| “Taut, well-balanced,
insightful...a probing look into Haiti's contentious modern
history.”
- New York Times
“Informative and very moving. An excellent
film about the recent political history of Haiti that
not only provides a rich, well-detailed context for understanding
the rise and fall of Aristide but also offers a provocative
meditation of the role of outside (especially American)
forces and interests in his tumultuous career.”
- Richard Peña, Film Society of Lincoln
Center
Only an hour south of Miami, the elected president of the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, Jean Bertrand Aristide, has twice been forced from office with the complicity of the international community. An intelligent and engrossing examination of the oft-suppressed story of the 2004 coup d'etat in Haiti, Rossier's film investigates the events that led to the second violent expulsion of Aristide from Haiti, and reveals the tangled web of hope, deceit, and political violence that has brought the world's first black republic to its knees.
An in-depth interview with Aristide (now in exile in South Africa) is juxtaposed with the views of a wide range of supporters and critics, including US Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega. A complex historical truth emerges as international interests concerned with suppressing popular democracy and ending Aristide's reforms co-mingle with embargos, debt service (for loans Haiti never received), systemic violence and human rights violations that erupted as the situation worsened.
Read the article
about Aristide that ran in January 29 issue of The
New York Times.
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