Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Jonathan Demme presents The Agronomist at the Coolidge
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The Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts will host a very special benefit screening of Jonathan Demme’s documentary The Agronomist on Monday, March 1 at 2:00 pm.
The screening will be introduced by director Jonathan Demme, who will be in Brookline to accept the 2010 Coolidge Award and participate in related festivities. Proceeds from the screening will go to support Haiti earthquake relief efforts through the on-the-ground non-profit organizations Partners in Health and Yele Haiti. Tickets to the screening are $25 and are on sale now.
As an incentive to encourage early ticket sales, a group of Coolidge supporters will donate a matching $3,500 to the Haiti relief efforts towards the first 140 tickets sold by February 7. Those donations, combined with the advance ticket sales to date, will be sent immediately to Partners in Health and Yele Haiti in early February. Advance tickets are now on sale at the theater box office and through the website at http://www.coolidge.org.
The Agronomist is Jonathan Demme’s 2003 documentary about the life and work of Jean Dominique, human rights activist and host of the independent radio station Radio Haiti-Inter. His broadcasts throughout the early 1970s were a bold break from Haiti’s predominant government-run media, offering enlightening stories, in the native language of Creole, about global issues to the people of the island. Dominique was forced to temporarily leave Haiti twice, in the early ‘80s and again the early ‘90s, but remained an outspoken advocate for freedom of the press and the Haitian community. In 2000, after returning to his country, he was assassinated outside the radio station in Port-au-Prince. The film features a stunning soundtrack by Grammy-Award winning musician Wyclef Jean, who is also a social entrepreneur and founder of Yele Haiti.
Kenneth Turan, in reviewing the documentary for the LA Times wrote “It almost seems an act of magic that an unapologetically political film that closely examines the last decades of Haiti’s history could move us so much, both to sadness and to joy. Even the participation of Oscar-winning filmmaker Jonathan Demme as director, co-producer and cameraman doesn’t fully explain how and why this 90-minute documentary turned out to be so compelling… To understand that you have to see the film and experience firsthand the personal dynamism of its subject, the remarkable Jean Dominique, an irrepressible force, a true hero for our complex times and a martyr gunned down by unknown thugs in 2000.“
At the time of the film’s release The New York Times wrote “In part, the film is a chronicle of that bad luck, as Haiti alternates between chaos and authoritarianism, with glimmers of hope quickly giving way to compromise, corruption and violence… By the end, you come not simply to admire Dominique; you want to count yourself, as Mr. Demme clearly does, among his friends. Unfortunately, you will also have a clear sense of his enemies, the gangsters and strongmen who have run Haiti, usually with American support, for most of its modern history.“
Yele Haiti uses music, sports and the media to reinforce projects that are making a difference in education, health, environment and community development. In practical terms this translates to over 3,000 new jobs, close to 7,000 children being put in school, more than 8,000 people a month receiving food and approximately 2,000 young people a month learning about HIV/AIDS prevention. Visit: yele.org
Partners in Health works to bring modern medical care to poor communities in nine countries around the world. Their work has three goals: to care for patients, to alleviate the root causes of disease in their communities, and to share lessons learned around the world. Based in Boston, the organization employs over 11,000 people worldwide, including doctors, nurses, and community health workers. Partners in Health has been working on the ground in Haiti for over 20 years. Visit: standwithhaiti.org/haiti
Click here to listen to an NPR interview with Jonathan Demme about the film.
The annual Coolidge Award, recognizing a film artist whose work “advances the spirit of original and challenging cinema,“ was launched in 2004. Previous honorees are animators the Quay Brothers in 2009 (Street of Crocodiles, Institute Benjamenta), film producer Jeremy Thomas in 2008 (Sexy Beast, The Last Emperor, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle), film editor Thelma Schoonmaker in 2007 (Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed), actress Meryl Streep in 2006 (Sophie’s Choice, Silkwood, The Devil Wears Prada), Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro in 2005 (Apocalypse Now, The Conformist, Reds) and Chinese director Zhang Yimou in 2004 (Hero, The House of Flying Daggers, Raise the Red Lantern).
Festivities celebrating the 2010 honoree, Jonathan Demme, will take place March 1-2.
Coolidge Corner Theatre
290 Harvard Street
Brookline, MA
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