Meurtre à Pacot

After Raoul Peck documented the earthquake that shook Port-au-Prince in January 2010 in his film DEADLY AID, he focuses on a bourgeois couple in MURDER IN PACOT. The earthquake in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince in January 2010 turned large parts of the city into a field of rubble. The villa of a married couple living in the upscale neighborhood of Pacot was also destroyed. In the ruins, they try to reorganize their everyday life and rent out the undamaged part of the house to Alex, a European NGO disaster relief worker. When his young Haitian lover Andrémise moves in, the situation between the two unequal couples comes to a head. Peck contrasts the claustrophobic confines of the destroyed house with the vastness of the social issues that have shaped Haiti for decades. With symbolically dense images and a precise view of social abysses, the director creates a drama that transcends the specific location. It is about possession and loss, dominance and dependence, but also about the fragile attempt to regain normality. MURDER IN PACOT premiered in Venice in 2014 in the “Giornate degli Autori” section and was subsequently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where it received international attention. With these festival appearances, the film established itself as a powerful contribution to world cinema, highlighting Haiti's aftershocks not only as a natural disaster but also as a social and political flashpoint.