This is my first time attending the film festival, the first documentary that I saw was called Black Zombie, at the TIFF Lightbox theater (I always spell things in French, like the word company, or center) here in Toronto. Well the festival itself is in Toronto, yearly. This year, through my awesomeness, I was awarded free tickets to many of the documentaries. So let me get started!

I can’t say that this film was a bad film, it was really wonderfully put together. But I have issues with the subject matter and the content, it was about Haiti and colonialism really. About how the Haitian people had their battle with slavery, and how white people are bad, when all I see was the story of the Native Americans.

I mean, sure, the documentary was about the Haitian spiritual practice of Vodou, and there were talks of the metaphysical realm with healing. That was interesting to me, but. Then there were all these talks about how the European whites, had stripped the religion and their beliefs and injected Catholicism.

As I tend to really like zombies, not because of the original zombies, but zombies that are infected with a virus (I grew up on video games like Resident Evil 3), it’s hard not to draw conclusions that maybe deep down I like zombies because they are victims.

In Haitian culture, it was represented that zombies are those individuals that are plagued by some trauma, doomed to spend the rest of their lives enslaved in a cage. I then look at others, and myself and think; perhaps, this is why we work so hard. I begin to question why I work so diligently at certain tasks, do I really like science, do I really like academia?

I can assure you, I really do like science. I work hard not because I am traumatized.

The documentary itself had well-structured interviews, and one of the vodou spiritual practioners had said himself that his hope is for the film not to be created in such a way that it exploirs Haitians, and their culture. This documentary didn’t do that, rather it exposes us to stories can be spun.

I actually didn’t like how the zombie, which was never associated with black people to me, all of a sudden got associated as depicting black people as scary, ghoulish, frightening. I don’t even think that anyone really thinks of that, to be honest with you. I always associated zombies with being brainless atnd flesh eating, to be infected by some virus.

I am so sick of this narrative, it’s okay to talk about Haitian culture, it’s okay to talk about the boycott of international trade with Haiti, and how they were on the brink of economic ruin and was forced to payback the French slave owners.

But hey, that was then and during that time humans were largely stupid, philosophy and religion were the only things that some people knew, and for fucks sake, that’s life.

It’s war. Everything is usually in a state of conflict. Anyway, that is my initial review. There are many things other than colonial hate that plagues Haiti right now I am sure. This is my first documentary of the festival. However I may do a proper review later, after I read up on this, I am going to see Love, Actually later on at the Ted Rogers cinema.