POTO MITAN: “A moving and stirring film, showing Haitian women strength.

Tequila Minsky, Heritagekonpa Mgazine  
 

The documentary film Poto Mitan, Haitian Women: Pillars of the Global Economy’s premiere screening was the center of an extraordinary evening of dance, film, and engaged discussion presented by the Medgar Evers College Film & Culture Series in Brooklyn, this month. 

It was an ambitious effort of the film to both supply background global-impact information on the Haitian tattered economy and portray the lives of five working women in Haiti.  The filmmakers are eager for outreach and to show their film in community and educational venues. 

(Co-direcctors Anthropology  Prof Mark Schuller and filmmaker co-Renee Bragan field questions following the screening)

The film shows how importing U.S. government-subsidized cheap rice from the States and forcing Haiti to lift import tariffs killed the homegrown Haitian rice market.  

Another example depicting outside destructive forces  highlighted  the eradication program of the (practically indigenous) Haitian Creole pig,  the peasants’ piggy bank, their safety net. Said to carry the swine flu, the Creole pig was unsuccessfully replaced by the U.S. with their variety that couldn’t survive in the  typical peasants’ rural lifestyle.  Self-sustaining efforts were yanked from local input.  

Shifting to now, the viewer learns of lives of five women and their personal struggles to earn a living.  Poetic visual  segues written and spoken by Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat bridge the different profiles.  

We learn of the women’s abysmal  working conditions, pay, and sexual harassment. Encouraging is that the women are members of the grassroots organization KODEFF-Committee to Defend Working Women’s Rights and collectively they’re fighting these conditions.  

The film came about as a  response to  women who co-director/producer Mark Schuller met while researching his PhD dissertation  in Port-au-Prince on women’s participation in non-governmental organizations.  The women said they weren’t interested in a book; they wanted a film to be made about their working and life situations, so Schuller collaborated with filmmaker Renee Bragan.   Schuller is now Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at York College, CUNY.  

Students of Medgar Evers College attended the full-house screening--it was an assignment for one History class, whose students diligently took notes-- and community members were welcomed also.  The audience was not shy when it came to the Q&A that followed the screening.  

For a Q&A, the co-filmmakers joined directors of two Haitian organizations that work with women, Brooklyn-based Dwa Fanm Executive Director Gina Cheron and Katleen Felix who works with FONKOZE, an organization that provides loans to women who have very small businesses in Haiti.