Aftershock: Surviving Haiti

Filmmaker Claude Barnes and his documentary crew arrived 13 days after January’s devastating earthquake. Immediately upon arrival, their cameras began capturing what looked like the apocalypse. Buildings reduced to rubble. The realization that the people caught inside did not have the slightest time to react and get to safety. People that were lucky enough to survive now had nowhere to live. The city streets were teeming with people living under bed sheets and sleeping on cardboard. Barnes and his crew also discovered the body of a young man who had been shot. His grieving family said that he was killed for his case of soda, and it was later determined he was one of the many escaped inmates from the Port-au-Prince prison. AFTERSHOCK: SURVIVING HAITI is a portrait of a devastated nation as well as the historic Haitian relief effort, a moving example of nations coming together to help a neighbor in need. The film features a Dutch field hospital where medics push themselves to the limits to take care of the injured as well as U.S military compound responsible for maintaining security in this ravaged and desperate region. Other characters include Spanish doctors and a Canadian team of NGOs that scrambles to remote areas to teach Haitians how to purify their water before disease spreads. AFTERSHOCK reveals the powerful stories of these relief workers as they attempt to absorb the calamity and make sense of the chaos all the while struggling to keep their emotions in check in the face of such suffering. Although the people of Haiti can be proud of being the first independent black nation in the Americas, we hear their stories of survival in the face of continued adversity, now having lost everything. Long before the earthquake, their survival depended on international aid, financial and otherwise. We realize this is a people who have been in need for many years. How can the international community have ignored their plight for so long, only to have mother nature remind us of their existence? Claude Barnes shares with us his reason for taking this project on: ?When the earthquake happened I was glued to CNN for days like most of us and I realized that their was a much bigger story to tell then simply news coverage. Because of the magnitude of the devastation I knew that Haiti would need help for years to come and I thought this documentary would be a great way to keep their plight in public view for a few years…after all the cameras and the media stop talking about it. That’s really what my agenda is…to make sure the world does not forget.? Nothing can prepare you for something like this. Haiti really did get destroyed in 30 seconds.