Haitian Film Competes for the Oscar

The production portraits a post-earthquake nation that cries its more than 220.000 dead, but rises from the rubble

The incipient Haitian film industry began to emerge, after the announcement today of the first entry of this Caribbean nation to the Oscars, with the film ”Ayiti Mon Amour”, by director Guetty Felin.

The production exposes the portrait of a post-earthquake nation that cries its more than 220.000 dead, but rises from the rubble. It is nominated in the category of best foreign film.

Felin, is a filmmaker born in Haiti, and raised between the Caribbean nation and New York, traveled to Port-au-Prince on an emergency plane 10 days after the disaster of 2010, and tried to remember in the film each of the scenes encountered when disembarking, ‘Images that will stay with me throughout the practice of my film career,’ the author stated.

Seven years later, ‘Ayiti Mon Amour’ marks not only the emergence of a new distinctive voice in Haitian cinema, but also a milestone in the country’s cultural recovery, as the first narrative film filmed locally and directed by a woman.

Taking advantage of her previous work, Felin infuses the realities of today’s Haiti, the shortage of power and water, the threats of climate change, with a lyricism that plays its mystical side.