![]() These and other hand-crafted amusement park attractions will rise again, this time in Los Angeles. ![]() There’s more, including a celebratory carousel from Keith Haring, where the artist’s curved creatures come alive as toy-like blocks. The creations of Luna Luna were dreamed up by icons of contemporary art - an enchanted forest, for instance, crafted by David Hockney, or a Ferris wheel envisioned by Jean-Michel Basquiat, where the whimsical contrasts with violent images of an exploding house and stark phrases of racial inequality, all placed like graffiti in haste. All the while, the glorious and outlandish rides of the little-known Luna Luna lay preserved and untouched. And it was his trivial request, over a decade ago, to narrate a documentary he had been working on, which actually pushed me further in the direction my life has taken both in answering the call from the Arts, and answering the call from my motherland, Haiti.For decades, one of the world’s most unusual and unlikely amusement parks sat forgotten in shipping containers about two hours north of Dallas. One such Haitian friend soon became a Haitian brother: Alain Martin. I then found myself working on numerous film sets as a Production Assistant, and eventually joined the Director’s Guild of America as an Assistant Director.I would also answer by helping friends create work along the way. I would answer by enrolling in a 1-year Production program at NYFA. I would answer on the screen through writing and directing. But the Arts called, and I would eventually, much to the dismay of my Haitian Mother, answer. And like every Haitian household, there were Haitian expectations: I was to become a doctor. I grew up in a Haitian household with Haitian food, Haitian music and stories, and Haitian Creole being spoken by Haitian Uncles having loud debates about Haitian politics. To Haiti I am also grateful for my culture. So to Haiti I am forever thankful for not allowing me to be an orphan of the planet. But the country that acknowledged me as its son and citizen was Haiti, although I would not visit it until decades later. I was born in France and grew up in the United States. The teacher who learned I was studying film hinted that I should seriously consider giving this subject of the occupation a documentary treatment. At last, New Jersey is where I spent my early twenties, where I flirted with cinema and literature, where I attended William Paterson University and majored in film, took an elective on Haitian History and learned of the brutal and forgotten US Occupation of Haiti. New York is where I came of age, where I stumbled upon Malcolm X, DuBois and got introduced to the cinema of Spike Lee, of John Singleton and Quentin Tarantino and realized that filmmaking wasn’t just shit blowing up and people being shot. Jacmel is where I spent my formative years, where I discovered literature and mindless, shoot em up action films that my siblings and I would recreate in our backyard with paper guns. So I’m from Jacmel and I’m from the five boroughs of New York City and I’m from Bergenfield, New Jersey, although I was born in some hospital in the hills of Port-au-Prince. I feel that where one is from is where one feels most at home, not necessarily where one was born and grew up. As the letter continues, the brutal decades of the Occupation come to light, betraying the complicated history of a people who, a century ago, looked to the United States for guidance only to find themselves enmeshed in violent clashes of of race, culture and class, resulting in the wholesale theft of their homeland. Alain reminds his grandfather that the United States had already occupied Haiti and only left it more impoverished. They find themselves desperately hoping for an American intervention, seeing it as the only solution for their ravaged nation. In that letter’s opening, the filmmaker recalls a morose conversation between his grandfather and another familiar member in which they bemoan the chronic troubles of their country, Haiti. The documentary opens with Filmmaker Alain Martin reading a letter to his deceased grandfather. A decade after his death, his grandson writes him a letter trying to reconcile the contradictions. ![]() Yet, he went on to become a fierce advocate of the country that destroyed his. Synopsis Brunel Martin came of age during Haiti’s brutal occupation at the hands of United States Marines.
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