Haitian Corner

“Raoul Peck’s debut film Haitian Corner laid the foundations for his career as a political filmmaker. The film is a collective portrait of Haitian identity in exile, centred on the ‘Haitian Corner’ bookshop in New York; this is where exiles from the Duvalier regime gather, and their daily lives set the rhythm of the film. Among them is Joseph Bossuet, a poet who had been imprisoned in Haiti for seven years and tortured by the paramilitary secret police. When he spots one of his torturers in New York one day, Joseph is plunged into a maelstrom of individual and collective traumas.” (Anthology Film Archives)

‘I didn’t have a real role model for the kind of film I wanted to make – a film that depicted the world I saw around me … All I knew was the mainstream cinema of the time. There was no Spike Lee yet, no John Singleton. There were hardly any Black actors and actresses either, and if there were, it was only in stereotypical roles. So I felt I had to unleash our own cinema, to dream it up from nothing.” (Raoul Peck, in: Stolen Images)