Revisiting Ghosts of Cité Soleil.

In Ghosts of Cité Soleil, Asger Leth has made a strikingly cinematic documentary, but there's another compelling story in the filmmaking process and in the politics of its reception at film festivals. So far, it's also one of the best documentaries of the year.

Shot in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) in 2004, before and after the flight of Jean-Bertrand Aristide as his regime collapsed, the doc surveys the atmosphere of anarchy as it follows young heavily-armed chimeres (ghosts) who were once enforcers for Aristide but now vie for territory in the city's vast slum, Cité Soleil. (It remains a hotbed of support for the dictator who was removed from power, many say, by the Central Intelligence Agency. Because of his enemies, and the hope many placed in Aristide, the former Haitian leader, now living in South Africa, is revered as a substitute Fidel Castro.) <

Underneath the semblance of armed anarchy in Leth's doc, shot on the run by Milos Loncarevic, is more deadly anarchy, an infinite black hole if you're unlucky enough to be born there. Dozens of people are killed every day. The young protagonists who tell Leth their stories, Winson "2Pac" Jean and James "Bily" Petit Frère, are now all dead.

The look of the film draws on the mythologies of gangster music videos, action futurism, and gladiator movies - except it's all real, from the gang-bangers to the guns. Leth's characters, as you might expect, are seeking to mythologize themselves. One of them is a would-be Port-au-Prince rapper, for whom hip-hop records seem to have been English-language instructional tapes. He auditions his raps over his cell phone to a receptive Wyclef Jean in New York. He'd like to go to Miami, yet Haitians are among the most unwelcome of unwelcome immigrants. So much for violence or poverty as a reality check.

It all raises questions. Leth had remarkable access - although he says it's too dangerous to go to Cité Soleil now. How do you make a realistic documentary in (and about) circumstances that threaten your life and the lives of your subjects? How do you bring coherence to anarchy once your cameras record hundreds of hours of footage? That's part of the story. (There's a much more tactile immersion here than in Iraq in Fragments, War/Dance or even Gunner Palace.) Leth is the son of Jørgen Leth, the Danish cameraman, documentarian (his work is featured in the much-admired The Five Obstructions) and teacher of Lars von Trier.

Another element of the story is the odd balance that Leth strikes between the visual seduction of the squalid Cité Soleil (the chimeres could qualify as Benneton models, and I can only imagine what Caravaggio would have done with these guys) and the horror of the place and many places like it, from Manila to Gaza to various neighborhoods of Mexican cities. Despite the throbbing Wyclef Jean soundtrack, the documentary doesn't buy into the myth of buffed men in armor - far from it - but it does build a disturbing sub-plot - all true, of course - on the story of a pretty French aid worker who does. She sleeps with one of them, and tries with everyone else from the non-governmental organizations to stop the violence, or just to bring food.

Another thing to consider is the film's accuracy, especially when images of Haiti become a substitute for much-needed journalism at a time when dozens of Haitian deaths at sea are eclipsed in the news by higher or more topical body counts in Baghdad or Tripoli or Darfur. The events addressed by the film's "journalism" are more than two years old. That didn't keep Leth from coming under attack a month ago at the San Francisco International Film Festival from furious Aristide supporters (all white Americans) who called the film seriously inaccurate. (For some die-hard radicals, as I said, Aristide was their generation's Fidel Castro - it's ironic that the aging and ill Castro is a lot more alive than most of the chimeres - and ought to have been treated with the proper veneration, as they saw it, but that's another story that would probably involve being on the ground in the Cité Soleil for a while.) Is Ghosts of Cité Soleil the prophetic image of the "failed state" that we hear so much about, presented through a close look at its eloquent failures? Or was Leth thrown off by the tight focus of his gritty doc? I think Leth is right on target.

Posted by dwhudson at June 29, 2007 6:24 AM