Documentary Films

"The Invisible Wounds of Exile": Stones in the Sun Haitian director Patricia Benoît: Interview

Liza Béar: I assume you have lived in Haiti at one point.

Patricia Benoît: I left as a child in the sixties.

LB: How old were you when you left?

PB: Six.

LB: Did you go back a lot?

PB: I’ve been back, yeah. My family was exiled, but then about…13 years  after leaving I went back for a first visit and  [since then] I’ve been back a lot. I’ve done a lot of work in Haiti. I’ve done documentation work with grassroots groups. I’ve done theater in a school with kids in a sort of very disadvantaged neighborhood, and kids who were not in school.

The story that I’m telling had been brewing in my mind for a very long time.  And it’s a story that I felt I could only tell through fiction, because I wanted to talk about something that was…very intimate. And I don’t think I could have done that in a documentary.

One of the things that I wanted to talk about was  the invisible wounds of exile. And that’s something that I’ve lived with ever since I was little. There’s  that initial trauma that sends people out of their countries of origin. And I wanted to look  at how that trauma, the pain of that trauma sort of radiates, in small and large ways. And how it affects people in their intimate lives.

LB: Pain is something that everyone wants to forget. They don’t want to keep it in the social and civil society.

On November 14th 2012, thousands of people took to the streets of Portugal as part of a European wide general strike. Until recently, the International Monetary Fund held Portugal as an ideal example of the effectiveness of austerity policies, but today, its economy is heading in the same direction as Greece and Spain. This short documentary details the week of the November 14th strike in Lisbon and the events surrounding it.

Sheila Garber works sales/purchasing at Englund Marine & Supply. She gives some great reasons to vote NO on Measure 81.

To find out more about Measure 81: nomeasure81.com

To find out more about Sheila Garber or Englund Marine: englundmarine.com/