Boat People

Boat People (1982)

As the film opens, a Haitian father, mother and infant are on a boat; the father’s thoughts concern his need to escape a country in which he was jailed by the Macoutes for complaining about worker exploitation at the baseball factory where he worked. Suddenly, the people who own the boat are pushing the Haitians over the side at gunpoint far from the coast of Florida. News stories indicating that 33 Haitians have drowned are intercut. We jump to the man, whose wife has drowned and who still carries his drowned infant boy; he has been pulled out of the water by an elderly man and woman with German (Yiddish?) accents who empathize because they also came to the United States illegally. The elderly man is coughing and slowly dying because of his work in an asbestos factory. He tells his wife, "It is not problems I am afraid of; it is having nothing to live for." They help the Haitian man bury his son at sea and commit to helping him into the United States.

Available for research at UCLA