NOU VISION Past Events
Past Events:
📰 NOU Vision Community Conversations: Between the Notes, Beyond the Border 🎥 Free Screening of Kiskey’ART at the Bronx Museum – June 21, 2025
During our inaugural NOU Film Festival, Kiskey’ART was one of the most beloved screenings—leaving the audience tearful, joyful, and deeply inspired. It sparked conversations that moved beyond the screen. People left elated, ready to build, ready to begin again.
In this moment of collective grief and rising division, Kiskey’ART reminds us of the power of connection across borders. It reminds us what becomes possible when we come together through art, music, and honest dialogue. It lifts us. It challenges us. And it shows how Haitian and Dominican artists are not just resisting—they’re re-imagining.
That re-imagining feels even more urgent today.
On March 30, 2025, a violent anti-Haitian protest took place in Hoyo de Friusa, near Punta Cana, organized by the far-right nationalist group Antigua Orden (Old Dominican Order). According to Black Agenda Report, protestors—many bused in from Santo Domingo—marched into a neighborhood home to one of the largest Haitian communities in the country. Armed with gasoline, weapons, and Dominican flags, some attempted to breach police lines and shouted racial epithets, including calls for a Dominican “Ku Klux Klan.” Police dispersed the crowd with water cannons and tear gas, but not before a Haitian worker was killed by four gunshots in nearby Verón-Punta Cana.
Just weeks later, on May 9, Lourdia Jean-Pierre, a 32-year-old Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic, died after giving birth at home in El Ceibo. As reported by The Haitian Times, she bled to death—too afraid to seek medical attention at a hospital, where she risked deportation under newly enforced policies requiring migrants to present documentation before receiving care.
Meanwhile, the United States has reinstated a travel ban that includes Haiti among 12 countries whose nationals are barred from entering, citing national security concerns. This policy, effective June 9, 2025, echoes earlier controversial bans and has been criticized for its discriminatory impact on Haitians seeking refuge from political, economic, and climate-related crises.
This is the context in which we return to Kiskey’ART.
The film follows the Azueï Movement, a collective of Haitian and Dominican artists who travel together across the island—from Santo Domingo to Cap-Haïtien, Anse-à-Pitres to Santiago—creating murals, holding music workshops, and offering their art to children and communities living at the edges of history.
They cross borders not just physically, but spiritually. With every drumbeat and brushstroke, they ask: What does it mean to create from a place of love across a line built by colonial power?
Kiskey’ART is not just a film. It’s a refusal: • A refusal to be divided by colonial borders that pit Haitians and Dominicans against each other. • A refusal to accept silence about racism, anti-Blackness, and state violence. • A refusal to allow trauma to be the only story—choosing joy, creativity, and connection as tools of resistance. • A refusal to forget the shared histories and solidarities erased by nationalism, white supremacy, and empire. • A refusal to comply with systems that tell us that art is separate from politics, or that healing is separate from justice.
🗓 Saturday, June 21, 2025 | 2–5 PM
📍 The Bronx Museum (Doors open at 1:30 PM)
🎟 Free and open to the public
🎙 Q&A with Co-Directors Jean Jean & Rachèle Magloire
📚 In partnership with Literary Freedom Project’s One Book One Bronx series
💛 RSVP here: https://bronxmuseum.org/event/azuei-film/
🙏 Support the work: https://givebutter.com/2024noufest
🎙 Co-moderated by MelimeL, creative artist & mompreneur, and Tasha Dougé, artist, educator, and cultural vigilante
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This moment demands more than passive sympathy.
It calls for active solidarity.
Come ready to build—because the work doesn’t end when the credits roll.
We invite you to show up for this film, for the artists, for the communities living these stories—and for the future we’re trying to build, together.
Sources:
U.S. Department of Homeland Security press release on travel restrictions, June 2025.
Black Agenda Report, “Nationalist Anti-Haitian March in the Dominican Republic,” April 2025.
The Haitian Times, “Haitian migrant woman dies after giving birth at home in DR,” May 2025.