Giving his life for a love of his land

Shortly after 6 a.m. on April 3, 2000, on a clear, sunny morning in Port-au-Prince, Jean Dominique, a radio journalist who had spent his life fighting for democracy and justice for his beloved and troubled Haiti, was assassinated as he stepped out of his car on his way to work. He was 69, a son of the elite. As a young boy he had accompanied his father around the countryside, and he not only fell in love with the land and its people, but he also began to see Haiti as a country where the poverty was excruciating, where a handful of families controlled most of the wealth and where government too often equaled dictatorship.

To those who knew him, Dominique was charming, charismatic and fiercely intelligent. He had piercing eyes, a mischievous smile and a wicked sense of humor. He smoked a pipe. Jonathan Demme was one of those who knew him. The filmmaker, who began work on Dominique’s story more than a decade ago, examines his legend and his mystique in “The Agronomist,” which is in theaters Friday. And the Haiti that Dominique loved is again in political turmoil.

Demme (“Stop Making Sense,” “Melvin and Howard,” “Philadelphia,” “The Silence of the Lambs”) first interviewed Dominique in 1993 in New York for a planned portrait of a journalist-in-exile, but wasn’t sure what to do with the film. Years passed; then that April morning he heard of the assassination. “We had become buddies, I was completely devastated,” he said recently in his production offices in Nyack, N.Y., where he was taking a break from editing his latest feature, a remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep. “Jean felt he was smart enough to never get caught, and we all probably thought that too. He was such an icon, there may have been a sense that he was untouchable.”

The journey to cultural icon was a circuitous one. Trained in Paris as an agronomist, Dominique ultimately turned to journalism to bring news reports and analysis in Creole, the language of the majority of Haitians, to the airwaves. “Everyone listened to Jean Dominique, he was the most important journalist in Haiti, the conscience of Haiti,” said Robert Fatton, who was born in Haiti and now is chairman of the Woodrow Wilson department of politics at the University of Virginia. Since his death, “no one has come close to filling his shoes.”

Radio Haiti Inter, Dominique’s station, was shut down several times by the authorities. In 1980 he and Michele Montas, his partner and later wife, were forced into exile; they moved to New York and returned home in 1986 after the brutal regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier was ousted. Five years later, after a military coup overthrew the democratically elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Dominique was again exiled, but he returned in 1994 along with Aristide.

The art of compromise was not part of Dominique’s nature. He spent six months in jail during the Duvalier regime, and when he talked about it, he laughed. When he was gunned down, along with his security guard, he held in one hand the notes for that morning’s broadcast.

Demme and his friend, Daniel Wolff, the film’s executive producer, were feeling a sense of hopelessness until they agreed that the way to honor Dominique was to finish their film.

“The Agronomist” is an energetic portrait of Dominique laced with music by Haitian-born hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean. Although it is a profile of Dominique, it also is one of Haiti over the last 20 years. Told through interviews with Dominique, Montas, his sister, his daughter, a farmer, plus news footage of political milestones and colorful scenes of Port-au-Prince and the countryside, the film movingly captures Haitians’ dreams of democracy after the fall of the Duvalier regime. It also effectively conveys the dashed hopes of the people after Aristide’s government succumbed to the corruption and demagoguery that have riddled Haiti throughout its 200 years of independence.

“Demme has an authentic interest in the subject that is direct and undeniable,” said David Thomson, the author of “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,” who praised the director’s ability to convey “the relationship between characters and place” in films such as “Melvin and Howard” and “Something Wild.” “Demme has used Haitian music in some of his earlier films; he has a great feeling for Haitians,” he said.

Love for Haiti

The director’s fascination with the island began in the 1980s, when he lived in Manhattan near a store that sold Haitian art. He has visited the island some 20 times and had produced four documentaries about Haiti before “The Agronomist.”

“The people are so terrific -- their tenacity, their courage, their sense of humanity,” he said. “I was deeply touched by their collective aspiration for democracy.” Dominique only added to the country’s appeal. “I was really, really struck with his incredible coolness and his incredible charisma; he was professional, in command,” said Demme, who paid for “The Agronomist” out of his own pocket. (“I just love to shoot, and I can’t resist a good script,” he’ll answer, with a shrug and a smile, when asked about how he moves fluidly from thrillers -- he won an Academy Award for directing “The Silence of the Lambs” -- to comedies to drama to documentaries.)

“And Jean was completely unimpressed with our little video crew, which I thought was very cool,” Demme added. The crew filmed in New York -- in exile Dominique was a little “bored,” said Demme -- and, when Dominique returned to Haiti in 1994, the cameras went too. But back at the radio station, Dominique was too busy to fuss with being a film star.

“Jean said to me, ‘Jonathan, I like you very much,’ ” recalled Demme “ ‘You’re my friend, but these little cameras in my face are a pain in the ass.’ ” So the filming ended (although their friendship did not) and resumed in 2000 after the assassination, when Demme went to Haiti to interview Montas.

“Jean appreciated Jonathan’s generosity and his love for Haiti,” said Montas, who now lives in New York and works in communications at the United Nations. “To Jean, the film was irrelevant. He had something more important to do, to rebuild that radio station once more after we returned from exile. To him, what was important was to keep on fighting. So much had gone wrong in Haiti, he wanted something to finally go right.”

Montas continued to operate Radio Haiti Inter after her husband’s death and took over his spot behind the microphone. “Every day I would say good morning to him, and I would denounce the obstacles to the investigation of his murder, from the state apparatus to the justice department to the police,” she continued. “I was relentless.” On Dec. 25, 2002, gunmen tried to assassinate her, and within a few months she closed the station and moved to New York.

“All kinds of people had an interest in killing him,” Fatton said. “He criticized everyone in power. It could have been people in the drug business, the old military establishment. Most of the rumors seem to point to some Lavalas involvement,” he added, referring to Aristide’s political party. “He was increasingly impatient with Aristide and the corruption.”

Though the assassination was the catalyst for the film, it focuses not on Dominique’s death but on his life. Montas initially questioned Demme about the title. “Jean was a journalist,” she said. “But when I saw the finished film, I realized what Jonathan wanted to say about Jean was his love for the land.”

“Jean was a man in love with his country, in love with his wife, in love with his pipe,” Demme said. “I miss going to a tobacco store and buying a packet of tobacco to send down to Haiti or take to him on my next visit. When I look at the film, I think, Jean was a little bit mad, wasn’t he? He appears a little quixotic.

“In person, he was very passionate. I’d sometimes wonder, he’s so charming, so smart, he’s accomplished so much, why don’t he and Michelle just move to Paris, lead an urbane life somewhere else? What makes somebody like that continue to carry on? He’d been smacked to the ground so many times.... he just didn’t know how to stop caring.”

Nancy Ramsey can be contacted at calendar@latimes.com.