The earthquake robbed Huguens Jean and Clifford Muse of the ability to fulfill a final promise to their grandfather.
Fly to Haiti, he told the brothers as cancer ate away his health, and carry my coffin, garbed in white. The color meant something. The old man wanted them to find joy, even in the sadness that accompanies death.
But the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed 230,000 and leveled Port-au-Prince made it impossible for Jean and Muse, both students at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to return for their grandfather's funeral a month after the disaster.
It did not, however, crush their desire to celebrate the man who had imbued in them a love of stories. They resolved to build a kite like the ones he had flown with them when they were boys in Port-au-Prince. That plan quickly expanded to include a trip to Haiti, during which they would film their journey and gather stories of Haitians coping with the aftermath of the earthquake.
The final product, an 82-minute documentary called "Lift Up," had its debut at the Haitian Embassy in Washington this month. Jean and Muse hope that, in its depiction of Haitians rejoicing in the rubble of their former lives, the film evokes the spirit of their grandfather's request.
"He told us that he wanted us to celebrate his life, to find the joy," says Jean, 29 and a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering at UMBC. "I had no idea what that meant until we encountered these people in Haiti. These images of life continuing on, they were very moving."
Philip Knowlton, who met Jean when they co-captained the track team at UMBC and co-directed the film, says he'll never forget the smiles on the brothers' faces as they flew the memorial kite for their grandfather at a festival in Washington.
"They didn't fulfill their promise the way they said they would," he says. "But the way the whole journey happened, they made up for it. It was really an amazing experience to be a part of."
The plan came together in true seat-of-the-pants fashion. Less than a month elapsed between Jean's first thoughts of the kite tribute and the brothers' return to their native city. They arrived in March with little idea of where or whom to film and with serious trepidation about whether people would talk at all.
In fact, some Haitians were tired of interlopers who arrived with cameras but none of the food, water or money needed so desperately by the survivors. Many others, however, staggered Jean and Muse with their tales of resilience.
There was the little boy who smiled brilliantly as he flew a kite adorned with messages of love for his mother, who had been killed in the earthquake. There was the woman who said she lived with new purpose after watching a building collapse on a man who had rushed in to save a trapped baby. There was the street festival where hundreds of children danced and sang songs of tribute about those who had perished.
The brothers hope the film will introduce American viewers to another side of Haiti, one that goes beyond the poverty, violence and suffering so often depicted in mass media. Growing up in Port-au-Prince, they saw the dark side of humanity but also reveled in warm households packed with extended family, days spent playing outside with packs of friends and a rich tradition of passing stories from one generation to the next.
A close relationship
The brothers had different fathers and grew up in different households in Port-au-Prince.
Jean's father moved to the United States and worked as a general sales manager at radio station 98 Rock. In search of better education and more job opportunities, Jean joined him in 1996, enrolling at Howard High. He was amazed at the things Americans took for granted — consistently running water, electricity that worked almost all the time. But at the same time, he missed the sense of community he felt in Haiti.
Jean excelled in sports and academics, earning a track scholarship to UMBC, where he majored in electrical engineering.
Muse, four years younger, endured a rockier exit from Haiti. He finished high school in Haiti, where he earned top grades and starred in basketball. But when he began college in the neighboring Dominican Republic, he quickly learned how poorly the world thought of his homeland.
"They treated us like we were crazy and dirty, like some sort of cave people," he says. "If they saw you in clean clothes, they would argue with you that you could not possibly be Haitian."
One day, five men kidnapped Muse, stole his money and clothes and threatened to shoot him, he says, just for being Haitian. They let him go, but after he told the story to his brother, Jean insisted that he leave immediately.
"Letting that continue was not an option," Jean says. "Either he was going to go home or we were going to create an opportunity for him here."
The brothers had sometimes gone years without seeing one another but had always remained close, exchanging letters in which they confided their dreams for the future.
Jean helped Muse secure a student visa and moved him into his home. After boning up on his English, Muse enrolled at UMBC, where he is a senior majoring in information systems technology. He fell in love with a Baltimore girl he met in the campus library and they are now married, with a home in Arbutus and a 9-month-old son, Jude.
Jean, meanwhile, lives in Bowie and is working on technology that would enable computers to mimic human vision.
Awaiting word from family
The brothers put their everyday lives on hold when news of the earthquake came. Unable to reach their families by phone, they passed frantic days calling each other to check for the smallest update. Finally, one of Jean's uncles called to say his side of the family was safe. Muse had to wait a week, with little else on his mind, before a cousin e-mailed to say that his side of the family was safe as well.
"Even after you hear your family is OK, to stand there and watch your entire country collapsing on a television screen, it leaves you feeling powerless," Jean says. "Not being able to reach out to anyone, it was a very heavy feeling."
As the days crawled along, and more Haitians emerged from the rubble, the seeds of the film began to grow in Jean's mind. He had long nursed an interest in filmmaking, which began with a 3-D short for a high school chemistry class and continued after he penned a fairy tale for French class at UMBC. With Haitian resilience inspiring the world, he saw a story he wanted to capture.
But he lacked technical expertise, so he called his old friend, Knowlton, who works as a video editor in New York and made a documentary about cyclists fighting diabetes a few years ago. Knowlton, a Silver Spring native, was a little nervous because he knew Haiti only from news reports of devastation and violence. "Does your mother know you're going to Haiti?" a woman asked him in the airport.
That seemed ominous.
As the brothers got off the plane, they sensed that their home city had been changed forever. "That smell that reminds me I'm in Haiti, it was different," Jean says.
He walked through the rubble of a once-majestic cathedral where he used to wait for the bus to and from school. The national palace was similarly flattened. "It would be like seeing the White House in pieces," Jean says.
"It was like walking onto the scene of a disaster movie," Knowlton adds. "Just stuff that you would never expect to see in real life."
'People coming together'
The earthquake had not destroyed people's spirits, however, and in five days the filmmakers captured scene after scene of children playing and people smiling as they remembered lost loved ones. "I didn't see any of the negative things I had always heard about," Knowlton says. "I only saw people coming together."
Muse and Jean, meanwhile, went to the hillside where the country's master kite makers collect their wood and picked up the flexible sticks that would form the frame for their kite.
They had only a few days to build it between their return flight and the kite festival in Washington on March 28. They decorated it with a compass, which their younger brother, Jimmy, said would help guide their grandfather to heaven. After a few attempts, the kite flew.
Since then, Jean and Knowlton have spent much of the year hacking the film together on their home computers during spare time. They nailed down the final version during a marathon editing week in New York earlier this month.
Some viewers wept at the initial screening. Several told Knowlton that the film, which cost about $6,000, was the first to capture the beauty in Haiti's response to the disaster.
"I think what was so powerful to me was seeing a community organize after the earthquake and really help each other without a lot of help from the outside," says Mia Foreman, a Washington resident who attended the screening at a friend's urging.
The trick now will be getting a wider audience to see the movie. Knowlton says he plans to pitch the film to television networks, and the festival circuit is another possibility.
"I don't even know how we made this film," Jean says. "We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into."
"We wanted to inspire people," Muse adds. "And to keep our promise."