Lafanmi Selavi: video documentary. Photographed and co-produced by Caitlin Manning. Written, produced and directed by Lee Flynn. Playing Sunday March 26^th at the Roxie and other Bay Area Venues.

Say Haiti and most people think “Hell.”  With its 75% employment rate, it is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world. It lives outside a high-tech global economy that cares little for expending capital on countries primarily dependent on agricultural subsistence.   To American tin ears it sounds like nothing more than a land of poverty, violence, personal and environmental degradation and despair. 

There is one group of people in the world who take some issue with this image fed to us by our crisis-mongering media.  The Haitian people themselves. Chief among them is former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who, in a gesture worthy of Jimmy Carter, has made it his post-Presidential life’s work to help care and advocate for the astounding number of Haitian children that make up 46 percent of the population. While most of them live in poverty, they do live with more hope than you'd expect.

Aristide and the children he works for are the subject a new, straightforward and illuminating documentary by Bay Area filmmakers Lee Flynn. Flynn, who along with co-producer and videographer Caitlin Manning, spent 20 days in Haiti last year interviewing Aristide and some of the social workers, homeless children and teenagers he worked with in founding Lafanmi Selavi. Lafanmi was started as a group home for the homeless and abandoned children who live in the streets of Haiti’s capital Port-Au Prince. Many of them come from the countryside where the farming life is simply too harsh and barren to make a go of it in the current situation. IT is what one teenager, Bertony Placido described as “a life of constant work . . . one day I saw that I suffered too much.”

Aristide founded Lafanmi Selavi (which is Creole for “the family is life”), while he was President in the early 1990s. Lafanmi Selavi provided, at least for a time, not only shelter from the life on the streets, but an education, Montessori style, that would provide a glimmer of hope for Haiti’s uncertain future.

Besides Aristide, the interviewees, mostly children and teenagers are an admirably articulate and street-savvy lot. Many of them help run Haiti’s radio station for children Radyo Timoun, which broadcasts to all of Haiti’s nine provinces.

Among them is Monique, who survived the sinking of the ferry “Jeremie” in 1993, only because she had to briefly leave the boat to use the bathroom.  The boat subsequently left without her and later sank. 1,000 people drowned including her parents. After this tragedy and after the 1991 coup that temporarily deposed Aristide, Monique found herself living in what was quaintly called the “cafeteria. The “cafeteria” was the headquarters for the more violent cadre of the right-wing military. While Monique was treated well, she saw many who were not, who were beaten and had doors slammed shut on their fingers. Still, she insists, she remains “the kind of person who can talk to anyone. I am open to all things on Earth.”

We also hear the story of Lolo who tells the pain of being undernourished on the streets and how life at Lafanmi improved both his physique and his attitude. Another one tells of being left at Lefanmi by her mother who couldn’t afford to care for her anymore.

Even after the military was driven out in 1996 the attacks on Lafanmi by right-wing supporters continued. According to the documentary, graduates of Lafanmi were turned into agent provocateurs and attacked the center in 1999. Apparently, they later publicly confessed to being set up and apologized.  Then Lafanmi closed its live-in program and helped the older youngsters find places to live, while still continuing its Montessori schooling. This section of the documentary becomes fuzzy as it’s never clearly explained why the live in program was shut down nor do we get a real look who the opposition is. While video is good on overall background, the length (barely an hour) and the fact that Flynn and Manning spent only twenty days filming in Haiti, keeps the documentary from providing a deeper context in this area. 

Lafanmi Selavi is a documentary of a startling and touching optimism. Admirably it lets it subjects speak for themselves. Aristide, who’s very much a socialist, points out, “democracy will not come from the sky” and the same thing can be said for hope. It starts from the ground up.  “We will not let misery destroy our spirit because we don’t have very much money.”

In the end, Haitians are the ones who will know better what paths work for them. The country walks a thin tight rope between their need for some forms of outside aid and the necessity of creating their own prosperity without the interference of outsiders [see accompanying interview with director Flynn]. American style capitalism, with its elephantine emphasis on high-tech, service and industry, plus its chronic impatience, has virtually no relevance here. The best thing about the documentary is how it shines a different light on a world that is much distorted and misunderstood.