Haiti: The Way to Freedom

The Afterlives of Sugar brings together films that consider the sugar economy not just as an industry but as a foundational structure of colonial modernity. Moving between Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, this series reveals the violence of the plantation not as a relic of the past, but as a structure whose afterlives continue to shape the present. 

In Haiti: The Way to Freedom (1973), Arnold Antonin combines archival material and text with the testimonies of Haitian political organisers to position the country’s revolutionary history as central to global anti-colonial struggle. Often regarded as the first Haitian feature-length documentary, the film opens with the arrival of Christopher Columbus to Hispaniola in 1492 and traces a thread of political upheaval through the Revolution of 1791, along the foundation of the first Black Republic and the peasant revolts, to the beginning of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship.   

Chosen for Cinelogue's catalogue by film curator and writer Jonathan Ali, Antonin’s documentary provides crucial historical context for understanding the political afterlives of the Caribbean plantation economy. Haiti’s revolution represented a profound rupture in the colonial order, destabilising the global system of plantation slavery and becoming a lasting symbol of Black self-determination. Its legacy continues to shape the region’s political imaginaries today.

Doors open at 2.30pm; event starts at 3pm and ends at 5pm.

Image credit: still from Haiti: The Way to Freedom, 1973, Arnold Antonin.