The
Other Side of the Water follows a group of young
immigrants who take an ancient music from the hills of Haiti
and reinvent it on the streets of Brooklyn. The journey of
this unlikely band offers a unique insight into the Haitian-American
experience -- a rare glimpse into a world of music, spirituality,
and cultural activism.
Part-carnival, part-vodou ceremony, and grassroots protest,
“Rara” is one of the most breathtaking and contested
forms of music in the Americas. Rara originally served as
a voice of the slaves in their revolt against the French,
and as the voice of those struggling against ongoing dictatorships
in Haiti. This documentary follows the journey of DJARARA
– the only sustained rara band in America – through
a hidden New York landscape of vodou temples, underground
economies, violent politics, and ground-shaking music.
Combining archival footage and vérité narratives,
this documentary focuses on the journey of the poetic visionary
Pé Yves. Yves has led a Rara movement in New York for
20 years, through an era when the media accusing Haitians
of bringing AIDS to America, to times of civil chaos in Haiti,
to police brutality riots in New York – each time re-imagining
Rara as a voice for an evolving Diaspora. Yet when a new generation
arrives bringing a radically different vision of the music,
and the Haitian Christian community attacks Yves for promoting
a Vodou ritual, he’s caught in the middle of a struggle
for the meaning of Haitian identity.
Ultimately, The Other Side of the Water is
about the struggle to merge the traditional and the modern;
the island and the City; the imagined and the real. The documentary
tells the story of one man who learns to hold true to a vision;
a motley band that comes to speak for a larger community;
and a music that manages to create a new meaning of home in
the Diaspora.
