http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3Ev4x7UBaM
Broken Stones by Guetty Felin, a award-winning independent Haitian filmmaker, is a documentary about the fate of a well-known Catholic cathedral in Port-Au-Prince Haiti before and after the earthquake on January 12, 2010. Broken Stones not only tells the story of the church but also that of its surviving parishioners in the Quartier Cathedrale neighborhood. Filmmaker Guetty Felin shares their story beautifully and, as one audience member pointed out, the film truly “captured a lot of the Haitian soul.”
One of men in the film commented that there are 5,000 NGO’s in Haiti but there aren’t 5,000 problems…there’s only about 3 or 4…. Millions of dollars have poured into the NGO’s since the earthquake but Haitians only get a trickle and see no major improvements in their day-to-day lives. The documentary “Haiti: Where Did all the Money Go?” notes there is no central management of the NGO’s in Haiti and they are not held accountable for their performance.
An interviewee commented that people were “living in endless idleness,” in part probably due to the lack of jobs available to the survivors. Given the enormous amount of physical post-earthquake reconstruction needed in Port-Au-Prince, it is easy to see why survivors would expect job creation to meet that requirement.
A valuable theme explored in the movie is the need for the Haitian people to regain their confidence. The country was built on the valiancy of its people, who were the first Caribbean nation to claim their freedom from colonists in 1804. “We need to reconstruct Haiti, but we also need to reconstruct ourselves.”
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