Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in the U.S., award-winning filmmaker Guetty Felin says she came of age cinematically while completing graduate studies in Paris, where she was an associate producer for the series "Écrire Contre L'oubli" (Write Against Forgetting) which aired in commemoration of Amnesty International's 30th anniversary. She has since added other roles to her filmmaking credentials, including distributor, marketing/outreach director, screenplay reader, voiceover narrator, curator and teacher. In 2008 she, filmmaker husband Hervé Cohen, and their two sons travelled America to make Closer to the Dream, "an engaging and particularly well-crafted documentary" according to Le Monde. In Closer to the Dream they followed the grassroots movement and primary campaign which resulted in the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States.
"As a child of immigrants," says Guetty Felin, "I'm a post-modern gypsy, a hybrid, and my trajectory and cultural identity pretty much pervades my sensibility as a filmmaker. Cinema is how I engage the world around me, how I explore haunting themes such as memory, exile, foreignness, and the unending search for home." The film she is showcasing at CaribbeanTales 2012 is yet another demonstration of this mindset. Filmed in the aftermath of the earthquake which devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010, Broken Stones earned an award at the Belize International Film Festival and, given the haunting subject matter, it looks poised to repeat this feat elsewhere.
With its erected columns and open air, the ruins of the cathedral resemble an ampitheatre where the daily realities of Haitian life unfold. Amidst the vestiges of what was once the most beautiful cathedral in the entire Caribbean, children play, women pray, some carry pails and jugs of water from the nearby tap, a white man dressed in black-hooded priest garb appears out of nowhere, followed by a cameraman, foreign missionaries snap pictures as they pray for lost souls in a house of worship that does not belong to them, men and women roam almost aimlessly in this post-apocalyptic setting ... Beautifully photographed, mixing cinema vérité and observational documentary style, this well-crafted poetic film is personal and yet endearingly political. Haiti, as it has rarely been shown.
Guetty Felin is participating in the 2012 CaribbeanTales Incubator Program and Broken Stones will be screened at 6PM on September 12, 2012, in Harbourfront Centre's Studio Theatre. Tickets can be purchased here and don't forget to follow CaribbeanTales on Twitter and Facebook.
jph
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