Marie Michael Library

079b

DVD

A work group of six women are planting beans in the misty, early morning. As they work, they talk, exchanging thoughts about sickness, death, funerals, work, land, inheritance, money, men, women's lives and religion. At the same time, the film depicts the acute agrarian crisis in which the natural milieu, the society and individual human beings are all exhausted. This is the result of trends which are at work in so many parts of the world, and are major features of modern history. One of a series of 4 videos which record peasant life in Haiti in the mid 1980s. They demonstrate the complex indigenous knowledge of the peasants and some of the conflicts and tensions between the indigenous systems and the overall state and "modern" production techniques.