
The Agronomist
US, 2003, 35mm, color, 90 min.
A strong advocate of human rights, director Jonathan Demme has produced and directed a number of documentaries about Haiti. The Agronomist, his most recent work, tells the story of Haitian national hero Jean Dominique and represents a labor of love for the director, who first met and filmed the late journalist and freedom fighter in 1987. As owner and operator of his nation’s only free radio station, Radio Haiti Inter, Dominique was frequently at odds with his country’s various repressive governments and spent much of the 1990s in exile in New York, where Demme continued to film him over the years. Following the successful reinstatement of Haiti’s democratically elected government, Demme also filmed Dominique’s triumphant return to Port Au Prince. It was Dominique’s still-unsolved assassination in April of 2000 that gave the director the impetus to assemble more than a decade’s worth of original and archival material into a celebration of the man and his legacy.