Haiti / 2014 / 130mins / Drama / French and Haitian Creole

When their Port-au-Prince villa is severely damaged in the devastating 2010 earthquake, a wealthy couple must renovate the house immediately or have it demolished. In order to bear the costs, the couple moves into the former servants’ shed and rents out the only remaining habitable floor to an employee of a French aid organization. But the young man is accompanied by Andrémise, a 17-year-old Haitian who wants to change her name to Jennifer to more easily befriend foreigners.

In this follow-up to his 2013 documentary Assistance Mortelle, Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) returns to the earthquake in Haiti, this time through a feature film lens. Inspired by Pasolini’s 1968 classic Teorema, about the disintegration of relationships within a family after a guest’s arrival, Peck presents an intense and intimate drama about social contradictions, asking fundamental questions about responsibility and justice in the face of disaster.

Raoul Peck

Born 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Peck lived for a time in Zaire and worked as a journalist and photographer. He later graduated from the Berlin Film Academy in 1988, made a dozen short and features from his Velvet Productions, based in France and Germany, and served until recently as the Minister of Culture of Haiti. A book of screenplays and images from four of Peck's major features and documentary films, called Stolen Images, was published in February 2012 by Seven Stories Press. He has been Chairman of La Fémis, the French state film school, since January 2010. In 2012, he was named as a member of the Jury for the Main Competition at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. He won the Best Documentary prize at the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival in 2013 for Fatal Assistance. His documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), about the life of James Baldwin and race relations in the United States, was nominated for an Oscar in January 2017. Learn More