At Martha’s Vineyard festival, Jean & I centers Haitian girls caught between grief and labor

The story of “Jean & I” began with an earthquake and took more than ten years to tell.

When filmmaker Mirta Desir arrived in Haiti after the 2010 disaster to assist with a mobile medical team, she was immediately struck by one recurring image: children looking for parents, parents searching for children.

Now, that experience lives inside her short film, “Jean & I,” screening this week at the 23rd Annual Martha’s Vineyard Run&Shoot African-American Film Festival. The film follows Michelle, a 10-year-old Haitian girl who, after losing her brother Jean in the quake, is relocated to Brooklyn under the promise of care and education. Instead, she finds herself trapped in the home of an interracial couple and forced to provide unpaid labor to their bedridden elder.

For a year, Michelle maintains the illusion that Jean is still with her—her grief manifesting through imagination. When she realizes she will never be allowed to leave, she poisons her captors.

The film doesn’t seek resolution so much as reckoning. Its power lies in what it dares to grant its protagonist: not pity, but agency.

“She deserves a chance to make it out,” Desir said. “I gave her a big win because we deserve it.”

Though set in Brooklyn, the film draws much of its emotional intensity from Desir’s time in post-quake Haiti.

“It started during the 2010 earthquake, where a medical group, Link Haiti, provided emergency assistance in the country,” Desir said. 

“During those trips, we set up a tent hospital in the area of Haiti that the key hospitals were not covering.”

“After several trips back and forth, what I noticed was that a lot of the people who came to our tent hospitals were parents who were still looking for their children and children who were trying to locate their parents,” Desir said.

Some of those missing had died under rubble. But others, Desir recalled, were reportedly removed by organizations with little oversight. Orphanage loopholes, lost documents, and unclear legal guardianship made Haiti ripe for both philanthropy and exploitation.

“It’s a double-edged sword because you want people to be taken out of the country,” Desir said. 

“We had several people who needed emergency medical care who couldn’t fly into Florida because, at the time, the governor had stopped all incoming flights from Haiti for medical emergency purposes.”

The border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic served as an opportunity for families to receive much-needed emergency care. But it also served as a gateway for illegal activity to occur with less oversight and less punishment. 

One case, widely reported, involved a church group from Idaho caught smuggling 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic. They claimed the children were orphans. Most weren’t.

New Life Children’s Refuge, a church based in Idaho, was caught smuggling 33 children across the Haiti–Dominican Republic border. The group claimed it was rescuing orphans, but many of the children had living parents and were not from areas affected by the earthquake. They had planned to take the children to an orphanage they were building in the Dominican Republic.

Desir chose not to center sex trafficking in her film. “It’s important,” she said. “But you still have to go to the core issue: that trafficking was possible to begin with.”

In “Jean & I,” the villains are not faceless traffickers or shadowy figures. They are a well-meaning American couple in a sunlit brownstone. The danger is proximity. The abuse is quiet.

The nuance present is unavoidable. Between the interracial couple that forces the viewer to determine what evil looks like–not always white and not always black, the airy, bright backdrop of a brownstone in Brooklyn that belies the question of where crime happens and how abuse looks, one is left having to acknowledge the complexity of the issue. 

“It fundamentally changed how I see people,” she said. “There are people who are willing to bend over backwards to help others; it is a testament to humanity. Because of my time in Haiti, my faith in humanity is not shaken.”

The post At Martha’s Vineyard festival, Jean & I centers Haitian girls caught between grief and labor appeared first on The Haitian Times.