The Criterion Channel has been described by Raymond Cavalieri of ForeverWatch.com as “A Film-Lover’s Streaming Home.” The subscription streaming platform “focuses on curated cinema — classics, international gems, and influential titles — served with context that helps viewers understand what they’re watching and why it matters.”
The New York Times describes Criterion as “gathering the greatest films from around the world,” compiling “a catalog so synonymous with cinematic achievement that it has come to function as a kind of film Hall of Fame.”
Therefore it is a great honor that the feature documentary Bitter Cane, produced clandestinely in Haiti in the final years of the Duvalier dynasty, has been selected to begin streaming on the Criterion Channel starting May 1.
Directed by the late Ben Dupuy and filmmaker/journalist Kim Ives, in collaboration with the underground Mouvement Haïtien de Libération (MHL) and a collective of Haitian and North American filmmakers and activists, Bitter Cane won awards in several film festivals – including first prize at the Antwerp Film Festival – following its 1983 release. Produced in both English and Kreyòl, it was projected in theatres to North American and Haitian audiences around the U.S., Europe, and Canada, and then, following the Duvalier dictatorship’s fall in 1986, on church walls, bed-sheets, and university movie-screens, helping to sow the ideological seeds for the Lavalas movement that sprouted in the following years.
Although released and distributed on DVD by the late Katharine Kean’s Crowing Rooster Arts in the early 2000s, the film’s original video transfer made by Dupuy and Ives’ Haiti Films collective, due to budget restraints, was sub-par. But in 2024, the IndieCollect film preservation organization returned to the original 16mm negative and magnetic track to digitize the film by 21st century standards, restoring Bitter Cane to a form even more beautiful than its original glory.
Bitter Cane’s restored version premiered at the Anthology Film Archive in Manhattan in February 2024, and the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Cinema showed it for a twice-extended run in June 2024.
The new version was also shown at several U.S. film festivals, such as in Miami’s May 2025 Third Horizon Film Festival, where curator Jonathan Ali compiled a selection of films entitled “You Don’t Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema 1978–1985.” Bitter Cane was part of that line-up, which will now be on the Criterion Channel, along with Haiti: The Way to Freedom (1973), The Terror and the Time (1978), Women of Suriname (1978), West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979), Grenada: The Future Coming Towards Us (1983), and Sweet Sugar Rage (1985).
“Bitter Cane… was [a] broadside against Haiti’s Duvalier dictatorship and its ongoing exploitation of the Haitian people in concert with multinational interests,” Ali wrote in Documentary Magazine. “Every film made in the Caribbean was a movement unto itself. In most cases, whether intentionally or not, the films… were one-off productions, irruptions that accompanied and were sometimes directly born out of activist struggles for social, economic, and political reform.” Criterion will now be presenting Bitter Cane and other classics from this prolific, revolutionary period over 40 years ago.
Bitter Cane has also been selected to be part of the “1001 Documentary Films Collection,” spanning the period from 1895 to 2020, to be included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.
One can subscribe to the Criterion Channel for $11 per month or $100 per year, which is cheaper than a Netflix subscription for much higher quality films. They also offer a free 7-day trial subscription for curious viewers to sample the hundreds of films which they offer.
