MDOCS Featured Event: Raoul Peck, Fatal Assistance
Film Screening and Conversation with the Director
Thursday, November 6, 7 p.m., Davis Auditorium
Francophone lunch for members of the Skidmore Community, November 6 at 12:30 p.m. Please RSVP to mdocs@skidmore.edu by November 4.
Fatal Assistance (2013)
The John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative, in collaboration with the Alien Invasions Project at Skidmore College, will bring noted scholar, teacher and filmmaker Raoul Peck to Skidmore College on November 6 for a screening of his recent documentary film, Fatal Assistance.
Fatal Assistance documents the post-2010 earthquake and takes us on a two-year journey inside the challenging, contradictory and colossal rebuilding process, the practice and the impact of worldwide humanitarian and development aid, revealing in the most disturbing way, the extent of a general failure. As one Haitian government official asked, "If you can't solve the problems in Haiti, how will you [the international community] do so elsewhere?"
Sponsored by MDOCS, Science Literacy "Invasions Project," International Affairs Program, Latin American Studies Program and Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.
Film Trailer: Fatal Assistance
About the filmmaker
Raoul Peck was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He was educated in Haiti, Zaire (Congo), the United States, France and Germany. His parents fled the Duvalier dictatorship in 1961, finding asylum and a new life in the Republic of Congo, which became their second home for nearly 25 years. Peck initially attended school in Leopoldville, later public school in Brooklyn, New York, and finally Orleans, France. He lived for an extended time in Zaïre and Germany and studied industrial engineering and economics at Berlin University. He started a Ph.D. in development strategies, which he chose to abandon after two years following the sudden death of his doctoral mentor. He was accepted into the competitive film program at the Berlin Germany Academy of Film, where he received a degree 1984. Peck has worked as a journalist and photographer and film professor. He currently resides between France, Haïti and New York.
Peck's past films include The Man by the Shore, about dictatorship-era Haiti, the Rwanda genocide drama Sometimes in April, and Lumumba: Death of a Prophet.
