Haiti's First International Film Festival Held Outdoors

One night in Jacmel, Haiti, 4,000 people gathered along the waterfront, sat down, and spent three hours watching a giant outdoor movie screen flicker before them, transporting them into other lives and faraway places. Haiti was in crisis -- murderous gangs in the capital, the economy in shreds -- but in this peaceful seaside city, a cultural awakening was under way.

The Jacmel International Film Festival ran July 9--16, 2004 with films screened three times daily in makeshift venues and nightly on an 18-by-25-foot screen on the city's wharf. Every screening was free and, without exception, packed. The festival was conceived by David Belle, an American filmmaker who had fallen in love with Haiti, and Patrick Boucard, a Jacmel native who had returned from the United States to open an arts center by the sea.

“Fifty percent of Haitians are illiterate; few can afford televisions, and even fewer can afford the luxury of a movie,” Belle noted. The pair scraped together $120,000, gathered 85 Haitian documentaries, shorts, and feature films, and convinced studios including HBO, DreamWorks, and Lions Gate to lend major releases for free -- among them Hotel Rwanda and The Motorcycle Diaries. A local theater group dubbed a dozen films into Creole.

“We cannot travel; we don't have the passports or money or visas to get to those places,” said Fenton Stevenson, 27, a festivalgoer from Jacmel. “This way, these places come to us.”

“This is very new for Haiti, and I am surprised they had the guts to do it,” said Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, who hosted a workshop. “It's like a giant public school. It's another kind of food.”