Miriam Neptune

With a tentative voice and a pair of dark eyes she’s quick to avert, Miriam Neptune defies the stereotypical image of a freedom fighter. But armed with a digital video camera and a rudimentary knowledge of Creole and Spanish, the Haitian-American filmmaker has become a vital witness to the Dominican government’s mass deportation of Haitian migrant workers, Haitian-Dominicans and their children from the Dominican Republic.

“These deportations happen cyclically in the D.R.,” says Neptune, a Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, resident who earns her living teaching documentary filmmaking to high school students. “This time it was all associated with the murder of a Dominican girl named Marisa Nunez. Haitians were falsely accused and this opened the door for [President Leonel Fernandez], to authorize the deportation of 11,000 Haitian men, women and children in one week.”

For Birthright Crisis, which she screened in a Crown Heights, Brooklyn, laundromat for mostly Caribbean patrons, Neptune collected footage of Dominican- and Haitian-American activists, deportees, and two Dominican-Haitian girls who asserted their constitutional right to Dominican citizenship at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Although her 15-minute film articulates the crisis with taut elegance, Neptune says she struggles with feelings of insecurity. “I feel a lot safer teaching than I do making my own work,” admits the 30-year old who holds a master’s degree in media studies and culture from New York University. “But that’s why I gravitate toward things that feel so urgent, so I can’t think about whether I can do it or not.”

Neptune also had to step outside of her comfort zone to execute her Create Change project—screening the overtly political Birthright Crisis at a neighborhood laundromat and filming patrons’ responses. She was accustomed to showing the film, which was produced by New York City’s Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, to a rapt audience. Playing it for unsuspecting laundry customers was another matter.

“I went to about 10 laundromats between Maple Street and Clarkson Avenue before I found an attendant willing to let me plug in my monitor and recorder and show this film,” says Neptune with a chuckle. “It was frustrating, but I couldn’t allow the rejection to affect the project. I had to accept that this wasn’t a controlled environment where everybody was listening. Create Change forced me to engage with people in a very basic way.”

With the help of the narrow laundromat’s attendant, a thirtysomething woman who lent the filmmaker her portable DVD player when the monitor failed, Neptune did indeed create change. In groups of three and four audience members tuned out the competing din of washers, dryers, chatter and television and watched the Spanish and Creole documentary with English subtitles. Some rewound it, seeking clarification and debating among one another.

She could convince only one woman—the laundry attendant—that it was safe to express their responses on camera, several men shared their thoughts. One middle age interviewee from Jamaica demanded to know why major television media hadn’t covered the deportation crisis. A Haitian-American university student admitted that he’d faced so much prejudice from African American classmates he didn’t assert his cultural identity until the late ‘90s. And one respondent, a self-described Rastafarian, revealed that he’d been jailed in Grenada for what he called political resistance.

“It was really deep for me to show something that is so important to me in this environment, to watch people reading every subtitle,” says Neptune, who considers her installation a success because it stimulated dialogue, raised awareness of a critical issue, and helped thicken her skin. “I got a sense that people at this laundromat knew each other in passing, but the act of watching something like this together created a feeling of real community.”