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Haiti / All works

Cinema

Map palé nèt

Raphaël Stines · 1976

Synopsis

In a hotel room, a woman waits for her lover to return, and the hours of his absence exasperate her. When he finally comes home, he refuses to speak to her, and she begins to open her heart to him in a long monologue. The film transposes into Haitian Creole Jean Cocteau's one-act play, Le Bel Indifférent, with Jocelyne Alphonse and François Latour.

Context

Cocteau had had his play premiered in 1940 at the Bouffes-Parisiens with Édith Piaf and Paul Meurisse. According to Joël Lorquet's thesis, Rassoul Labuchin wrote the Creole adaptation, and the film, shot on sixteen-millimetre colour stock, runs twenty-five minutes, which SensCritique confirms; Lorquet sees in it the first Haitian film shot on film stock. Sources call it sometimes a medium-length film, sometimes a short film.

Who it is for

A film barely half an hour long, in Haitian Creole, known above all through the histories of the country's cinema.

Prizes and reception

It is ranked among the only three films produced in Haiti during the twenty-eight years of the Duvalier dictatorship.

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