Haiti haunted by thuggish ‘Ghosts’

Asger Leth doesn’t especially look crazy or suicidal. But after I saw his new documentary, “Ghosts of Cite Soleil,” which debuted at the Toronto Film Festival before a packed house Saturday night, I had my doubts. The 36-year-old Danish filmmaker, whose father, Jorgen Leth, is a prominent Danish director, spent most of 2004 in the squalid slums of Haiti, chronicling the story of Haitians 2pac and Bily, two gang leaders of the Chimeres, the secret henchmen of then-Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

After years of corruption and dictatorship, Haiti is the eyesore of the Caribbean, racked with poverty and violence, with a malnutrition rate higher than Angola and a life expectancy lower than Sudan. Leth’s documentary shows us the thug life of the street gangs of Cite Soleil up close and personal -- so up close that the film’s cameramen occasionally dive for cover when gunfire erupts in the streets.

The movie made me feel as if I’d been tossed into the middle of an out-of-control reality TV show, with 2pac and his gunsels shooting rivals, smoking reefers, talking to the camera and composing rap-like anthems about killing. Many of the thugs have adopted monikers culled from American pop culture, from 2pac to Rocky Balboa and Jean-Claude Van Damme, but they’re not posers -- they make a hip-hop icon like 50 Cent look about as scary as Shrek.

Leth was introduced to Haiti by his father, who’d taken him as a boy in the 1980s while making films there. When his father fell into a depression, he found only one cure -- moving to Haiti. “Ever since I was a kid, my father told me the stories are stronger in Haiti than anywhere else on the planet,” says Leth, who when we spoke Sunday morning was still groggy from a wee-hours party the night before at which Wyclef Jean, who provides the music for the film, played a spirited set.

“My father figured that if he went to Haiti, where there’s so much chaos, the chaos inside his head would disappear. And it worked. In 2004, I’d just been divorced and I was suicidal myself. So going to Haiti was the best cure for divorce depression I could think of. At least until I got cured, and then I really realized how scary it was. Making this film was how I learned to handle fear, though I wouldn’t recommend it for everybody.”

The film is fascinating because you suspect that if 2pac and Bily, who are brothers, had grown up in a less hopeless environment, they might have turned their street smarts into something less sociopathic. As Leth puts it: “In a country full of illiteracy, they could read and write and speak several languages. It being Haiti, they ended up as gang leaders. But in another country, they might’ve been musicians or started a business.”

But in this movie, they are little more than thugs. Many who saw the film, which is still seeking a distributor, had concerns about Leth’s portrayal of the brothers, wondering if the filmmaker had gotten too close to his subjects. I was especially troubled by another key character in the film -- Lele, a French relief worker. She is intensely devoted to helping the poor of Cite Soleil, at no small personal risk -- Leth calls her “the queen of the slums.” She offers aid and counsel for the gangsters -- perhaps a trade-off for safe passage in a dangerous spot -- but she goes even further, becoming a lover of first Bily and then 2pac during the course of the film.

When I spoke with Leth, he revealed that her role was even murkier than the film suggests. Milos Loncarevic, Leth’s fearless cinematographer and co-director, was the person who helped introduce Leth to the gangsters and gain their trust. But Leth told me that Loncarevic, a Serbian expatriate, first came to Haiti to be with Lele, who was his girlfriend when filming began.

In an era where much of so-called reality TV is fake, it’s hard to blame a documentarian for making questionable judgment calls, especially in such circumstances. Leth told me that when he went to interview the Haitian chief of police, who was trying to wipe out the gangs, “I had to pretend I was a stupid outsider because if he knew I was with the gangs, they would’ve followed us and we would’ve all been in some horrible gun battle.”

But he pleads innocent to a loss of objectivity. “Actually, I’m totally objective because I’m too cynical about Haiti to take sides. Everyone there is trying to kill each other. And in another five years, it’ll be a new bunch of guys doing all the shooting. When it comes to Haiti, it is a place I love, but it is also a place where I lost all my illusions.”

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“The Big Picture” is covering the Toronto Film Festival this week. For daily dispatches, go to latimes.com/toronto.