🎙️ On this episode, we speak with Haitian filmmaker, Alain Martin. Alain continues our series “From Haiti to Hollywood,” as he offers us a gripping ‘forbidden history lesson’ about the Caribbean diaspora. In Alain’s award-winning documentary, and extremely important cultural work, “The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow Goes to Haiti,” Alain explores the history of the United States occupation of Haiti from 1915 – 1934. Watch “The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow Goes to Haiti” feature length documentary now on Filmocracy.com, August 20 – 28, 2023, as part of the virtual screenings of the Haiti International Film Festival #HIFF2023.
Submit your film now to the next Our Vision Caribbean and Latino Film Festival which takes place on April 9, 2025 to share your work, reach your audience, and turn your dreams into reality.
About Alain Martin 🎬
Born in Jacmel Haiti, Alain Martin grew up within the 4 broughs of New York City, as Well as New Jersey. Inspired by Malcolm X, Dubois, Spike Lee, John Singleton, and Quentin, Martin became a film major at William Paterson University. After taking an elective in Haitian History, Alain learned about the brutal and forgotten US occupation of Haiti and a seed was planted by his professor, who suggest that Martin make a documentary about the subject.
About “The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow Goes to Haiti” 🎬
“The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow goes to Haiti,” a documentary feature film that explores Haiti’s racist occupation by the United States, made its Los Angeles debut at the Haiti International Film Festival 2023.
Jacquil Constant, who founded the Haiti International Film Festival 8 years ago to increase the visibility of Haitian cinema, credits the decision to select The Forgotten Occupation based on the “filmmakers’ superb attention to detail…with the juxtaposition of narration and archival footage,” he continues, “[the film does] a great job of capturing the American Occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934.”
The feature documentary is the work of writer-director Alain Martin who, along with producer Hans Augustave, spent ten years laboring over the project. The film, which interweaves Martin’s complex relationship with his US-loving grandfather, cinema verité, and captivating interviews features award-winning and prolific novelist Edwidge Dandicat, writer and professor Yveline Alexis, political activist Patrick Elie, as well as professor of the Humanities, Laurent DuBois.
“The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow goes to Haiti” is a personal examination of the now forgotten occupation of Haiti at the hands of American marines who, coming from a segregated society, imposed their own set of Jim Crow practices in the country.
The Forgotten Occupation is both timely and relevant, as it arrives at a moment in which many are openly advocating for another American intervention, seeing it as the only way to rescue a nation that has been made socially and politically dysfunctional by the confluence of a set of crises that have been decades in the making.
