The man on the quayside

Haiti, in the early 1960s: From the balcony of her parents’ house, eight-year-old Sarah watches as her uncle is brutally abused by the paramilitary ‘Tontons Macoutes’. Shortly afterwards, Sarah’s parents flee Haiti; they hide the children at their grandmother’s house. Surrounded by daily terror, Sarah creates her own safe haven, which the fearsome local commander Janvier threatens to destroy at any moment. Thirty years later, Sarah looks back: on the day she cycled to the beach with her father’s pistol in her pocket, and on the man on the quay. (lf)

‘It is not the major events, nor the great political clamour, that interest Peck. He focuses on the small gestures of the protagonists in the sun-drenched and dusty village where his story is set. The child’s gaze – which here is above all the girl’s gaze out onto the street, out into the open, into the world just beyond the door – is at the same time the gaze that will change the child’s life, for out there, things are happening that she cannot and does not want to come to terms with so easily.” (Walter Ruggle, trigon-film)