Current Projects

Louis Henderson

 

A new documentary-fiction that explores the history of democratic processes within apparent post-colonial contexts, focusing on the tragic story of Toussaint Louverture: the slave leader of the Haitian revolution of 1791. 

 

In official History, Louverture was arrested by Napoleon’s forces and brought to France at the turn of the 19th century, where he was starved to death in his castle prison in the mountains of Jura and his bones thrown into the surrounding landscape: the calcified strata in which the story of the Jurassic period was read for the first time.

 

This film proposes a different reading of history through an archaeological fiction that brings Louverture’s ghost back to life to haunt the neocolonial present.  The ghost is summoned back across the Atlantic to Haiti, where, through the discovery of his country 200 years after his death, the ghost of Louverture allows a reflection on the current situation of Haiti in relation to its own past in order to predict a clearer future.