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GHOSTS OF CITÉ SOLEIL
Directed by: Asger Leth.
Produced by: Mikael Chr. Rieks, Tomas Radoor & Seth Kanegis.
Photographed by: Milos Loncarevic, Frederik Jacobi & Leth.
Edited by: Adam Nielsen.
Music by: Wyclef Jean & Jerry “Wonda” Duplessis.
Released by: Think Film.
Language: English, Haitian Creole & French with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: Denmark/USA. 85 min. Not Rated.

You don’t need to read novels or watch science fiction to see post-apocalyptic nihilism. It is just a two hour flight from Miami to Haiti. From the air, the island’s natural beauty enchants, but in the sprawling, teeming slum of Cité Soleil, outside the capital of Port au Prince, there are no resources, no food, no clean water, no jobs, and no hope – just guns and a bristling attitude of death before dishonor, manipulated by those who seem to want power for power’s sake.

Danish director Asger Leth and his Serbian co-director/cinematographer Milos Loncarevic took cameras into Haiti in 2004 amidst the chaos before the second coup d’état against elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Central to the film is the accusation that, in addition to his populist message for the desperately poverty-stricken residents, Aristide supplied the guns that gang leaders, feared as chimères or ghosts, used to violently disrupt political protests.

Five gang leaders forcefully rule separate sections of the city. Two are siblings, and the film is effective at showing that, in other circumstances, their natural talents could have had more constructive outlets. The Haitian 2Pac, as producer Wyclef Jean regards him in two encouraging phone calls, dreams of being a rapper. His brother Bily has the grassroots leadership skills of a born politician, like a local alderman, as he consults with the local voodoo priestess, distributes food, and deals with community complaints about his trigger-happy soldiers. Despite their wasted potential, it’s difficult to sympathize as much as the filmmakers do with these weapon-brandishing gangsters, who go back and forth between trumpeting their role as thugs and denying they are chimères when the community resents them and the political tides shift as U.S. and peacekeeping troops take over.

With their incessant bragging, it’s not clear how much they are posturing and exaggerating for the camera. Even more dubious is the ethically challenged Éléonore “Lele” Senlis, identified as a “French aid worker,” who seems to think she’s starring in one of those cliché white-woman-in-the-third-world Hollywood movies, like Jennifer Connelly in Blood Diamond. She not only presses cash, that hopefully does not come from humanitarian donations, onto the gangsters with ineffectual pleas to put it to good use, she inserts herself as a negotiator and spy. Oblivious to their girlfriends and children, she becomes involved romantically with first one brother then the other.

In the contrasting blazing sun and threatening nights, the film’s style recalls the Brazilian City of God. At least the cycle of violence that ensnared young people there was based on competition for drugs and money, as opposed to the abject misery here. If the constantly shaky vérité camera work doesn’t make the viewer nauseous enough, the utter hopeless violence will. And throughout, Wyclef Jean’s hip-hop score well captures the social complexities, incorporating the raps of the Haitian 2Pac, who now is only a ghost. Nora Lee Mandel
June 27, 2007