A group of artists and performers gathers on the roof of a compound overlooking Port-au-Prince. The sunset sky illuminates the proceedings. A lady in a blue dress covered in flower designs sings in Kreyòl. People dressed in outfits representing spiritual entities stand at attention. The reasons for this ceremony, as documented by Haitian Canadian filmmaker Joseph Hillel, are never directly explained to the audience. But no elaboration is needed. Especially not for those of us who are intimately aware of what we are watching and its significance. Hillel is giving the audience a glimpse of a performance steeped in the Vodou and storytelling traditions of the nation; a prayer to the ancestors and the spirits. The subtitles label it as a funeral song.

The performance appears in the second half of Koutkekout or At All Kosts, Hillel’s 2025 documentary. What appears to be a ceremony is, in actuality, a rehearsal for a play, part of annual art and theatre event Festival Quatre Chemins. Spelled in English with a “k” in reference to Kreyòl orthography, the ninety-minute film chronicles the planning and production of the festival's 2023 edition, with footage from previous years also featured. Throughout the film we are introduced to a variety of performers, writers and artists including dancer Schneiderson René, scenographer and performer Nathania Pericles, and actor Néhémie Bastien, witnessing the preparation for each of their artistic contributions to the festival, whose unfolding serves as the film’s denouement.

With At All Kosts Hillel has crafted a beautiful film, both an archival document of the festival itself and a love letter to the wider artistic traditions that have always existed in Haiti—and persist, despite media coverage that might suggest otherwise. “It’s really phenomenal in Haiti that something lasts that long,” Hillel tells me, admiring the twenty-two year-old festival and its ability to attract a young crowd. Building on his previous Haitian-focused documentary Ayiti Toma, in the Land of the Living (2013), the film provides a snapshot of the cultural architecture in Haiti. Hillel homes in on the details of life, using them to illustrate a bustling arts community intertwined with the rhythms of the quotidian: a man sells fresh bread on the tree-lined street every morning next to the compound where the festival artists rehearse; a woman braids the hair of her colleague in the rehearsal area of the compound while children play in the background.

Save a handful of luminaries—Marlon James, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Alejo Carpentier—who have managed to break through outside local and diasporic communities, the storytelling traditions of the Caribbean have been largely under-recognized and ignored outside of the region. While the world readily enjoys and adapts our music, relaxes on our beaches, and plunders our resources, our stories remain sidelined, our humanity an afterthought. Haiti, as with all things, has suffered the most in this regard. The country that shook the world with its revolution against slave-owners in 1791 is today depicted in Canadian news reports and humanitarian videos as an impoverished land, besieged by tragedy and suffering, with little broader culture or life for the inhabitants whose humanity is reduced to poverty porn. At All Kosts acts as a counterpoint to that norm. Following in the tradition of Haitian and Haitian Canadian filmmakers past, the film shows us a glimpse of a side of Haiti that we rarely get to see: from the syncretic integration of Vodou that permeates much of Haitian life to the indomitable spirit of the festival artists, Hillel depicts a rich and intensely active cultural life. 

Part of At All Kosts’ project is to highlight those Haitian figures who have helped build a vivid arts culture. Hillel interviews author, playwright, teacher, academic, and painter Frankétienne, who passed away earlier this year. His novel Dézafi was the first modern full-length novel written in Haitian Kreyòl. Meeting him, the viewer is greeted by images of his surrealistic paintings and the interior of his house, which with its carved walls and foundations has the atmosphere of a living museum filled with cultural artifacts. Frankétienne speaks with several of the artists featured in the documentary including the artistic director of Festival Quatre Chemins, playwright Guy Régis Jr. He reads aloud a passage from his book Corde et Miséricorde and discusses life and philosophy with those present. “Keep going,” Frankétienne declares with poetic zeal to his audience. “You who are working to create, keep going. I will be gone. I don’t know when. In two months? Four months? A year? I don’t know. Keep going.” 

“This guy had always been a mentor for the people that were around the table,” Hillel says about the late cultural giant. “A transmitter who was always sharing.” Hillel’s film emphasizes the importance of these teachers as mentor figures in our cultures, and the urgency of passing down the stories of our past and present so future generations can know where they come from and where it is possible to go. Frankétienne’s conversation with Régis Jr. is a metaphorical passing of the torch to the younger generations to carry on the work of preserving and transmitting these stories.

Watching their conversation, I was struck by a wave of nostalgia.I was reminded of Louise Bennett-Coverley, or as we in the Jamaican community know her, Miss Lou, who pioneered the use of Jamaican Patois in the arts. I found myself reflecting on my own experiences living in Jamaica, with Caribbean art and culture both at home and here in Canada, and the communities I grew up alongside. The Caribbean has one of the most overlooked cinematic cultures in the world. Many films both historic and modern are largely out of print and difficult to find through traditional means. I consider myself blessed to have been first exposed to Caribbean film and theatre as a child in Jamaica through films like the 1991 comedy drama The Lunatic written by Jamaican author and screenwriter Anthony C. Winkler, which tells the story of a mentally ill man who is taken advantage of by a European tourist; or the satirical plays of Oliver Samuels, which highlight the more humorous elements of Jamaican society, like city vs. country attitudes. Having access to these films became even more important in my teen years and early twenties, as they kept me connected to the cultural life of the island while I came of age in the diaspora. Each story was filled with images and sounds that had engraved themselves into my soul, influencing everything I make.

Starting in 1957, Haiti, like so many Central and South American countries, including its neighbours the Dominican Republic under Rafael Trujillo and Cuba under Fulgencio Batista, was subject to a US-backed dictatorial regime. Led in succession by François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the dictatorship lasted until 1986. Hundredsof thousands of Haitians left the island during this twenty-nine year period leading to the growth of the global Haitian diaspora. It was during this time of chaos that Haitian cinema took shape. 

First came the 1962 short documentary film Mais je suis belle by journalist and activist Jean Dominique, about a beauty pageant. Then, the first full-length Haitian film, 1974’s Haiti, The Way to Freedom, by the prolific filmmaker and scholar of Haitian cinema Arnold Antonin, who was living in exile at the time. Antonin’s film commented on the then current political climate in Haiti, by putting the dictatorship in the context of Haitian people’s past and present struggles for freedom.Throughout the non-Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the seventies marked a decade of emergence for homegrown cinema not produced by the colonial class, from The Right and the Wrong by Trinidad’s Harbance Kumar to Perry Henzell’s Jamaican breakout The Harder They Come in 1972. For the first time, life in the region was not depicted as a pleasant backdrop for the escapades of other peoples or the sanitized postcards of Eurocentric fantasies; our lives were the focus. This broad golden era, perhaps more of a confluence of activity than a movement, would have an impact both in the region and across diasporas as the first time for many that their lives were given voice, in bold, often uncompromising ways that tapped into the post-colonial class-based struggles of the period. 

Of the Haitian-made narrative films during the twenty-nine-year Duvalier regime, only Rassoul Labuchin’s 1980 classic Anita is easily accessible to watch online. Labuchin’s landmark film is a tender showcase of Haitian life, class consciousness, and an early depiction of Vodou ceremonies in narrative Haitian cinema. While Anita brought some attention to Haitian filmmaking, it was Raoul Peck’s 1993 work The Man By the Shore that served as a watershed moment for Haitian cinema in the international sphere, pushing it beyond cult status. It was the first Haitian film to get proper distribution in US theatres and an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival. Set in the sixties during the early years of the dictatorship, the film follows a young girl as her family lives under the regime. Peck lays bare the cruelty and the repression of corrupt officials, while also highlighting small acts of resistance, like when the girl’s godfather lampoons the military authorities, despite their increasingly severe punishments. The film is framed as a long flashback, with protagonist Sarah sharing remembrances of her childhood. That emphasis on memory reflects the ways that Haiti and the Haitian diaspora continue to deal with trauma and the legacies of repression even after the fall of the regime; the dictatorship is one chapter in a history of harms and abuses that extends long before 1957 and reaches into the present. The film stands as one of the masterpieces of Caribbean cinema. It is also, arguably, one of the first Haitian Canadian films. Though Peck is not Canadian, the film featured Canada-based actors like Mireille Métellus, as well as Canadian funding alongside France and Germany. 

The history of Haitian art and culture has long been intertwined with Canada, where Haitians make up the second largest Caribbean group outside of Afro-Jamaicans, as well as comprising the largest Black population in francophone Canada. Many Haitian actors and filmmakers have studied in Canada, reside here, or have relatives here. The Canadian state’s relationship with Haiti has also been complicated, to say the least. Beginning with official diplomatic relations in 1954, Canada has, alongside other Western nations, involved itself in Haitian politics, including interventions in 1993 and 2004. Between 1998 and 2013, Quebec funded over a hundred projects in the country, with a significant number of NGOs like Oxfam Quebec and the Centre for International Studies and Cooperation operating there too. 

Beyond that official relationship, another kind of relationship has bloomed as Haitians living in diaspora produce cultural texts in conversation with both their home country and their lives outside it. My introduction to Haitian cinema began when I was around nine years old during a family trip to Montreal, then an alien world filled with signs I couldn’t read and traffic lights that seemed small. I grew up hearing stories about my mother’s oldest friend from her time living in Montreal in the late seventies and early eighties, an aunt figure to my older siblings: the Haitian actress Mireille Métellus, who had come to Canada as a young girl in the sixties as part of an early wave of Haitian and general Caribbean immigration to the country. Arriving at Métellus’ home in Outremont, filled with trinkets and sculptures from her journeys as an actor, I met a woman who seemed to light up each room. I had never met an actor before, and she quickly became the dominant example in my mind of a thespian: kind, adventurous, almost larger-than-life.

Beginning with her first roles in theatre and film in the seventies, Métellus’ storied career connects her to key moments in two histories: Haitian cinema and that of Black actors and filmmakers in francophone Canada. “I was always an actor,” she says of her lifelong love of the craft. Her first on screen role was as Marie-Josèphe Angélique in the 1978 historical film Fields of Endless Day. The Canadian film, focused on the history of Black Canadians, was one of the first to feature a Haitian actor in a lead role. “The Haitian community, [and] Black French community, they teased me as ‘the first one,’” she says, reminiscing about the community reaction. “But I don’t think I was the first.” During this period, the legendary Black Theatre Workshop, founded in1971, acted as a crucial place of learning and community for the burgeoning cohorts of Black creatives in francophone Canada and beyond.

It took time for the Haitian and broadly Black Canadian presence to be truly felt on the stage, and especially so on-screen. Haitian Canadian filmmaker Henri Pardo recalls discovering the Black Theatre Workshop, reflecting on his own experiences as a Black actor in francophone theatre in the nineties. “Francophone theatre and francophone TV and film was mostly white,” he says. “We’re more present now.” In the late nineties, Haitian creatives started to organize behind the scenes. Hillel set up his production company Qu4tre par Quatre Films in 1995. The cohort of Haitian Canadian actors that emerged in the seventies began to get more screen roles, with Métellus acting in films like Robert Favreau’s Genie-award winning A Sunday In Kigali, about the Rwandan genocide. 

Writer Dany Laferrière was a mainstay in this period: several of his prose works were adapted by Canadian directors or Canadian co-productions, including John L’Ecuyer’s 2004 film On the Verge of a Fever. Though not directed by a Haitian artist, Laferrière wrote the screenplay, which depicts teenagers coming of age amidst the elder Duvalier’s death. Another Laferrière adaptation of this period, Heading South, is a France-Canada co-production set in Haiti during the Duvalier regime, tackling the subject of female sex tourism in the Caribbean. For me, it brings up complicated feelings, recalling my own experiences with fetishization at the hands of white women during my early twenties. Having your personhood reduced to a piece of meat on display for thrills and fantasies—that feeling is impossible to forget. While the film clearly aims to serve as a commentary on how places like Haiti are treated as a backdrop by the white women in the film, it fails to stick the landing. A central conflict in which the primary Haitian character falls victim to the regime is clumsily made backseat to the concerns of his exploiters, with his off-screen death serving only as a point of conflict between them. The film becomes another example of the exploitation it attempts to critique.

The past fifteen years in Canada have seen a significant shift in Haitian representation on screen. Increased access to funding bodies and opportunities, combined with decades of work, has led to a confluence of filmmakers both young and old telling new stories. Artists like Fabienne Colas, Frédéric Pierre, and Pardo have companies focused on fostering young Black talent in Canada, opening doors for said talent to enter an industry that still offers many obstacles for Black creators. “If I can break in and open doors. I’ll keep it open as long as I can so people can rush in,” Pardo emphatically tells me. 

That increase in access to resources and inter-generational support has contributed to a proliferation in Haitian Canadian cinema. Notably, documentaries have surged. Yasmine Mathurin’s 2021 doc One of Ours, for example, tells the story of when Haitian Canadian Josiah Wilson, who grew up in a Heiltsuk family, was barred from playing in the All Native Basketball Tournament in 2016. The work of Esery Mondesir examines the lives of Haitians in diaspora in Hispanophone communities like Cuba and Tijuana, while Miryam Charles takes a hybrid, personal approach to mourning in her 2022 docu-drama This House.

Part of this pull toward documentary filmmaking could be understood as a desire to break through the wall of propaganda and disdain that permeates conversations about the country in much of the Western world. “There’s so much noise against us,” Hillel says candidly, “we need to have a counter-narrative that will give us a taste of another point of view.” That counter-narrative courses through At All Kosts. Late in the runtime, artist Erthon Edmond is being interviewed by Hillel. To Hillel, he unflinchingly declares, “our history reminds us that we are strong people. It reminds us that we contributed to humanity.” 

Beyond the documentary form, fictional works are also detailing Haiti’s social fabric. The short films Fanmi by Carmine Pierre-Dufour and Sandrine Brodeur-Desrosiers and No Ghost In The Morgue by Marilyn Cooke tackle intergenerational concerns. Fanmi (“Family” in Kreyòl) stars Métellus as a mother who, recently diagnosed with a terminal disease, has decided to see her daughter (Marie-Evelyne Lessard) for what might be the final time. No Ghost In the Morgue is a surrealistic Bildungsroman that finds a young medical student (Schelby Jean-Baptiste), navigating the legacy of her family through conversations with the ghost of her grandmother—Métellus once again. Both films tackle the stories of Haitian women in Canada, centring how younger generations face history in the contemporary. “It’s two cultures,” Métellus says poetically about the intergenerational conversations in these films, “but we have to meet in one country.” 

Pardo’s 2023 film Kanaval, a magical realist film, showcases the experience of Haitians who came to Canada during the Duvalier regime. Kanaval tells this story through the eyes of a young Haitian boy who escaped with his mother from the regime in the seventies to a community in rural Quebec. The elegant film not only addresses the traumas faced by many Haitian families during that time, but also captures the emotions that come with being in, to use the metaphor of the film, an alien land. Protagonist Rico, for example, is so horrified and appalled by the brutality of a Canadian hunting trip that he runs away deep into the woods. Pardo also includes surrealist sequences where the main character interacts with Loa, spirits in Haitian Vodou. “It’s in the DNA of the language, of the culture, of the music,” Pardo comments on the importance of Vodou. 

What links these filmmakers together is a sense of reflection: on the legacies of the past, the challenges of the present, and possibilities for the future. “We were a bunch of individuals trying to make it,” Pardo says of this period, “but then I think community happened. And when community happens, you’ve got more tools.” The films, while disparate in their subjects, genres and production philosophies, are united in their desire to make art that examines the broader history of Haitians in Canada and to reaffirm a connection to Haiti and Haitian culture. Taken together, the films enact Afro-Turkish scholar Mustafa Olpak’s description of diasporic experiences: “The first generation experiences, the second generation denies, and the third generation learns.” 

Next year marks sixty years in Quebec for Métellus. As Haitian Canadian cinema grows, its earlier trailblazers are beginning to receive proper recognition, with Métellus receiving the National Order of Quebec this year. “I could say that, yes, I’m proud to be Haitian, but I’m also proud to be of Quebec,” she tells me. In the years I have known Métellus, I have had the pleasure of witnessing the shift in representation for Haitian creatives through her. 

Rewatching At All Kosts after speaking with Métellus, Pardo and Hillel, I’m struck that these films are linked together, too, as acts of resistance. Art has long been a method of resistance for people of the Caribbean, and especially so for Haitians both at home and in diaspora. We were the first victims of colonialism and imperialism in the Americas, as the region of first contact, and we have since been subject to centuries of atrocities and a sustained campaign of propaganda meant to dehumanize us in the eyes of the world. “They’re used to all kinds of catastrophe,” Hillel says with reverence for his people. “But there’s also resilience.” The very act of telling these stories and expressing our joy, sorrow, hopes and dreams is one of our greatest means of preservation and rebellion against those who would only see us as targets for pity, exploitation or enmity. We are alive and will survive, like the coconut trees that stay rooted through every storm. ⁂

Daniel G. Wilson is a Jamaican Canadian writer, musician, music journalist and organizer based in Ontario. Much of his work deals with Caribbean and Latin American identity, punk rock, Jamaican history and diasporic concerns, and the exploration of folklore and speculative fiction as a tool for the communication of ideas.