EMPOWERING HAITIANS
Paul Haggis lends hand to budding filmmakers
Paul Haggis is best known for his onscreen accomplishments. The London, Ont., native became the first screenwriter in Academy Awards history to pen two successive best-picture winners: Million Dollar Baby (2005) and Crash (2006). He also directed and won the original-screenplay Oscar for the latter.
Haggis also wrote the screenplays for Flags of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima and the 007 epics Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. Plus In the Valley of Elah, The Next Three Days and Third Person, all three of which he also directed.
Most recently, Haggis earned accolades for his direction of the stirring, fact-based HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero, about residents’ resistance to public housing in Yonkers, N.Y., and the devastating toll it took on the town’s mayor.
Few, however, are aware of Haggis’s efforts off-screen. He is the founder of Artists for Peace and Justice, which supports communities in Haiti with programs in education, health care and fostering dignity through the arts.
Haggis and filmmaker David Belle, founder of Haiti’s Ciné Institute, will be at the Quartier Latin cinema on Friday for the 11th edition of the Montreal International Black Film Festival (running Tuesday to Oct. 4), to receive the festival’s Social Impact Award for their contributions to Haitian education and social justice. This tribute will precede the screening of five films directed by graduates of Ciné Institute. There will also be a Q&A with Haggis, Belle and the graduates.
Haggis’s Haitian connection came about while promoting In the Valley of Elah in Italy seven years ago. In the midst of a conversation with an Italian journalist who had just visited Haiti, Haggis learned about Rick Frechette, an American doctor and priest who had been in Haiti for 25 years.
“The things that (Frechette) claimed he was doing there, frankly, seemed too good to believe,” recalls Haggis, 62, in a phone interview. “I said to myself that I had to go and find this guy in Haiti. And I did. I stayed with him as he worked in the slums for a week.
“I was simply blown away at how effective he was, and had been for a long time. And I saw his secret, which was about trusting and empowering the people of Haiti whom he served. Rather than doing what most charities do, which service neo-colonialist, ‘we know best’ attitudes, where they go in and try to do good for people whether those people like it or not — without consulting or empowering them. And those usually fail. But (Frechette) was successful doing so much with so little.”
Haggis decided he couldn’t just walk away from that experience, and founded Artists for Peace and Justice in 2009 — a year before the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti.
On his visit to Haiti, he met Belle, with whom he became fast friends. Belle started a film festival in Haiti a few years earlier, and had just launched a film school in the country as well.
“I thought at first that it was kind of a ridiculous idea,” Haggis
says, “but it was the kind of ridiculous idea that I love. I had been interested in starting an art school there, but was thinking: Is that absurd? I mean, people are starving.
“But (Belle) said: ‘No, that’s exactly what they need there, because if all you give to the poor is a little piece of bread for the stomach and a little piece of tin for the roof, you have failed them. You have to give these people the same possibility to attain their hopes and dreams and to express their hopes and dreams. To give them their dignity. With dignity, everything changes.’ “
Then the earthquake hit and the school was destroyed. So Haggis raised some money and opened a new space in Jacmel. He was able to prevail upon Belle to run the organization, which would absorb Belle’s Ciné Institute in exchange.
“In only our third year, the works of our graduating students are pretty impressive,” says Haggis, in reference to the films that will be screened at the festival on Friday. “We started out on such a shoestring, and we still operate on such a tight budget. But we promise those who have given us money that 100 per cent of it goes to the work on the ground.
“Even though we have raised over $20 million, we also have our high school to run for 2,800 kids in addition to our film and audio school — which are expensive to run. So it’s all the more remarkable what these graduates have achieved in just a few years. Necessity breeds creativity, and they have this deep need to tell their stories.
“People really want to see stories by those who have experienced them. And that’s not us. We can empathize, but we can’t possibly understand what they’re actually going through. Whether that’s a drama, a comedy, a documentary or a short film, these kids are graduating and telling their stories.”
Haggis visits the institute frequently and gives master classes. Plus, he brings friends like Susan Sarandon and director Nicholas Jarecki to talk to the students.
In an unrelated matter, Haggis made waves recently when he lambasted journalists for not questioning Tom Cruise about his Scientology beliefs when the actor was promoting Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation.
“It was so glaringly obvious,” Haggis said last month in a Hollywood Reporter dispatch. “There was this huge elephant there, and every journalist agreed not to address it. Why? You’re just a PR person at that point. Shame on you.”
Haggis was a longtime member of the Church of Scientology, but left in 2009. His outspoken views on Scientology and Cruise’s involvement therein were relayed in the recent Alex Gibney documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.
Haggis acknowledges that he has moved on. “(Scientology) wasn’t about my career when I got in and it wasn’t about my career when I got out.”
He is nothing if not candid when discussing his career.
“I did the movie Third Person, which came out last year (and) which some people thought was genius and others thought was a complete piece of s--t,” he muses in reference to this romance about a struggling writer, which stars Liam Neeson. “But I loved it. It was my homage to the great filmmakers who influenced me when I grew up, from the French new wave and the Italians — from people whose films would ask more questions than they answered.
“But that’s not the kind of films audiences like anymore. In fact, I don’t even think they liked them then. I loved them then. And I love them now.”
As always, the kid from London sticks to his vision, regardless of the opinions of others. Such thinking has served him well, and has resulted in numerous awards. Doubtless, he will be picking up a slew at next year’s Emmys for Show Me a Hero.
“We’ll see,” he says. “You don’t worry about awards. You worry about finding a good story and trying to tell it well.”