Good night

I’m just getting back from the first night of the film festival, and I’m really happy. The two films were really interesting. The first was a short documentary about two women working as rockbreakers. Seriously. Their job —usually done by men in Haiti— is to wake up early in the morning, go down to a site with lots of rocks (not really a quarry in the traditional sense), put rocks in a large bucket, carry it (on their heads) up a steep hill, dump it out, and break the rocks into smaller rocks to be used as cobblestone or gravel. For this work, they make just under US$10 a day, which is about twice the minimum wage in Haiti. Of course, one of the women was the sole wage earner for her 9 children and 11 grandchildren. An interesting film, quite powerful if you know nothing about Haiti, but for those of us who’ve studied it, it was a bit lacking in artfulness. It was more like an extended news report than an interesting documentary. The second film was a feature-length documentary profiling 6 Haitian women successively, called 6 Exceptional Women. Each one was no younger than 80, and they all did something important for Haiti or for their communities. 5 of them led bourgeois, upper-class lives: a classical pianist (80), a dance instructor (91), a singer (83), an author (80), and a political activist (85). There was also a midwife, who was 105. And none of them were retired! They were really incredible women, and we got to know a lot about them, their families, and their lives (including their love lives— one woman talked about how she could only have sex with someone around 40, and the 105-year old woman grabbed her husband indelicately and said things that even *I *found filthy). So it was particularly hard to find out at the end of the film that the last woman profiled, the activist, died the afternoon of the premiere, and the husband of the midwife had died just before that. One of the audience members, during the question and answer period that followed the film, complained that the women shown were mostly bourgeois, and didn’t reflect the ‘real Haiti’, to which the director replied 1) that he had done plenty of other films dealing with the subjects that the audience member was talking about, including the rockbreakers; and 2) that there is more than one Haitian way of life, just like the Americans, the French, and the French Guianese all have different classes of people within their country. But beyond the films, it was a great night professionally. Thanks to Dominique, I got to meet several people who could help me with my project, including a few who wanted to be interviewed and with whom I exchanged phone numbers. I also met someone from the Haitian consulate, who invited me to visit the Consulate this week to talk about my project, so I think one day this week I’ll head over to see them and maybe even try to secure a couple rooms to do the interviews in. I also met filmmakers and other important Haitians, including a couple who knew my dissertation adviser. So all in all, a very good night.