Black Sugar
1988 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Michel Régnier
Genres: documentary
Tones: dark, provocative
Haitian workers lured across the border to cut sugar cane in the Dominican Republic labour up to fourteen hours a day in cramped camps lacking water, electricity, and medical care.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a Haitian sugar-cane doc to be righteous agitprop, and Régnier just... gives you the footage, lets the system's cruelty speak without narration or sentiment—which somehow feels more subversive than any contrarian move could be.
A rigorously observational piece that inherits the patient documentary tradition of Wiseman and the Maysles, trusting formal restraint and durational witness to carry the moral weight that preaching never could.
The decision to hold on workers' faces and hands without cutting away—to refuse the edit that would let us look elsewhere—transforms a labor doc into something unbearably intimate and specific.