Ben Dupuy who died in Miami in 2023, was Haiti’s itinerant ambassador under the first administration of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the founder of both the Haïti Progrès newspaper and the Parti Populaire National (PPN). Photo by Fleurimond Kerns.
Kim Ives is a filmmaker and journalist with Haïti Liberté newspaper, with offices in Brooklyn and Port-au-Prince. His most recent films about the situation in Haiti are Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising (2022) and Haiti: Intervention versus Revolution (2024), both of which explore the emergence of an armed popular movement in Haiti’s poor shanty towns.
Filmed clandestinely under the Duvalier dictatorship, Bitter Cane, presented at THFF25 in a brand new restoration, is an incisive documentary interrogation of the exploitation and domination of the Haitian people. From peasant coffee farms in the rugged tropical mountains to steamy foreign-owned sweatshops in the capital, Port-au-Prince, the film takes the viewer on a journey through Haitian history to a deeper grasp of the country’s political economy today. The film explores the Haiti of the 1980s, a perspective that helps the viewer to better understand the crises that wrack the country now. Bitter Cane shows how foreign capitalists were beginning to drive peasants off the land and into the cities, creating giant shanty towns which have spawned crime, dislocation, and anarchy. Today, 40 years later, we are seeing the culmination of this socio-economic upheaval, which has left the country facing its third foreign military occupation in three decades.
A Q+A with Kim Ives will follow the screening.
Bitter Cane screens at THFF25 as part of the retrospective program You Don’t Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema 1978–1985.
This screening is presented in partnership with:
Miami Workers Center
