Kidnapping Inc., Haiti’s Leading Industry

Heritage ranks Haiti #155 out of 184 countries on its Index of Economic Freedom rankings, deeming it “repressed.” Taxation and inflation are high, government regulation is not transparent, and property rights are infrequently protected. With little incentive for investment, domestic or international, illicit enterprises thrives. Ransom kidnappings are an especially dangerous business, for reasons that soon become clear in Bruno Mourral’s Kidnapping Inc., which opens today in Brooklyn.

This was supposed to be Doc’s last abduction, so you know what that means. Their latest target is Benjamin Perralt, Jr. (a.k.a. Ti Ben), the semi-estranged son of Perralt Sr., an elite politician running for President. They assume it is a straight ransom job, but it is really part of a bigger political power play. Regardless, they are not supposed to kill Ti Ben, but they do, accidentally.

Obviously, they are in serious hot water, so they ferry the dead body around Port-au-Prince, almost like Weekend at Bernie’s, trying to devise circumstances to explain Ti Ben’s death that would not appear to be their fault. Instead, they dig themselves into a deeper hole, kidnapping the Voltaires, a bickering and extremely-expecting couple, as part of a hair-brained, improvised plan.

Frankly, Kidnapping Inc sounds more farcical than it really is. The comedy is about as black as it gets, but the conditions behind-the-scenes were even more serious. Three crew members were kidnapped during the production and one member of both the cast and crew were fatally killed after shooting wrapped. No film needs that kind of authenticity.

Understandably, the screenplay credited to Mourral, Jasmuel Andri, and Gilbert Mirambeau Jr., expresses considerable anger. Sometimes, it comes out in questionable ways, particularly the constant, divisive association of lighter-skinned “mulattos” like Perralt, Sr. with wealth, privilege, and corruption.

ADIFF ’17: Kafou

The boss has three rules for the luckless losers he has hired to make a delivery. Never stop the car, never roll down the windows, and never, ever look in the trunk. However, this will not be a Haitian homage to Speed. The two knuckleheads barely travel ten blocks before they break all three rules. Of course, that leads to some huge problems, especially that last point, in Bruno Mourral’s Kafou (trailer here), which screens during this year’s African Diaspora International Film Festival in New York.

Doc needs money for his sick mother, so he quickly agreed when Zoe promised him work with the local kingpin, Captain Fritz Bama. Unfortunately, Doc did not realize how difficult the jerky Zoe would be to work with. At least Bama placed him nominally in charge, causing considerable resentment in Zoe. The night was already off to a bad start (don’t worry, surely no dogs were actually harmed in the making of Kafou, right?), before Zoe peeked in the trunk and recognized the kidnapping victim trussed up inside.

Kafou (a voodoo reference) is exactly the sort of darkly comical gangster-caper drama that always plays well at festivals. There is indeed all kinds of cynical laughs and one-blasted-thing-after-another suspense, but its betwixt-and-between running time makes it a tricky film to program. The fifty-minute mark basically represents a state of half-pregnancy, but it certainly never drags, so give ADIFF credit for taking the plunge.

Jasmuel Andri and Rolapthon Mercure are terrific as Doc and Zoe. They are totally convincing getting on each other’s nerves and worse, while still being quite amusing in a meathead kind of way. However, Manfred Marcelin still regularly upstages them as the flamboyantly villainous Bama.

Mourral in collaboration with cinematographers Lucas Gath and Clément Maillet definitely give the film an evocative noir-city-at-night vibe. In some ways, it harkens back to vintage Tarantino, but it also has an absurdist edge to it. Genre fans and Haitian expats should find it well-satisfying but length could be an issue for some patrons, since it plays as a discrete program on its own, so take that into consideration. Highly recommended, Kafou screens Saturday night (11/25) at Teachers College, Columbia, as part of the 2017 ADIFF.

Fatal Assistance: NGOs Gone Wild

When the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, many who of us worried our close Japanese friends and allies were not getting the same high level attention in Washington and international diplomatic circles as the 2010 earthquake that rocked Haiti. Ironically, Japan might be more fortunate in that respect. Leftist filmmaker Raoul Peck argues international aid efforts in Haiti have largely done more harm than good in Fatal Assistance (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

With mostly good intentions, the world rushed to aid quake-devastated Haiti. The Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC) was instituted with Bill Clinton and Haitian PM Jean-Max Bellerive installed as co-chairs. Right from the start, it acted like any other hydra-headed multi-national quasi governmental body.

Peck irrefutably establishes some of the charges in his wide ranging indictment. Without question, the various competing NGOs woefully underperformed in the debris removal process. They were so focused on grand rebuilding schemes, they had neither the expertise nor the donor interest in doing the very work necessary to make the rebuilding stage possible.  It is also pretty hard to defend the flood-prone temporary housing constructed (at not inconsiderable cost) in the temporary camps that became permanent new slums. Also, Peck gives rather short shrift to the effect of the UN’s pointless arms embargo, which left Bellerive unable to arm his new police recruits.

However, Peck does not connect the international conspiracy dots nearly as well as he thinks he does. Often, he shows various IHRC proceedings as if they were “ah-hah” moments, but only he can see the smoking gun. In fact, he does his best to ignore the widespread corruption that made the NGO sector legitimately leery of the Haitian government. It might be disappointing that Peck lets Haitian politicians off the hook so easy, but it is understandable, considering he happens to be one himself, having served as Minister of Culture under PM Rosny Smarth’s short-lived administration.

As much as Peck wants to focus on the international relief “industry,” questions regarding domestic corruption are highly pertinent. Recently, the Filipino expat community largely shunned government agencies in favor of organizations like the International Red Cross precisely because of similar concerns.  Still, it is hard to have much confidence in the IHRC, the OAS or any of the rest of the do-gooding alphabet soup based on the results Peck documents.

In fact, if anyone emerges as Fatal’s genuine bad guy, it is Bill Clinton, whom Peck explicitly accuses of using the tragedy as a disgusting ego-stroke.  According to Peck and frustrated aid workers, the Hot Springs native is far more concerned with preening at ribbon cutting ceremonies than actually resolving the IHRC’s internal divisions or doing any sort of work in general.

Peck will convince just about every viewer of his general thesis: international aid is often misallocated and counter-productive. However, his assorted sub-points do not always convince. Frankly, Fatal just as easily supports the sort of Public Choice Theory analysis developed by the late Nobel Lauriat James Buchanan, who argued government (and presumably extra-governmental NGO) bureaucrats are just as influenced by self-interest as anyone operating in the private sector. Fatal will engender pity for Haiti and contempt for Clinton, but Landon Van Soest’s Good Fortune remains a more thoughtful exploration of unintended consequences of first to third world aid programs. Sometimes quite revealing, but rather scattershot in its insight, Fatal Assistance is narrowly recommended for those interested in the politics of disaster relief when it opens this Friday (2/28) at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

Tribeca ’10: Moloch Tropical

The “Priest of the Slums” lives in a heavily reinforced citadel. He is not Aristide. He just happens to be a Haitian dictator restored to power by Bill Clinton. Jean de Dieu also seems to be going mad in Raoul Peck’s Moloch Tropical, which had a special screening to benefit Handicap International at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

To satisfy his vanity, de Dieu has planned a gala celebration to mark the anniversary of Haiti’s independence and his own ascension to power. The nature of his anniversary is highly controversial, since he refuses to count his years in exile against his duly elected term of office. Nearly the entire population disagrees with him, but the dictator only hears what he wishes to hear. Unfortunately, the developed world is largely skipping the shindig, including France whom he has antagonized with an unrealistic demand for colonial reparations. Hollywood is there in force though, with several big name stars playing in a didactic historical play written by his ex-mistress.

The President is clearly a monster. Past merely being out of touch, he is slowly sinking into a madness marked by a pronounced martyr complex. He believes all the exaggerations the leftist press once wrote about him and now tortures those who dissent from his rule. He desperately entreats the Clintons and the Kennedys to intercede on his behalf with the Bush administration, but they know a loser when they smell one.

Peck is a hardcore leftist filmmaker reportedly at work on a Karl Marx bio-picture, but he loses control of Moloch’s political implications—and the picture is much the better for it. The parallels between de Dieu and Jean-Bertrand Aristide are inescapable, as are the atrocities he commits in the name of the people. Even Hollywood activists take a skewering, as the African American actors marvel at the beauty of his palace, while willfully blinding themselves to the suffering of the Haitian people.

As an apparent attempt at ideological purity, Peck probably tries to draw a parallel between de Dieu and President George W. Bush by including occasional news footage from the Iraq War, but it is far from convincing, unless viewers are so dogmatically rigid, they need it in order to appreciate the film.

Indeed, the film itself is remarkably accomplished. Jean Luc Le Floch’s production design creates a presidential fortress worthy of a gothic horror movie and Eric Guichard’s cinematography viscerally evokes the burgeoning madness within its walls. As de Dieu, Zinedine Soualem brilliantly brings to life one of the worst kinds of monster: an ideological monster who is absolutely convinced in his own moral superiority, even while hassling the domestic servants with his pathetic advances. His steady slide into insanity becomes the logical extension of his character.

Visually striking and possibly more nuanced than Peck intended, Moloch is a richly intriguing film. An interesting choice for Tribeca’s benefit screening, it is film likely to inspire quite a bit of debate. Further information about Handicap International, which has been very active in Haiti in the wake of the recent hurricane, can be found here.