Ouvertures

Director: Louis Henderson and Olivier Marboeuf

2020, 132min.

Language: Haitian Creole and French with English subtitles

Please join us for a celebratory reception from 6:45 pm -7:30 pm before the show.

Join us also for the post-screening discussion of Ouvertures, with Professor Indira Karamcheti of Global South Asian Studies at Wesleyan University.

 

At a time of violent political upheaval in Haiti, April in Paris presents an extraordinary film that explores the conflicted heart of the first country to win independence from their European colonizers in 1803. The inspired collaboration is the work of directors Louis Henderson and Olivier Marboeuf and a group of Haitian artists, actors and poets called The Living and the Dead Ensemble. Ouveratures opens in Paris, where a young man is researching the legendary revolutionary Toussaint Louverture: a former slave who owned slaves himself, who thought of himself as a “free Frenchman,” although he died in a French prison. The film next moves to Haiti, where a group of young performers from Haiti, France and the U.K (The Living and the Dead Ensemble) stage the play Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant, and translate it into Creole. In the play, ghosts from the Haiti’s past put the dying Toussaint on trial, while illuminating his rare ability both to terrify slave owning countries (including the U.S.), and to inspire enslaved black people to imagine – and fight for – freedom. “A mediation of how the pain and triumphs of a nation’s history are eternal. It is alive, breathing and evolving through the people they influence.”- Gabrielle Pascal, Haitian Times