Mar
17
“One Day, Everything Will Be Free” is the title of a remarkable new feature-length documentary on an ecological restoration and permaculture community in Haiti. The film is still in final editing, but you can see an inspiring preview and get more information at onedayeverythingwillbefree.com.
The movie explores the challenges, motivations, and broader implications of Sadhana Forest Haiti, an unlikely reforestation community organized around an alternative, cashless economy in an area of Haiti devastated by soil erosion and social immobility.
The director, Joseph Redwood-Martinez, emailed me the following:
After living and working with this community for an extended period, I put together this video as a way to extend a thoughtful reflection on the motivations, complications, and implications of this project. As the documentary is now finished, I’d like to make it available to non-profits, education organizations, and diverse communities for whom this could be a resource. Do let me know if it would be of interest to anyone involved with the Sustainable Haiti Coalition.
If you are interested in showing the film, or can help get the word out about it to other organizations and networks, please email the director at Joseph Redwood-Martinez <joseph.r.martinez@gmail.com> or sign up to host a screening at onedayeverythingwillbefree.com.
The director writes:
From May to August of 2012, I lived and worked with the Sadhana Forest community in Anse-a-Pitre, Haiti. Over the past several years, I’ve visited intentional communities and ecological restoration projects throughout the United States, New Zealand, France, Ecuador, India, Belgium, Germany, Turkey, Haiti, and Palestine. To date, Sadhana Forest Haiti remains the most significant, complex, and dynamic project I’ve encountered. Sadhana Forest not only makes a proposition for addressing environmental degradation and the inadequacies of foreign aid, it importantly offers very real working-example of a these propositions enacted from within a diverse and constantly evolving community. In this way, Sadhana actively challenges paradigms that exacerbate alienation, scarcity, and competition by catalyzing patterns that promote mutually beneficial relationships, environmental stewardship, and conscientious resource use.
Seeking to understand the significance of Sadhana Forest’s presence, I approached creating this film without a preconceived agenda, but with an unbiased curiosity. The intention to discover, instead of “document” Sadhana, led me to appreciate the comprehensive societal implications of Sadhana, a community that encourages its participants to realize abundance by provoking actions motivated by resilience and patience over instant gratification.
Yet still, Sadhana Forest is not without its own complications. Throughout this process of living with the community as an engaged observer and participant conducting interviews over a period of several months, I was provoked to question and attempt understanding the symbolic nature of Sadhana in relation to the practical solutions it puts forward for improving the environment and its stakeholders’ quality of life. And at the heart of this film is a perpetual questioning: Whose hope? Whose optimism? And whose practical solutions to whose problems?
We hope One day, everything will be free will be used as a tool to engage and inform diverse communities around the world. As such, we are happy to work with you in every way we can to make a screening possible.