Haiti's lost voice.

• Author: Kim, Kevin Y.
• Position: Movie Review

Filming Haiti sounds oddly left-field for most directors. Until the U.S. debut of his newest film this spring, however, Jonathan Demme had been tooling The Agronomist, on and off, for over a decade. It is the Oscar-winning producer and director's fifth movie on the perpetually impoverished country--not counting Hannibal Lecter's escape to a Haiti-like island in Silence of the Lambs.

Moving past where his exec-produced Haiti: Killing the Dream ended with the 1991 coup of ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, The Agronomist centers on the life and work of Jean Leopold Dominique, once Haiti's most outspoken, renowned pro-democracy activist and radio journalist. From its 1971 launch to its third, final shutdown in 2003, Dominique's Radio Haiti Inter was a rare independent voice whose investigations, commentary, and foreign news roused Haiti's people and riled its elites--until a hail of bullets overtook Dominique one quiet morning four years ago.

It was Dominique's still-unsolved murder by thugs allegedly linked to Haitian pols that compelled Demme to wrap up The Agronomist. Until then, the roughly three hours of video he had culled from various encounters in Haiti and New York with Dominique and his wife, Michele Montas, were still a handheld-DV hobby-horse.

"At first, it was filming, interviewing, just for the sake of it," says Montas, a Columbia-trained journalist who headed Radio Haiti's newsroom and ran the station after Dominique's death. After meeting the pair in 1987, Demme had found Dominique one of the most dynamic, fascinating persons he ever met. "The Agronomist really started as a sleazy kind of deception," Demme publicly admits, "a flimsy excuse for one guy--me--to get to know another guy--Jean Dominique."

The resulting footage of Dominique holding forth on all things Haitian--from personal experience, history, and politics to Haitian identity, media, and cinema--forms the core of The Agronomist's occasionally meandering, but ever-deepening narrative. "During the project, we always had the feeling it would never end," Montas recalls. "We never thought of the big screen. And it kept changing--first an homage to a friend, then a story about a man and his land...