32 minutes that'll wreck you: one woman's fight to exist where she's always lived.
In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army, on the basis of anti-black racism. Fast-forward to 2013, the Dominican Republic's Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929, rendering more than 200,000 people stateless. Elena, the young protagonist of the film, and her family stand to lose their legal residency in the Dominican Republic if they don't manage to get their documents in time. Negotiating a mountain of opaque bureaucratic processes and a racist, hostile society around, Elena becomes the face of the struggle to remain in a country built on the labor of her father and forefathers.
Direction
Stephenson makes bureaucracy viscerally terrifying.
Editing
Cuts between 1937 and 2013 land like gut punches.
Director
Michèle Stephenson
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The 2013 'sentencia' that stripped citizenship wasn't reversed until 2014—and implementation remains spotty. Elena's story is still happening to thousands.
Stephenson filmed her own family navigating similar precarity in Black in Latin America—this is personal cinema as political act.
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