L’HOMME SUR LES QUAIS (2nd American Film Festival, 1993)

In his feature film L'homme sur les quais, Raoul Peck looks back and portrays life under the military regime in Haiti from the perspective of a girl. He does not aim for a realistic restaging of historical events; Peck rather wants to try to grasp how a bad dream that became reality is experienced by a child. What should eight-year-old Sarah, the main character of his film, think when she has to watch from the balcony as her father in uniform maltreats a relative of the family with an iron bar?

Raoul Peck lets Sarah, as a woman of today, reflect on her childhood of that time. He flashes back, allows traumatic scenes like the one described to emerge: Indelible splinters of memory. The dictatorship divides families. The men on the quays, to whom the title alludes, are the secret police of those days. One of them is the sadist Janvier, who also managed to expel Sarah's father, who was relatively loyal to the government, so that the child would grow up with her grandmother and her father's two sisters. Peck has crafted an atmospherically dense film. What distinguishes the film is its attention to the smallest details that impose that unbearable tension on the atmosphere of that time, is the agonizing silence, reminiscent of the ritualized silence of many Westerns: here it recalls a reality in which there was nothing to play with.