When you search “movies filmed in Haiti,” you are asking one of the most deceptively complicated questions in cinema. Because there are two very different things that question could mean, and most of the internet treats them as the same thing.
There are movies set in Haiti. And there are movies filmed in Haiti. The gap between those two lists is wide, telling, and worth understanding before you hit play on anything.
Setting a story in Haiti while filming it somewhere else, in the Dominican Republic, in Jamaica, in a studio back lot in Los Angeles, is not a small distinction. It says something about how the world values Haiti as a location, as a set of people, as a place worthy of investment. And it says something about what stories get told, and by whom, when the cameras finally do roll on Haitian soil.
Let’s go through the full picture.
First, The Hard Truth About Location
If you want to watch a movie or show that was actually filmed in Haiti, not just set in Haiti and filmed elsewhere, your options are pretty limited.
Wikipedia’s category of films shot in Haiti contains just eleven entries. Eleven films. For a country that has been the subject of foreign fascination, humanitarian campaigns, news coverage, and cultural appropriation for over two centuries, eleven films were considered worthy of being made on Haitian ground.
Compare that to the number of films set in Haiti — stories that use the country as backdrop, as metaphor, as dramatic scenery — while flying in foreign crews and shooting in other countries. That list is considerably longer, and considerably more comfortable for the productions involved.
The distinction matters. When a film is actually shot in Haiti, it employs Haitian crew members, Haitian actors, Haitian technicians. It puts money into the local economy. It trains a generation of filmmakers. It builds an industry. When it is shot elsewhere, Haiti gets the imagery — the name, the stereotype, the plot device — while none of the economic benefit flows back to the people being depicted.
That is not a minor footnote. That is the whole story.
The Foreign Gaze: When Hollywood Came for Haiti’s Scenery
The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)
This film follows Dr. Dennis Alan, a Harvard doctor sent to Haiti by a pharmaceutical company to investigate a black magic drug for potential commercialization. He gets more than he bargained for when he encounters torturers and witch doctors. Directed by Wes Craven and based loosely on Wade Davis’s ethnobotanical research, the film is one of the few major Hollywood productions genuinely shot on Haitian soil.
The problem is what it did with that access.
The Serpent and the Rainbow is, in many ways, the cinematic peak of the Western world’s fixation with Haitian Vodou as horror. Not as religion. Not as philosophy. Not as one of the most sophisticated African spiritual systems to survive the Middle Passage — but as spectacle. As fear. As something primitive and dangerous lurking in the tropics.
To be fair, the film has its defenders. The Haitian landscape is rendered with genuine atmosphere. The political backdrop — Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship — is depicted with some honesty. And Wes Craven’s decision to actually film in Haiti rather than replicate it elsewhere gave the film a texture that most studio productions about the country have never achieved. But the framing remains that of an outsider looking in at something alien and terrifying. Vodou, once again, serves as the monster.
The Comedians (1967)
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Haiti. Set against the turbulent backdrop of Papa Doc Duvalier’s regime, this film captures the country’s intense political climate and the struggle of its people. Based on Graham Greene’s novel, it is a rare English-language film that actually grapples with Haitian political reality rather than using the country as exotic set dressing.
The film, titled Les Comédiens in French, was a British production directed by Peter Glenville. It is also, importantly, one of the few films of its era to portray the terror of the Tonton Macoute — Duvalier’s paramilitary force — with genuine dramatic weight. The film was so critical of the regime that strict surveillance was exercised over films during the Duvalier era, lest they convey revolutionary ideas. Duvalier reportedly denounced it personally.
Heading South (2005)
Set in a Haitian resort, Heading South explores the complex relationships between foreign women and local men, emphasizing the socio-economic conditions within Haiti’s tourism sector. Directed by Laurent Cantet, the film stars Charlotte Rampling and is far more sophisticated than its premise suggests. It is an uncomfortable, honest portrait of the power dynamics of sex tourism and the economic desperation that drives them — with Haiti as the stage for a critique of the Global North as much as anything else.
It is the kind of film that would not get made today in the same way. It is also the kind of film that Haitian audiences have complicated feelings about, because while it indicts the foreign women and the system they exploit, the Haitian characters remain, ultimately, objects of someone else’s story.
The Films That Actually Belong to Haiti
Now here is where things get genuinely exciting. Because when Haitian filmmakers — or serious international collaborators committed to Haitian storytelling — get to work, the results are extraordinary.
Raoul Peck: Haiti’s Greatest Filmmaker and the World’s Best-Kept Secret
If you do not know the name Raoul Peck, that is not an accident. It is a symptom.
Raoul Peck is a Haitian filmmaker known for using historical, political, and personal characters to tackle and recount societal issues and historical events. He served as Haiti’s Minister of Culture from 1996 to 1997. His film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), about the life of James Baldwin and race relations in the United States, was nominated for an Oscar and won a César Award in France. His HBO documentary miniseries Exterminate All the Brutes (2021) received a Peabody Award.
His feature L’Homme sur les quais (The Man by the Shore, 1993) was the first Haitian film to be released in theatres in the United States. It was also selected for competition at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.
Think about that. The first Haitian film ever released in American theaters was in 1993. Not in 1950 when Hollywood was making prestige pictures. Not in 1970 when world cinema was exploding with new voices. 1993. That is the infrastructure — or lack of it — that Haitian cinema has been working against.
In 1987, Peck directed his first feature film, Haitian Corner, a fictional story about the life of a Haitian immigrant in New York who becomes obsessed with finding the man who tortured him on behalf of the Duvalier regime. The film is largely in Haitian Creole. It was the work of an artist who understood that Haitian cinema had to be rooted in Haitian language, Haitian trauma, and Haitian interiority — not filtered through anyone else’s perspective.
Murder in Pacot (2014)
Murder in Pacot is a feature film by Haitian director Raoul Peck, starring Joy Olasunmibo Ogunmakin, Alex Descas, Thibault Vinçon, and Lovely Kermonde Fifi. It is a continuation of the themes Peck featured in his documentary Assistance Mortelle (Fatal Assistance), on international aid to Haiti following the earthquake of January 12, 2010.
The film tackles race, class, gender, and post-colonialism through the eyes of richly drawn characters. While the drama does eventually erupt into violence, the “murder” in Murder in Pacot is not so much about personal vendetta as it is about the killing of a social order — and even an entire class.
Filming took place in Port-au-Prince between April and May 2014. The production employed between 60 and 100 technicians, actors, and extras — mostly from Haiti, with some from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and France.
That detail matters. A film actually made in Haiti, with Haitian crew, Haitian actors, telling a Haitian story about what happened to Haitian people after the earthquake — while the international aid industry that descended on the country after 2010 also came under examination. Murder in Pacot is the kind of film that treats Haiti as a subject with interior complexity, not as a symbol of suffering.
Kidnapping Inc. (2024)
Kidnapping Inc. is a 2024 crime comedy thriller co-written and directed by Bruno Mourral. A co-production between Haiti, Canada, and France, the film stars Jasmuel Andri and Rolaphton Mercure as two low-level gangsters assigned the task of transporting the kidnapped son of a presidential candidate — only for the plan to go awry.
The film was selected as Haiti’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards. It did not receive a nomination, but the fact that Haiti submitted a film of this ambition, a genre picture, a comedy-thriller, a crowd-pleaser with real satirical bite — signals something important about where Haitian cinema is trying to go.
Writing for Variety, one critic noted that “any film from a country with as scarce an output as Haiti is cause for curiosity, especially since it’s not a subdued, social realist drama of the kind typically sourced from developing countries to pad festival lineups. The idea to address social inequality and the corrosion of institutions through crowd-pleasing entertainment is sound, even daring.”
That quote is worth sitting with. What the critic is describing — almost without realizing it — is the double standard that Haitian cinema operates under. Films from Haiti are expected to be sober. Sad. Humanitarian. To give Western audiences something that confirms what they already believe about the country. A Haitian comedy-thriller that actually wants to entertain people? That is daring. Because the world has decided what Haiti is allowed to look like on screen.
My Internship in Canada (2015)
This award-winning film was partially shot in Haiti and partially in Ottawa. It is a political satire and comedy about a young Haitian who moves to Canada to intern for a Member of Parliament while living in Quebec. It won multiple international festival awards and represents exactly the kind of Haitian storytelling that deserves far wider distribution — funny, smart, politically aware, and human in ways that disaster narratives never allow Haiti to be.
The Agronomist (2003)
Directed by Jonathan Demme — the American filmmaker behind The Silence of the Lambs — this documentary centers on Jean Dominique, the Haitian human rights activist and radio host whose voice defined political resistance for a generation. Haiti’s first independent radio station, Radio Haiti-Inter, represented the thoughts of the common people, and Jean Dominique was the activist and host whose voice inspired the spirit of revolution against Haiti’s dictatorial regime. The documentary includes historical footage of his fight for democracy, as well as interviews conducted shortly before his assassination in 2000.
This is a film where a foreign director used his platform to center a Haitian hero — not as victim, not as symbol, but as a full human being with wit, love, rage, and vision. Demme understood that he was a guest in this story. The film feels like it.
The Pattern You Cannot Ignore
Look across this list and a pattern emerges that should provoke something in you.
Local film production in Haiti is limited, but Haitians go to the movies. Hollywood cinema has taken over Haitian movie screens over time. There is only one film school in Haiti, the Ciné Institute. There is no Haitian legislation on cinema, and the state has shown no interest in film production.
One film school. No national film policy. No state investment in the industry. And yet: Raoul Peck at Cannes. Kidnapping Inc. at the Academy Awards. My Internship in Canada winning at festivals across three continents.
Haiti has been producing extraordinary cinema in spite of the infrastructure. Imagine what it could do with the support that French, Brazilian, or South Korean cinema receives from their governments as a matter of national cultural policy.
The other thing to note: the films about Haiti made by outsiders almost universally reach for the same set of images — poverty, Vodou, political chaos, tragedy, earthquake, humanitarian crisis. The films made by Haitian directors reach for something different: interiority, humor, class contradiction, love, the complexity of diaspora identity, the texture of a city that the world only ever sees in ruins.
Both things are real. But only one of them is true cinema.
Now What?
There is a Haitian concept called kòlè — a kind of righteous anger that is not bitterness, but clarity. The Haitian gaze in cinema carries kòlè. It looks at the same country the international cameras point their lenses at and sees something completely different — not a problem to be solved, but a people to be understood.
Raoul Peck once said something that every film student, every filmmaker, every person who has ever picked up a camera should hear: “I belong wherever I am — I never ask myself if I’m legit or not.”
That is the spirit of Haitian cinema. It does not wait for permission to exist. It does not ask whether the world is ready. It makes the film, submits it to Cannes, sends it to the Oscars, shoots it on the streets of Port-au-Prince with 60 people and a budget that Hollywood would spend on craft services.
The films are there. Some are hard to find, a Region 2 DVD, a festival streaming link, a Mubi listing that requires you to search. And that difficulty of access is itself part of the story.
When you find them, watch them. Not because Haiti needs your attention, but because you need what these films contain: a perspective on the world that has been forged by everything this island has survived, and is still here, still making art, still asking the camera to tell the truth.
