The Agronomist

“Haiti has something for everybody. But Haiti has very little for the Haitians,” wrote one traveler. When Hollywood director Jonathan Demme visited the island in 1986 he first met Jean Dominique, the republic's foremost independent broadcast journalist. The outspoken Dominique had studied as an agronomist, only to discover the bitter inequities that left his people no land of their own to develop. After centuries of imperialism by the French, the British and the Americans, thug regimes of “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier held all the power and enforced it with violence and intimidation. So instead of seeds, Dominique sowed information, coded in Haiti's first native-made films produced by the cinema club he helped found and in audio portraits aired on his own upstart station, Radio Haiti Inter. Twice hounded into exile, the indefatigable Dominique challenged the dictators and the Tonton Macoutes, and paid the ultimate price. Now, in this chronicle in image, sound and music by Wyclef Jean, Demme pays tribute – the truth about Jean.