As reported by Dominican Today on June 10 2009:

http://www.screendaily.com/ScreenDailyArticle.aspx?intStoryID=33948


The Price of Sugar
Peter Brunette in Los Angeles
09 Aug 2007 11:32
Dir: Bill Haney. US. 2007. 90min
One the stand-out documentaries at Austin's SXSW festival this past spring was Bill Haney's The Price of
Sugar, a sobering and well-done examination of the unpleasant realities behind the sugar tens of millions of
Americans innocently sprinkle over their cereal in the morning.
A theatrical release for this often dramatic and riveting film, which sports exceptionally high production values, seems a
stretch. But television outlets around the world should give it a serious look, and it could also do very well on DVD,
especially if marketed to the same demographic and in the same word-of-mouth manner which made Al Gore's An
Inconvenient Truth so commercially and politically successful. It next screens at IDA's Docuweek in LA (Aug 17 to 23)
and will have festival bookings throughout the year.
The most shocking revelation in the film is found not too far inland from the pristine beaches of the Dominican
Republic, best known as the Caribbean island retreat for the family travelling on a limited holiday budget. Here lie what
can best be described as modern-day concentration camps, in which dispossessed, impoverished Haitians (who come
from the other, western half of the island known as Hispaniola) are forced to work cutting sugarcane for inhumanly long
hours in back-breaking circumstances. They are paid just enough money keep themselves and their sickly, uneducated
children barely alive.
Lured across the mountainous border from Haiti, where their daily lives are already miserable enough, these Haitians
(who bear the additional handicap of being despised by the lighter-skinned Dominicans) soon enough find that they
have jumped from the frying pan into the fire. At least in Haiti, they didn't have armed guards patrolling day and night to
keep them by force on the subhuman, plantations, lest they flee.
What separates The Price of Sugar from the proliferation of other run-of-the-mill outraged progressive documentaries is
its focus on a charismatic, almost suicidally-driven Spanish priest named Christopher Hartley (his name derives from
the fact that his father is British). Father Hartley has taken on the Dominican establishment, the government, the cynical
media bent on perpetuating myths about the Haitians for their own purposes, and, above all, the sugar companies that
profit mightily from this indentured servitude.
Clearly on a divinely-inspired mission derived from twenty years of working with Mother Theresa, Father Hartley
earnestly follows her simple advice to "love the poor." Provocatively challenging the status quo, the priest brings in
doctors to tend to the sick Haitian children and incites the workers to strike. Unsurprisingly, none of this sits too well
with the powers that be, nor even with the poorest Dominicans, misled by their own racism, who daily threaten Father
Hartley's life. Much of the film's suspense--and for a documentary, it is enormously suspenseful--comes from our fear,
with each new provocation, that he has finally gone too far.
The ultimate point of the film, of course, is to awaken the benighted viewer to realise the extent of his own responsibility
involved in that simple little spoonful of sugar. This is familiar territory for director Haney, whose previous documentary
- he has made a total of four - aimed in more or less the same direction. Called Life Among Whales (2005), the film
seeks to examine human-whale relations in the person of a charismatic whale activist named Dr. Roger Payne and, by
extension, vividly demonstrates our quickly deteriorating relations with our non-human fellow inhabitants of this severely
stressed planet.


Production company
Uncommon Productions
Sales contact
Mitropoulos Films (+ 1 310 273 1444)Producers
Tim Disney
Eric Grunebaum
Bill Haney
Screenplay
Peter Rhodes
Editing
Peter Rhodes
Cinematography
Jerry Risius
Eric Cochran
Music
Claudio Ragazzi
Cast
Father Christopher Hartley
Paul Newman (narrator)
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The Price of Sugar
Bottom Line: This politically charged docu should be required viewing for Americans.
By Stephen Farber
Aug 23, 2007

DocuWeek


A number of documentaries during the past few years have taken aim at the bad behavior of American government and business. Many of these focus on Iraq, but "The Price of Sugar" travels to another part of the world, where American policies have not always fostered decency or compassion. Bill Haney's disturbing film is set in the Dominican Republic, where most American sugar imports are produced. The film exposes the slave labor on which the country's sugar industry is built. But what keeps it from being just another angry screed is its portrayal of a most unusual hero, a Catholic priest named Father Christopher Hartley, who has set out to improve the lot of the sugar cane workers in that country.

In Latin America, priests often have been political activists, fighting for their parishioners in more than just an abstract spiritual sense. Hartley has an unusual background: He was born in Europe, and his father was a British industrialist, while his mother came from an aristocratic family in Spain. He found his vocation when he went to work with Mother Teresa in India, then traveled to the Dominican Republic, where he has rankled the country's rulers.

The situation of the sugar cane workers is unique and tragic. They are primarily Haitian immigrants who enter the country illegally and are then stripped of their identity cards and kept in primitive conditions on the country's vast sugar plantations. They are scorned by the citizens of the Dominican Republic, as one person in the film suggests, because they are "poorer and blacker" than the country's natives. Yet the owners of the plantations exploit their desperation to hire them as little more than indentured servants. One cannot help seeing parallels to the situation of illegal immigrants in the U.S., who are courted by employers seeking cheap labor but despised by much of the rest of the population.

While the political implications of the film are provocative, "Sugar" also happens to be an impressive cinematic achievement. This picture has a visual sweep that many docu films lack; the plantations and nearby towns are vividly evoked. A scene in the plantation's desolate cemetery is especially haunting. Peter Rhodes' editing strikes just the right balance of the personal and the political, and Paul Newman's heartfelt narration lends considerable dignity to the film.


Unlike some other political docus, this one boasts a guarded sense of optimism. Hartley, along with Peace Corps volunteers and doctors whom he brought from the U.S., has made an appreciable difference in the lives of the workers. Although the priest has been threatened with expulsion from the country, he has managed to win some slight but measurable improvements in the working conditions on the plantations. Yet the film still makes us think about our own responsibility for the lives of people whose products we eagerly consume while remaining blithely ignorant about the social conditions under which those goods were manufactured. The filmmakers deserve credit for opening our eyes.

THE PRICE OF SUGAR
Uncommon Prods.
Credits:
Director: Bill Haney
Screenwriters: Bill Haney, Peter Rhodes
Producers: Eric Grunebaum, Bill Haney
Executive producer: Tim Disney
Directors of photography: Eric Cochran, Jerry Risius
Music: Claudio Ragazzi
Co-executive producers: Abby Disney, Kees Kasander, Marie Langlois
Editor: Peter Rhodes
Narrator: Paul Newman
Running time -- 95 minutes
No MPAA rating

HAITI-DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Film on Plantations Spurs Backlash
By Michael Deibert

Credit:Walter Astrada

Armed sugar cane field guard in the Dominican Republic.

NEW YORK, Jun 4 (IPS) - When a man stood up at the Paris screening of director Amy Serrano's "The Sugar Babies", demanding to know how one of the film's subjects, the Belgian priest Pedro Ruquoy, could afford such a large car on his priestly salary, Ruquoy was nonplussed.

Ruquoy, who had ministered to Haitian workers in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic for 30 years before being driven from the country amidst death threats in 2005, replied that, for the first several years of his time in the country, he rode a mule, and from then on, a motorcycle.

The mysterious protestor was apparently attempting to criticise another film, "The Price of Sugar" by Bill Haney, which traces the similar struggles of the Anglo-Spanish priest Father Christopher Hartley. In the film, Hartley is seen driving a 4x4 over the roads of the eastern Dominican Republic.

Due to technical problems at the Esclaves au Paradis (Slaves in Paradise) conference in Paris, which sought to explore what organisers say are the appalling conditions of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic, the screening times of the two films had been reversed under short notice.

"It was strange that the questions were totally unrelated to film we had just screened," says Anne Lescot, the coordinator of the colloquium and its film programmer. "They had obviously been prepared for the other film."

However disjointed, the mysterious man's interjections appeared of a piece with similar interruptions and protests that have greeted events attempting to discuss the ever-more contentious issue of the treatment of the estimated 650,000 to one million undocumented Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, fleeing the political violence and economic stagnation of their often-tumultuous homeland.

Though these immigrants have traditionally laboured in the sugarcane fields, known as bateys, controlled by individuals such as the Cuban-American sugar barons Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul, and the wealthy Dominican Vicini family (owners of the Grupo Vicini collection of companies and of the Diario Libre newspaper), recently Haitians have also taken jobs in such urban endeavors as construction, auto repair and working in the country's booming resorts.

In a recent cease-and-desist order sent to the makers of "The Price of Sugar", the Washington law firm Patton Boggs (which had previously represented the government of ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide), acting on behalf of the Grupo Vicini -- subjects of scathing criticism in the film -- outlined what it claimed were 45 defamatory statements against the corporation in the movie. The objections ranged from the Grupo Vicini's contention that its workers were not under armed guard, to allegations that some of those depicted in the film as living in sub-standard conditions on the bateys were not in fact batey employees.

"I don't know why these people are going after not only the sugar operations of the Vicini family but sugar operations in the Dominican Republic in general," Read McCaffrey, the lead counsel at Paton Boggs representing the company, told IPS. "I've gone through the bateys and seen conditions that are significantly better than those in this documentary. It is unfortunate that the film is being shown as something accurate when it is propaganda."

In response to some of the charges, Father Christopher Hartley, the priest portrayed in the film, produced to IPS over a dozen still photographs from 2003-2004 of armed men that he says were taken in and around Vicini-controlled sugar operations. In many of the photos, the men carrying pump-action shotguns are wearing baseball caps bearing the logo of the Ingenio Cristóbal Colón, a Grupo Vicini-controlled sugar complex on the outskirts of the Dominican city of San Pedro de Macorís.

"I believe that it is unworthy of the human person to exist in the living and working conditions that were present within the boundaries of my parish," Hartley, who has been the object of great vilification in some quarters of the Dominican media, told IPS from his home in Spain, where he has lived since being forced out of his community deep in sugar territory on 2006. "It is an intrinsic aspect of my pastoral mission to do the utmost to help these people defend their dignity, and their human rights."

Supporting Hartley's position, a prize-winning reporter for a major South Florida daily newspaper, present during the filming of scenes in "The Price of Sugar" and speaking on the condition of anonymity, has confirmed the general conditions it depicts of life in the bateys as accurate. Though the reporter feels that certain elements of the film might have been exaggerated for dramatic effect, the reporter said that the abysmal living and working conditions of Haitians working in Grupo Vicini-controlled bateys are largely true.

"Everything (Hartley) said about those conditions, he didn't need to say it," the reporter told IPS. "When you walked around in the bateys, you could see that people were living in bad conditions, were defeated, it was a miserable life. You didn't need words to explain it, it was there."

"The Price of Sugar" is not the only target of controversy.

To help shape its public image, the Grupo Vicini has also retained the services of Newlink, a Miami-based public relations and consulting firm founded and run by former television journalist Sergio Roitberg. In addition to the Grupo Vicini, Newlink's clients include the Policia National of the Dominican Republic and the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana, (PLD), the political party of Dominican president Leonel Fernández .

At the Paris symposium, several witnesses charge that Roitberg, in addition to vociferously interrupting a question-and-answer session following an address by Father Hartley, used strong language to threaten a French-Peruvian photographer, Céline Anaya Gautier, who spent two years documenting the lives of Haitians in the bateys and whose photographs form a large part of the exhibition.

"We know who you are, we know where you live," Roitberg is alleged to have said to Gautier, an account that she confirms. "Be very careful."

Newlink and Roitberg did not respond to IPS requests for comment.

The road for those agitating on behalf of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent has never been an easy one.

Sonia Pierre, a Dominican of Haitian descent who leads the Movimiento De Mujeres Dominico Haitiana (MUDHA), was part of a legal team that, in September 2005, successfully argued before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the Dominican Republic was in violation of five articles of the American Convention on Human Rights Pact of San Jose, Costa Rica in denying citizenship to two young girls, Dilcia Yean and Violeta Bosico, born in the Dominican Republic.

That decision reinforced that, in its denial of citizenship to persons born within its borders, the Dominican Republic was in violation of Article 11 of its own constitution, which guarantees Dominican citizenship to the all those born within its territory save for those "in transit" and the children of foreign diplomats.

For her efforts, Pierre, a 2006 recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, has been the subject of attempts by members of the Dominican congress to revoke her citizenship, despite the fact that she was born and raised in the country.

Dominican Foreign Minister Carlos Morales Troncoso, one of the bitterest critics of the newly-assertive Haitian presence in the Dominican Republic and of Pierre in particular, has a long-standing relationship as an executive and major shareholder of the Central Romana sugar concern, along with the aforementioned Fanjuls.

Bitter vision grows in the sugarcane fields
Filmmaker moved by workers' plight
By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff | June 18, 2007

WAYLAND -- Back in the beginning -- before the film-festival award, before the cease-and-desist letter and the threat of a lawsuit, before the attention from Congress and Amnesty International -- before all that, Bill Haney had nothing more in mind than a few modest steps to improve healthcare in the Dominican Republic.

But then Haney sat down for lunch with an intense, charismatic priest, the Rev. Christopher Hartley . The priest told him, point-blank: "The biggest contribution you could make would be to explore the conditions of the people in my parish."

With those words, the wheels were set in motion for a project that would consume three years of Haney's life and immerse him in a world that would appall, anger, and ultimately inspire him. He discovered both a movie and a mission -- not that Haney has ever made much of a distinction between the two.

That world was the "bateyes," the workers' enclaves near the sugarcane fields in the Dominican Re public where Haitian migrants toil. The conditions under which the Haitian cane-cutters live and work are the subject of Haney's wrenching new documentary, "The Price of Sugar." Narrated by Paul Newman, the movie was screened over the weekend at the Nantucket Film Festival and Provincetown International Film Festival.

"The Price of Sugar" depicts the lives of the Haitian workers as marked by hunger, arduous labor, and day-to-day desperation. It is a title -- and a film -- designed to make US consumers think about the human cost of sweetening their morning coffee. "We told a small story so we could tell a big story," said Haney, 45, sitting in his book-lined home office, noting that the Dominican Republic exports much of its sugar to the United States . "This story is partly how US consumers and taxpayers subsidize things they don't know about and would never support if they did know. It's what capitalism looks like if unchecked by the hand of government."

"The more I got into the story, the more shocking and powerful it became," added Haney. "We saw intimidated, almost traumatized Haitians. Frequently, there would be guys with weapons on horses who would ride around us. They never pointed a gun at me, but we were told that if the Haitians tried to flee they would be captured and beaten. These overseers were a law unto themselves."

US Representative James McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, who met with Haney last Wednesday in Washington, said he found the film deeply troubling and plans to organize screenings for other members of Congress.

"We're going to look into this issue," said McGovern. "Anyone who sees this will want to take action."

Called into priesthood
At the center of the film is Hartley, the impassioned and implacable son of a wealthy family who startled his parents by announcing, as a teenager, that he wanted to become a priest. "He had a moment of feeling he was called by God, and instead of living the life of a wealthy playboy, he went to Calcutta and worked with Mother Teresa for 20 years," Haney said. When he was assigned to San Jose de los Llanos, a town in the Dominican Republic , Hartley began championing the cause of the Haitian migrant workers. That set him at odds with the Vicini family, the sugar barons whose plantations are the focus of "The Price of Sugar."

"He's a complicated guy," Haney says. "He's not a saint. He could occasionally be self-righteous. But this guy has given up every material thing. He's committed to the poorest of the poor. . . . It's the heroic tale of how one person can really make a difference."

But it is not a story with a happy ending. Hartley was removed from his parish and, he has said, forced to leave the country last year under pressure from the Vicini family and the Dominican government. Haney, meanwhile, may soon be the target of a lawsuit by the Vicini family. Grupo Vicini, the family-run company under which the sugar plantations operate, hired the powerful Washington law firm Patton Boggs, which sent Haney a letter last month demanding he stop showing the movie. The cease-and-desist letter from Patton Boggs attorney Read K. McCaffrey says that the film contains false statements and misrepresentations, and that it is defamatory of his clients "and, indeed, of the country itself."

McCaffrey declined the Globe's request for an interview, saying through a spokesman that he was unable to comment "since this matter will involve litigation." McCaffrey told the IPS news agency this month that he had visited the bateyes and had "seen conditions that are significantly better than those in this documentary. It is unfortunate that the film is being shown as something accurate when it is propaganda."

Campos de Moya, vice president of communications for Grupo Vicini, could not be reached for comment. His assistant said he was out of the country.

Haney said he stands behind the accuracy of his film, adding that he hired fact-checkers before releasing it. "These lawsuits are designed to bully you," he said. "Nobody wants to spend five, six, seven years being sued. But it's not going to stop us from showing it."

So far, the reception from audiences has been favorable. In March the film, written and directed by Haney, and produced by him and Eric Grunebaum , won the Audience Award at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. In addition, Amnesty International has asked Haney for permission to screen "The Price of Sugar" to its chapters as part of an effort to build support for legislative change to help the sugar workers.

A life-altering experience
All in all, making the film was a transforming experience for Haney, who was no stranger to life transformations already.

The child of a middle-class family in Portsmouth, R.I., Haney won admission to Harvard in 1980. To help pay his tuition, he began cleaning toilets in campus housing, where he noticed that fireplaces were going unused. So, he and a friend drove a truck to New Hampshire, bought a large load of firewood, and brought it back to Harvard Yard. They made $4,000, and an entrepreneur was born. Before his freshman year was over, Haney had started his own company, built around a technology to reduce air pollution.

Over the next two decades, he would help launch more than a dozen technology companies. But as he reached his late 30s, Haney began to feel restless.

"I was sort of groping around, trying to figure out what I could do that might be useful," he said. He had been bitten by the filmmaking bug when he helped finance a couple of films (including Errol Morris's "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control"). So he and a friend, Tim Disney (son of Roy Disney and great-nephew of Walt Disney), decided to make movies .

Haney attended a screenwriting seminar led by the famed Robert McKee (memorably featured in "Adaptation") and began writing scripts. The first collaboration between Haney and Disney, "A Question of Faith," won critical respect but flopped commercially. But in the past seven years he and Disney have been involved in the production of a dozen more films.

It is clear that the poverty and misery he saw while shooting "The Price of Sugar" shook him to the core. "The extreme vulnerability of the people," Haney said slowly. "That's how most people in the world live. It's very scary to have a child and think you won't be able to take care of them. To live that way and still find meaning, still find joy, still find God: I found the courage required to get through their daily lives inspiring."

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.