The Forgotten Occupation

Brunel Martin came of age during Haiti’s brutal occupation at the hands of United States Marines. Yet, he went on to become a fierce advocate of the country that destroyed his. A decade after his death, his grandson writes him a letter trying to reconcile the contradictions. USA, 2023, 105 minutes

The documentary opens with Filmmaker Alain Martin reading a letter to his deceased grandfather. 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. They find themselves desperately hoping for an American intervention, seeing it as the only solution for their ravaged nation. Alain reminds his grandfather that the United States had already occupied Haiti and only left it more impoverished. 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.

After the film, a discussion with director Alain Martin will be moderated by Steven White.

Presented by Rivertown Film and The Global Film Series at the Justice Studies Institute of St. Thomas Aquinas College, honoring Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month.

Community Partners: Haitian Cultural Heritage Preservation, Kreyol Catering, La Baguette d’Or Bakery, Spring Valley,
Rockland Coalition to End the New Jim Crow.

Director’s Statement

I feel that where one is from is where one feels most at home, not necessarily where one was born and grew up.

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. 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.

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. 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. The teacher who learned I was studying film hinted that I should seriously consider giving this subject of the occupation a documentary treatment.

So here we are all these years later.