Louis Henderson & Olivier Marboeuf / 2019 / Haiti / Documentary / 140 min
In Ouvertures, a hybrid film, the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture is brought back to life in more ways than one. First by a Haitian researcher in France, who does so by scaling French archives and the frozen and snowy landscape of the Jura mountains. And secondly by a group of actors in Haiti rehearsing scenes from Monsieur Toussaint, a play written by Édouard Glissant. The actors perform a version of the play that they translated from French to Creole. The play recounts the last days of the life of Louverture dying in exile in a prison cell in the Jura in 1803, where he is visited, on his deathbed, by ghosts from the pantheon of Haitian history. The actors are deeply affected by the play in a myriad of ways, and we witness them preparing for a different kind of exile involving the dead and the living.
