Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams, this is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100 .5 FM in the Lower Mainland. Today I talk with Michelle Stevenson about her new documentary film, Stateless.
Speaker: Haiti and the Dominican Republic share a long history dating back to colonial rule when France and Spain divided the island of Hispaniola along cultural and racial lines. Despite historic cross -border solidarity and peaceful coexistence between the two countries, Haitians have been subject to waves of state -sponsored violence.
Speaker: In 1937, the Dominican Army murdered tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. In 2013, the Dominican Republic Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents. The ruling left more than 200 ,000 people without a nationality or a homeland.
Speaker: Director Michelle Stevenson's new documentary, Stateless, examines the history and politics of Haiti and the Dominican Republic through the grassroots electoral campaign of a young attorney named Rosa Iris. Stateless is a co -production between Hispaniola Productions and the National Film Board of Canada.
Speaker: The film won the special jury prize for Canadian features at Hot Docs in Toronto last month. And for the next week, Stateless is available online in British Columbia as part of the Docs of Documentary Film Festival. Michelle Stevenson joins me today from New York to talk about the film. Hello, Michelle. Hi. Now, you have a personal connection with Haiti. Tell me about that.
Speaker: I do. Well, I was born in Haiti. My father is Haitian and my mother is Panamanian, a Panamanian descent. And I left very young. We left as exilees from the Duvalier dictatorship in the late 60s and immigrated to North America, first to New York and then to Canada. So my formative years were actually spent in Canada in the Eastern townships in Quebec.
Speaker: But I used to go regularly to spend my summer vacations in Haiti with my grandmother through the course of my high school and late elementary school years, and just grew up around the culture, deeply embedded in everything I did. And so when this 2013 ruling came down, then it was, I guess it had a real strong impact on you.
Speaker: Absolutely. It had a very strong impact on me. I mean, I grew up learning a lot about the relationships between the Dominicans and Haitians, which is very complicated and deep, but also always knew about the racism and racial hatred that darker -skinned Dominicans and Dominicans of Haitian descent suffered from. But also, I think
Speaker: as an immigrant myself of color who've settled in the United States and in Canada and witnessing, but also experiencing ourselves, discrimination in our new homeland, it kind of had this double thing for me, recognizing not just the cultural connection between those who have just been denationalized, but understanding the vulnerability that exists among migrants and their descendants.
Speaker: And why did you choose Rosé and Rhys to be the central character in the story? Well, I met Rosé Iris through my communications and connections I had actually even before starting the film with people on the ground who had been involved in the movement to defend the rights of Dominicans of Haitian descent. And she was doing work on the ground as part of an organization called Reco Nocido. She herself
Speaker: is a Dominican woman of Dominican and Haitian descent of both ancestry. And when I met her, I really just fell in love with her presence, her commitment, but also her willingness to be so open about herself, her choices, her family, and the decisions that she was going about to make regarding what she felt was needed to be done on the ground to defend her community.
Speaker: And so we became friends and we're still very connected, but also I felt she was a really beautifully strong vehicle through which we could tell the broader story of what's going on on the island. And you spent a long time making the film. So the two of you spent a long time together on this project.
Speaker: Yes, we did. The film was shot over the course of about five years. We just recently finished it. So the decision, the Supreme Court decision happened in 2013. I was on the ground six months later doing research, trying to find participants such as Rosa Eadys and interviewing them to see, you know, who we could spend some time with. And then it took us about, yeah, till the end of 2019 to wrap
Speaker: Another important person in the story is Rosé Iris' cousin, Juan Teofilo, who lost his nationality under the new law. What happened to him when he lost his status? When Juan Teofilo lost his status, he is really an example of the extreme impact
Speaker: that the invisibility of statelessness happens. I think for us, sometimes it seems kind of theoretical. What does that mean to not have your birth certificate or to not have access to certain things that we kind of take for granted? Like a birth certificate is never something that we ever would think in the course of our lives that could even be annulled. But in his case, it was. And it meant from one day to the next, he had no access to his bank account. He could no longer own telephone, a cell phone account.
Speaker: He couldn't study if he wanted to. He couldn't apply for a job. He had no documentation, access to any documentation that would allow him to continue a normal civilian life that he did prior to losing these papers. And so he became invisible. And that's where you have over 200 ,000 people who become invisible with an inability to earn an income in an official way. So they're forced into an underground economy
Speaker: and exposed to exploitation. But he has a very specific decision that he made, and his philosophical outlook is slightly different from Rosa Yves. Rosa Yves still believes in the system. She still believes that there's certain things that she can change from within, from inside that might lend some hope for an opportunity for Dominicans of Haitian descent or darker skinned Dominicans. He kind of opted out and decided to escape, essentially, and run
Speaker: to the mountains of Haiti. And in some ways, Haiti kind of ironically becomes a point of liberation, as opposed to being looked at as a place of dissolution. It becomes a place where we can potentially reimagine our lives. And so in that sense, he's what I would call a modern day maroon. And maroons were people under slavery who would escape
Speaker: from their enslaved situation and create these autonomous communities in the mountains. This is current in Latin American and the Caribbean. So I'd like to see him that way in terms of the symbolism of his choices.
Speaker: There's a scene in the film where he's talking to an official about his documents. And watching that scene, it's like something out of Franz Kafka. There's no way he can prove that those documents are valid. Exactly, exactly. So to give a little bit of background, when the Supreme Court decision happened to basically annul, denationalize people, annul their certificates of people who were born in the DR, it would be like if my son,
Speaker: Born in Canada, the Canadian government decides from one day the next, the Supreme Court, that their birth certificate is no longer valid because their parents are immigrants from a specific country. And that's what happened to him. And they made that decision retroactive to 1929. So they're generations of people who were affected.
Speaker: And so the government had to react because there was a lot of pressure from the international organizations that this was just unacceptable and humane against all types of international law. And the government was response was to create this very bureaucratic, passive aggressive mode of potentially you, if you have the right documents are able to go to certain places to prove with affidavits that certain things exist.
Speaker: You can have potentially your papers, but you are marked in a separate registry. And some people did opt for that, but it means that there's a separation and there's this kind of, it's almost sort of this fascistic Nazi type of regulation. And in his particular case, what happens is it's always a moving target.
Speaker: The bureaucracy will say, well, you need these papers. You come and you present those papers and they say, oh no, I need something else. And then you do that. And they say, oh no, that's not enough. I need something else. They keep you in this circular, Kafkaesque is the best word for it, bureaucratic system where ultimately people give up and many people have given up. The other main character in the film is Gladys. How did you find her?
Speaker: So Gladys is part of the ultra -nationalist fascist movement in the Dominican Republic. It's a deeply racist movement that is similar to the white supremacist movements that we see in the United States and in some places in Canada as well. And she is someone, and she's part of an aspect of the society that for me was extremely important to have as part of this story.
Speaker: So we could actually contextualize the stakes, the level of the stakes that existed against Rosairis and Teofilo, that these were real, the hatred is real, the racism is real. And she sort of personifies that. But it took me a long time to kind of get to her. I had some collaborator field producers on the ground in DR who were tremendously, really strong collaborators. And they set up a bunch of different sort of
Speaker: interviews, meetings with people who seemed that they were willing to collaborate with us on this project, who wanted to tell the story of why Haitians should be expulsed, why Dominicans of Haitians should not be given their birth certificates. But they were all just so aggressive and vitriolic in their expression that I had to take a step and think, can I even spend two hours with this person?
Speaker: with the level of hatred that I can actually feel in my bones. And then we fell upon, and there were mostly men actually, that I was thinking and knowing that I would have to spend, you know, a year or two years with some of these people. And we fell upon then Gladys. And the interesting thing about Gladys is there's sort of an unsuspecting aspect to her where what comes out of her mouth you don't expect, but
Speaker: It is, she really pinpoints for me the notion and reality that she could be my aunt, she could be my neighbor. There's a very kind of normal aspect to her, which there is to hatred as well, that we have to reckon with as people maybe who are trying to change things. And I've shown the film to a couple of Dominican Americans who see in Gladys
Speaker: you know, members of their family, that they're going to have, you know, very difficult conversations with. So I fell upon her and I realized, okay, there are aspects of her that I can actually kind of relate to. And I have to lean into my own discomfort and open up
Speaker: the possibilities of her wanting to tell her story. And it was extremely difficult for me emotionally. I was sort of soy to undercover. She never asked or found out that I was Haitian myself, Haitian Canadian, because I'm a light skin Haitian woman, black woman. And so it never crossed her mind that I could actually have my roots in that country.
Speaker: because she had this stereotypical notion of what Haitians looked like and acted. And so I had, you know, first seed access to these conversations that were deeply disturbing. But one thing it did make me understand, or that I actually kind of realized before even kind of engaging with her, but kind of solidified is that, you know, the communities from which she is,
Speaker: The ideology that she espouses, the people who believe in that, there's no way we're going to change her mind or other people's minds because we can present the facts, but she will always find a way to blame it on Asians or find a way to justify and rationalize. It's like it is a belief system that is religious zealotry in nature. And so when we think about telling stories or building narratives,
Speaker: I think we have to move away from any potential of converting people who are already kind of deeply ingrained in that spot and think about where can I make change with these narratives that can actually build movement.
Speaker: The film's being released at a time when there are huge uprisings against systemic racism and against police brutality. What connections do you see between the story of the film and what's happening now? Well, I see the effects certainly in our Western hemisphere of white supremacy and institutionalized racism in every aspects of our lives. It's like the air we breathe.
Speaker: And I see statelessness as the extreme manifestation in that continuum of how systemic inequities express themselves because it is the ultimate invisibility that is the result of anti -Black hatred. And along that continuum are things like COVID and the pandemic where it is further revealed to a larger segment of society that sometimes is in denial
Speaker: all of the inequities that exist in terms of how that pandemic affects marginalized groups in such a larger percentage and toll, whether we think about, I mean, think about Montreal, because I have my extended family there, and looking at the Haitian community
Speaker: and communities of color in the northern part of Montreal are much more deeply hit by the COVID pandemic than other places in that space. And same with the United States. I mean, statistics are quite mind boggling and reveal the inequities in the healthcare system as well, but also the toll, the literal physical toll that institutional racism has on black and brown bodies. And so,
Speaker: You know, people are out in the streets. It is undeniable now. There is no rationalization or justification we can make where you can deny the facts. And the facts have been around for a long time. And I think that's why you see the bigger numbers of people uprising. And today, there's no real middle ground. You're either a racist or you're an anti -racist.
Speaker: the notion that if we stand in the middle, then we're racist because our inaction simply perpetuates the inequities. It's how can we put into practice visions of anti -racism, anti -racist practices in our everyday lives, but also pressuring for legislative and policy changes that can address these inequities
Speaker: is really the only route to sort of get us out of this system that is really, it is a machine that feeds upon itself, but it's also leading to our collective destruction. And even the notion of allyship, I don't even think applies because it's about the survival of us as human beings. Because if we look at the inequities of the pandemic, the inequities
Speaker: that express themselves, you still can't contain the virus. So we have to think of it as our collective interest. And our collective interest has to be anti -racist in our ultimate goals.
Speaker: So, in a sense, this film is coming out at a time that will really change the impact of the message with the pandemic and the uprisings at the same time, then the message will be amplified, do you think? I certainly hope so, because again, I see these interconnections and maybe because I am a child of the diaspora, I see, you know,
Speaker: I don't really see borders. I see a continuum. I can see a continuum of how things are expressed. And for us in the Americas, it all started on that island of Hispaniola. When Columbus first arrived in 1492, he arrived on the island of Hispaniola. The first Africans arrived on Hispaniola. The first genocide against indigenous people by Europeans happened.
Speaker: on the island of Hispaniola. And from there, the racial caste system that is expressed from, you know, as far north as Canada and its own, you know, iterations to as far south as Argentina came from there. So we all have this large
Speaker: Well, family, for lack of a better word. And, you know, the way it expresses it in the Dominican Republic is very connected with what we believe in and support or deny in Canada. So, yes. So I think that stateless is very timely. In some ways, it's even more timely now than it was before the pandemic because it is a further sign of story.
Speaker: of how institutionalized racism expresses itself, but also how white supremacy and racist ideals express themselves in individuals and getting kind of a first seat sort of witness of rationalizations and how people act who truly believe in this ideology.
Speaker: It's a wonderful film, and it's beautifully shot, and I so appreciate you talking to me about it today. Thank you so much for having me. I've been speaking with Michelle Stevenson, writer and director of the new documentary, Stateless. The film is a co -production between Hispaniola Productions and the National Film Board of Canada, and it's showing now in British Columbia as part of the online DOCSA documentary film festival.
Speaker: The festival runs until next Friday, June 26, and you can find out how to view, stateless, and more than 40 other films at doxafestival .ca. The Red Eye podcast is produced at the studios of Vancouver Co -op Radio. You can support us by supporting Co -op Radio.
Speaker: go to coopradio .org and click on the donate button. Independent media relies on the support of people like you.
