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Director Juan Mejia Botero Attending November 14!
Working tirelessly to protect the Dominican Republic’s natural resources with a fervor that sometimes dipped into the extreme, park ranger Eligio Eloy Vargas, known to family and friends as Melaneo, struggled to preserve his nation’s dwindling forests from the illegal felling of trees-making a few bitter enemies in the process. When his body turned up in 2012, a life cut short in a savage nighttime assault, attention turned to the desperate Haitian immigrants who slip across the border to harvest wood in order to make charcoal, one of the few economic options open to them-apart from petty crime-in their deeply impoverished homeland. Soon already frayed relations between the two countries collapse into a storm of accusations and threats, stoking anti-immigrant zeal in the DR and fear of reprisals for already burdened Haitians. Yet this explosive documentary uncovers a more troubling reality, one that goes beyond the hardships of a grieving family seeking justice or troubling narratives of ‘bad immigrants,’ but to the highest echelons of power.
The murder of Melaneo and the shock waves it sent across Hispaniola is the starting point for this riveting documentary, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2016 Seattle International Film Festival. Told with the urgency of the best political thrillers, Death By A Thousand Cuts is a tale of a land long defined by the whims of colonialists and despots, and the price still being paid by the environment and the people who depend on it.
Título: Muerte por mil cortes
Cuando el ecologista y guardabosques dominicano Eligio Eloy Vargas fue hallado asesinado, las ya débiles relaciones entre Haití y la República Dominicana colapsaron en una tormenta de acusaciones, amenazas, y celo antiinmigrante. Y eso es solo el punto de partida para este inquietante documental que nos cuenta las historia de una tierra históricamente definida por los caprichos de colonialistas y déspotas.
Press
"Beautifully filmed... 'Death by a Thousand Cuts' surges forward, propelled by an evocative score."- Point of View Magazine