To celebrate Flag Day in Haiti, tomorrow Thursday at 6 p.m., Casa de América, in co-organisation with the Embassy of Haiti, presents the latest feature film by the prominent intellectual and filmmaker Arnold Antonin, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the man who defeated Napoleon Bonaparte (Jean-Jacques Dessalines, le vainqueur de Napoleon Bonaparte).
This event is also an opportunity for the Madrid public to discover the author of the first feature film in Haitian cinema (Haiti, le chemin de la liberté), who has had an important career in his country and abroad, in the fields of culture and social and political sciences.
Arnold Antonin is the founder and director of the Pétion-Bolivar Cultural Centre and was president of the Haitian Association of Filmmakers in 2005. With a filmography of more than forty titles, mostly documentaries, his works have won numerous awards at various festivals. In 2021, the Haiti International Film Festival pays tribute to him and recognises him as the father of Haitian cinema.
After welcoming remarks by Enrique Ojeda Vila, Director General of Casa de América, a historical introduction will be given by Guy L. Lamothe, Chargé d’Affaires a.i. of the Haitian Embassy, and Consuelo Naranjo, historian and Research Professor at the Institute of History of the CSIC.
The film tells the story of how Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence in 1804. Assassinated shortly after proclaiming himself emperor, he was the subject of a damnatio memoriae for forty years. He is the only one of the heroes of independence to be deified in the voodoo pantheon and his mythologised image has been used for both good and evil. This film aims to place Dessalines in his rightful historical place, in his human dimension and in his tragic trajectory as a military and political leader; at the same time, it invites debate on Haiti’s historical legacy to illuminate the present and the future. In the film, numerous historians and intellectuals, as well as Dessalines’ descendants, shed light on the subject.
