Eat, for This Is My Body

Eat, for This Is My Body is powerful and lyrical surrealism. A political and allegorical pamphlet about Haiti, the fatherland of director Michelange Quay’s parents. Once Haïti was the great coffee and sugar producer for Europe, a rich colony that became independent of France in 1804 after an army of Napoleon’s soldiers was beaten by the proud, black population that had thrown off the yoke of slavery in 1791. The past 200 years did not bring much solace to Haiti: American occupation, gruesome dictatorship and corruption. Now Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, where underdevelopment, civil war, crime, voodoo and illiteracy seem to be inextricably entangled and child labour cannot be distinguished from slavery.

That is the country to which the minutes long majestic opening scene of Eat… leads us. From the blue ocean, we fly in, over housing on the coast, over a slum neighbourhood, getting deeper and deeper into the country, to an old plantation. Quay focuses on the colonial heritage, on the age old contradictions – ‘relations’ – between black and white. In a large house, we see in stylised, melancholy tableaux vivants for instance the poetic considerations of a very pale old lady on her sick bed. Later, her daughter receives a group of young black kids. The servant, like the rest of the cast played by amateurs, mysteriously changes into an albino. —IFFR