5 Best Movies from Haiti to Watch First

5 Essential Films from Haiti

Ranked native cinema in Haiti’s own creative voice.

1. 

   1. Haitian Corner

   1987

   A Haitian poet who fled to New York after being imprisoned and tortured under the dictatorship is haunted by his past — until he believes he spots his former torturer on the street and becomes consumed by thoughts of revenge. Raoul Peck's searching drama.

2. 

   2. Ayiti Mon Amour

   2016

   Five years after the devastating earthquake, three lives in Haiti — touched by loss, longing, and a hint of the magical — quietly intertwine. A poetic, dreamlike fable of a country healing.

3. 

   3. Freda

   2021

   In a rough Port-au-Prince neighborhood, a young university student helps her mother run a tiny street stall while wrestling with whether to stay and fight for her country's future or leave for a safer life abroad. A vivid, tender drama.

4. 

   4. Kidnapping Inc.

   2024

   Two bumbling low-level gangsters tasked with delivering the kidnapped son of a presidential candidate to their ruthless boss see the job go disastrously wrong, sending them on a frantic, blackly comic scramble through Port-au-Prince. A pulpy crime thriller.

5. 

   5. The Man by the Shore

   L'Homme sur les quais · 1993

   Seen through the eyes of a young girl whose family is torn apart, this drama evokes the terror of Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship in the early 1960s. Raoul Peck's haunting childhood memory of a reign of fear.