Photo from Haiti's National Palace Website 2003
Danny Glover talks about his upcoming film on Haiti's Revolution during a 2003 press conference with President Jean-Bertrand Aristide at Haiti's National Palace:
"I've talked about working on a film on the Haitian revolution for the last 20 years. That is a project which has taken many roads. It has been a very arduous journey. The story is, as the esteemed scholars would say, so large that it's almost unimaginable. We've all learned about the American Revolution, we all learned about the French Revolution, but so few people know of, or are aware of, the Haitian Revolution. So the attempt to use a film as the medium of education must have an enormous support system to reeducate people who've been miseducated. So a film is only a very small part of the process. The work that we have to do before, beyond the film and after the film. The work we have to do in creating the kind of teacher, the educational materials, is daunting. We have to break through this wall, this veil, this presumptuous attitude that people have about people of color, and specifically of people of Haitian descent.
...I'm sure that people are ready to see such a film. It often takes something, as I said earlier, whether we want to call it destiny, this moment, whether we want to say a moment in a 100 years overdue, however we want to frame this, the fact that we have the responsibility and the opportunity to demand something more. Something more in terms of what we see in films, something more in terms of what could bring some abiding sense of identity, something that's going to happen in this process. We cannot continue as we continue to go on. We have to begin to look at who we are to understand who we are in relationship to our past and to celebrate our past as a way, as a gateway, to our future. I think the story of the Haitian Revolution, and I'll say this many, many times, and hopefully I'll be able to say that we've accomplished that when we make this film, that it's the story of the Haitian Revolution that is the very vehicle that could possibly unlock something about filmmaking, that not only entertains us, but fuels us in such a way that we're capable of using that information to act, for action, for the purpose of actions." Read entire statement at http://www.transafricaforum.org/newsletter/news_april9_03_toussaint.html