The Jollywood Manifesto: Trans-local Film Cultures in Haiti's Emerging Cinemas

Taking into account Haiti’s peripheral and/or temporary position within World Cinema’s politics, this paper focuses on a recent phenomenon of cinematographic productions of Haiti’s emerging filmmaker’s generation: Jollywood. The Cine Institute is the only film school in the French-speaking part of the West Indies that currently provides training to a young generation of filmmakers and videographers. Its Jollywood Manifesto is based on the political, cultural and societal as well as media-related vision of a self-sustaining film market in Haiti. Based on lowest-budget productions made possible by the huge rise of digital film, this recent phenomenon not only asks for new modes of production, circulating distribution and reception. It also stands for a reconsideration of film and media theory for “inter national ized” World Cinemas on a discursive level. This level will be approached by interlacing a twofold concept: On the one hand, theories on (Post-) Third Cinemas that have been known since their inception in the late 1960s in Latin America and that have subsequently been adapted in the Asian and African Cinemas. On the other hand, today’s assumptions of considering cinema in its political message on a transglobal space are called into question. The global film market, mostly dominated by the triad of Bollywood, Nollywood and Hollywood, also questions the margins of hegemonic centerlines of power relations. Haiti’s cinematic productions are located at the interstices of local and national(ist)  imaginaries in line with a (post)colonial independent film industry. This ambiguity stands for the resulting translocal and transcultural attributions of Haiti’s emerging film cultures and the ambiguous formations of the notions of being and belonging . The analysis of the Jollywood phenomenon on transnational/-local/-cultural levels aims at a methodological detangling of geopolitical spaces and temporalities in the media.