Written and directed by Bertrand Bonello
Starring: Louise Labeque, Wislanda Louimat and Katiana Milfort
Running time: 1 hour and 43 minutes

by Ryan Smillie

“When the anthropologists appear, the Gods depart.”-purported Haitian proverb 

In 1789, the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille and the publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in the colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), a group of free blacks appealed to the Declaration’s assertion that all men were free and equal to demand the right to vote. The French colonial government denied the appeal and violently crushed a brief insurgency against the decision. In return, the population of African and African-descended slaves, who outnumbered the European colonists nearly ten to one, launched a revolt that ended with the abolition of slavery, the expulsion of the French colonial government, and the independence of Haiti.