Haiti / 2016 / 88mins / Drama, Magical Realism / Haitian Creole, French and Japanese

Set in Haiti five years after the devastating 2010 earthquake, Guetty Felin's magical realist tale avoids the kinds of images of the disaster that saturated screens around the world. In his depiction of young Orphée's grief over the loss of his father beneath the rubble of decimated buildings (represented in ghostly images that float beneath the ocean's surface), Felin refuses to tell a story of victimhood. Instead, she gives the narrative back to the Haitian people, whose lives cannot be reduced headlines. And as her characters begin to heal, Felin suggests that the island will too.

Guetty Felin

Guetty Felin is an award-winning independent filmmaker, teacher, and film curator. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in New York, she holds an MFA from the university of Paris School of Cinema. Throughout her career, Felin has worked on factual and narrative films for European and American television. Her films explore haunting themes such as memory, exile, foreignness, and the unending search for home, while interconnecting our common global humanities. She produced and co-curated the critically-acclaimed Haiti on Screen in 2004 to celebrate Haiti’s bicentennial. She also helped to launch Haiti’s Film Festival Jakmèl in 2004. In 2007 she launched BelleMoon Productions, a U.S. based company that since has been the producing entity of all of her works. In 2014, the Women’s Film Institute honored her as one of the most vital figures in film, television and media in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her 2017 drama Ayiti Mon Amour, explores the intertwined lives of three people in Haiti five years after an earthquake. The film won the Best Feature Narrative Award at the 2017 Blackstar Film Festival. The film has travelled to over 40 festivals around the world and was Haiti's first ever entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Category for the 2018 Academy Awards. Learn More