visual and cultural hybridity functioned as effective strategies in (de-)constructing and (re-)configuring transnational imaginaries of local settings. This hybrid encounter demonstrates what Puri calls the ‘move[s] between the space of political representation and the space of aesthetic representation’ (2004: 1–2). As Haiti’s post-disaster state of being ‘produced as incomprehensible by the media’ (Fischer, 2010) was (at least partly) resisted, the emerging filmmakers created a counterpart to the predominant international humanitarian media representation. In such a way, the filmmakers were trying to respond to the ‘crisis of representing Haiti and the vacillating flow between its visibility and invisibility’ (Clitandre, 2011: 147) in post-disaster media coverage at that time by critically and visually engaging with the(ir) lived realities after the apocalyptic event (Munro, 2015).

Eventually, these emerging structures of local productivity, transnational failures and global mobility constitute a mapping of the (after)life of media that goes beyond the distinct space of cinema, as it equally comprises social, cultural and geo-critical conditions (Stern, 2010: 189). A considerable challenge in achieving adequate measures for a functioning informal film production system in general is the disregard of failures, discontinuities and messiness inherent in technologies and infrastructural connections. All of these are too easily and randomly attributed as being a simple reflection of national poverty, as became evident in international post-disaster narratives. International media coverage justifies multiple developmental-oriented measures, such as intervening in local film production, whereas the reality of infrastructural connections and their failures and lacks are actually ‘inherent in the functioning (and the threat of collapse) of all technological systems’ (Larkin, 2004: 292). A potentially viable vector for Haiti’s film cultures in the Caribbean to become self-sustaining could be through an alternative model of media power, which, as Miller explores with regard to Nollywood, ‘raises questions not only about what constitutes African [Caribbean] cinema but also about the limitations of models that fail to recognize the regional power and influence of locally produced popular forms’ (Miller, 2010: 143). Hence, further establishing a shadow film economy in Haiti would serve large, dispersed audiences without recourse to the established institutions of film commerce such as NGO-(re)sourced film productions. Likewise, transregional grassroots networks organize informally while equally being efficient and extensive in their reach (Lobato, 2012: 5).

One major imperative in order for Jacmèl’s emerging film production to be able to take root sustainably is to produce circuits that distribute these films on a local and global scale. This process would comprise initiatives other than funding systems exclusively based on development resources, since a significant cause of the ‘First World-ism’ (Agathangelou and Turcotte, 2010) agenda resides in a film funding interest that tends to consider ‘development’ and ‘culture’ as synonymous (Dovey, 2015: 13). In brief, too little focus is placed on ‘culture’ as a place-specific economic activity (Wang, 2004: 11–12), as can be seen in the transnational exhibition policy of locally made film productions. The emergence and consolidation of upcoming film cultures in the Global South have led to an increasing number of centres where ‘minority cultures are part of our transnational moment, not a reified or segregated pocket of cultures and mores waiting to be selectively incorporated into what qualifies as global or transnational by the powers that be’ (Lionnet and Shih, 2005: 7–8). In this regard, a recurrent theme within recent scholarship is, as Lobato states, ‘the need for developing nations and regions to effectively leverage their cultural assets and integrate them into global economic networks, thus providing new sources of revenue, employment and growth’ (2010: 338). This becomes especially pertinent in post-earthquake and post-hurricane Haiti, where new modes of international investment are often inscrutable in their management and policies. They become most notable in the shadow side of economic transactions, referring to a range of proceeds produced outside of the official, available and authorized spaces of the economy, such as local grassroots initiatives.

A recent body of research on repositioning cultural production that is located in minor spaces is very useful vis-à-vis grounding not only the anachronism of Haiti’s film history but also its ambiguous spatio-temporality during natural disaster conditions. The transmission and reception of translocal images worldwide in the aftermath of the earthquake enforced inter-regional networks and ultimately had a great impact on how these images shaped digital cultures and reinforced popular culture on a transnational level. In the case of Haiti, unpacking the history and elaborating theories on the spatial ordering of film cultures between translocal and transnational encounters requires negotiation and overlapping of existing concepts. As for now, film and media production resulting from Haiti’s socio-political, cultural, historical and economic context reflects the politics of global culture and development in terms of inequality between the Global North and Global South.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that a hybrid encounter of transnational, diasporic, humanitarian and neocolonial components has strongly influenced the emergence of Haiti’s local film cultures. Haiti’s circular production, exhibition and distribution model is ambitious yet controversial from the perspective of its spatial ordering, which has been analysed along various lines. First, since Haiti’s film history is under-represented in scholarly research, translocal image production intersects with a diasporic, transnational film market (independent cinema and popular cultures) insofar as it shapes its conceptual alignment in terms of approaches, aesthetics, languages and grammars. Second, the local filmmakers’ desire to establish a self-sustaining film market further stimulates the emergence of modes of production. However, prevailing neocolonial impulses intensified in the aftermath of natural disasters and (re)configured the politics of local film production. I have outlined the ongoing structural mutations in the current media landscape in Haiti resulting from post-disaster effects and what it means for a young generation of filmmakers to socially, economically and artistically take ground in Haiti’s historically and socio-economically marginalized media production spaces. The analysis of the somewhat unpredictable movements of films through production, distribution circuits and reception highlighted some of the contradictions embodied in the recently established film school in Jacmèl. As this case study has shown, the film school continues to rely on international humanitarian funding initiatives, as local resources are not yet sufficient. In the end, the aim of potentially making a local, rather than a global, film market viable, is only partly met, as it interfaces with exhibition networks that operate almost exclusively outside of Haiti. This circumstance complicates the possibility of a distribution infrastructure in the local context that is both economically and culturally viable.

This article has analysed how the film school’s spatialized practices of translocal production and transnational exhibition and distribution are influenced by and intervene in the broader context of geo-political debates in global cinema. I have argued that the effects of globalization simultaneously constitute a homogenizing and a differentiating process. I have pointed out key similarities, differences and challenges in how film cultures are being produced, and how they circulate across various sites and socio-economic contexts, in order to illustrate possible narratives of both hegemonic and resistant film cultures. In this case, translocal narratives end up being distributed for a global audience due to a lack of a local distribution infrastructure, while the transnational circulation is assumed to have a local, rather than a global, benefit, both culturally and economically. Post-disaster narratives were integrated in this context insofar as local, regional film production from cultural, geographical and socio-economic niches became relevant for international distribution after the earthquake. This recent film production might act both as a counterbalance to unequal distribution policies and offer a potential of counter-geographies that enable (re)shapings of porous and/or decomposing geo-political spaces in the near future. This work ultimately initiates a lively debate about informal industries and cultural policies in Haiti that considers the extent to which Haiti’s emerging film and media cultures contribute to new formations of counter-geographies in global media studies.