Alain Martin, The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow Goes to Haiti, 2023. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.
Organised by Black History Month Norway in collaboration with Kunsthall Trondheim, this two-day programme opens on September 11 with a screening of The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow Goes to Haiti (2023), a documentary by Alain Martin.
Brunel Martin, the filmmaker's grandfather, came of age during Haiti's brutal occupation by US Marines, yet became a fierce advocate for the country that had destroyed it. A decade after Brunel's death, Martin writes him a letter trying to reconcile the contradictions. Hosted at Cinemateket Trondheim, the screening is followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker and artist Jelsen Lee Innocent.
On September 12, the programme continues at Kunsthall Trondheim with a conversation between writer and designer Alice Grandoit-Šutka, co-founder of Deem Journal, and cultural anthropologist Dubie Toa-Kwapong. The discussion explores debts, inheritance, and reparations alongside colonial legacies, memory, and Black futures, in dialogue with Martin's film and Jelsen Lee Innocent's exhibition The World, The Flesh and The Devil, on view at Kunsthall Trondheim until September 27, 2026
Tendai Angela Rokkness is the producer for Against Benevolent Hands, which is co-organized with Black History Month Norway. Supported by Kulturdirektoratet, Kulturrådet, Olso Kommune, Cinemteket Trondhiem.