Lincoln Center to Screen FATAL ASSISTANCE, Begin. 2/28

FATAL ASSISTANCE is award-winning Haitian born filmmaker Raoul Peck's two-year journey inside the challenging, contradictory and colossal rebuilding efforts in post-earthquake Haiti. Through its provocative and radical point of view, Fatal Assistance offers a devastating indictment of the international community's post-disaster idealism. The film dives headlong into the complexity of the reconstruction process and the practices and impact of worldwide humanitarian and development aid, revealing the disturbing extent of a general failure. We learn that a major portion of the money pledged to Haiti was never disbursed, nor made it into the actual reconstruction. Fatal Assistance leads us to one clear conclusion: current aid policies and practice in Haiti need to stop immediately. (Description by Human Rights Watch Film Festival)

The documentary screened at the 2013 Human Rights Watch Film Festival and will open at the Film Society of Lincoln Center exclusively on Friday, February 28, 2014 for one week only.

A native of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Raoul Peck was raised in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) after his family fled Haiti's Duvalier regime. Educated in France, the U.S. and Germany, where he studied filmmaking, he has directed film and television in both documentaries and fiction features, including Lumumba (Cannes Director's Fortnight 2000) and The Man by the Shore (Cannes 1993), which was the first Haitian film to have an American theatrical release. In 2005 he produced and directed Sometimes in April for HBO, about the Rwandan genocide (Berlinale Competition 2005). His last feature film Moloch Tropical was also presented in Toronto and Berlin. Former Minister of Culture of the Republic of Haiti, Peck was the recipient of the Irene Diamond Award presented by Human Rights Watch, for his body of work. He is, since January 2010, Chairman of the Board of the film school La Fémis in France.

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