Love Me Haiti (2014)

Interesting facts

Love Me Haiti is a 2014 fictional short film directed by Hugues Gentillon. Love Me Haiti co-stars Aurelia Khazan, Pierre-Louis Dieufaite, Deoud Gentillon, and François Meknes. The script was written by Gentillon, Alexander Stuart, Joyce Mccauley-Benner, and Joe Vetromile. Love Me Haiti was recorded in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The film won the 2014 Haiti's Oscar for Best Short Film. Love Me Haiti also won Best Interpretation for the Dikalo Peace Award with actress Aurelia Khazan for bringing the character Marie Forstner to life. The young actress collected the prize at the prestigious Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in Cannes, France.

Production

In January 2015, after Gentillon won the Interstudent contest, some Polish news media, lost-in-translation, mistakenly reported that he produced Love Me Haiti while he was a graduate student at the Strzemiński Academy of Art Łódź (ASP Łódź). The truth is Gentillon hired actors and crew members and rented filmmaking equipment from ASP Łódź and from the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre in Łódź (PWSFTviT).

Nonetheless, Gentillon's filmmaking education and most of the financial support to produce Love Me Haiti came from the San Francisco's Academy of Art University and the U.S. Department of Education. The misinformation arises from the fact that Gentillon attended AAU while studying medicine at the Medical University of Łódź in Poland, and both AAU and ASP, are locally known as Academy of Art.

Gentillon's MFA thesis film Love Me Haiti was indeed done extramurally but under the sole academic aegis of the Academy of Art University, located in California and which also awarded his MFA in motion pictures and television.

To piece this enigmatic film production puzzle together, the ideas which gave birth to Love Me Haiti were locked in Gentillon's mind until summer 2007. He conceived the film at the New York Film Academy (NYFA), where he studies acting, then assembled it at AAU, and released it seven years later. At NYFA, he also wrote lyrics for film music.

As a result, Gentillon recruited a team of screenwriters and interviewed Dr. Alix Charles again. The story that he originally adapted was subsequently re-written a number of times, as if it was a film development in the real Hollywood collaborative world. Besides Gentillon, Alexander Stuart and Joyce Mccauley-Benner did most of the rewrites. Gentillon took all the supplemental ideas and diluted them into a final shooting script.

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