Imagine a Country
On Joseph Hillel’s At All Kosts (Koutekekout)
Orlando Reade
At All Kosts (Koutkekout)
Director JOSEPH HILLEL
Year
2024
Country CANADA
“Can you imagine a country with
nothing left?” Posed in Joseph Hillel’s documentary At All Kosts (Koutkekout), the question imagines a place where art has disappeared from public
life. This is almost a reality in Haiti, which has been without effective
government since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, and
where large parts of the country are controlled by armed gangs.
Almost a reality—but not quite. The Quatre Chemins Theatre Festival has taken place in Pacot, a residential neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, every year since 2003. Joseph Hillel’s film follows the festival team as they prepare for the next iteration. The festival’s director Guy Régis says its continuation is a sign that the gangs have not totally stifled life: “If we let them take up all our mental space, we have no country left.”
At All Kosts shows how life in Haiti can be at once fraught and ordinary, and explores the potentially dangerous decision to continue the festival. That is why Régis poses this strangely Utopian thought experiment: imagine a country with nothing left. Only then you will know what art does.
Utopian thought began with the Caribbean. Written in 1516, only twenty-four years after Columbus reached Hispaniola (the island encompassing Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Thomas More’s Utopia describes a perfect society, located on an island hidden far from Europe. He was inspired by the travelogues that had come back after Columbia’s voyage, fantastical stories of monsters and limitless wealth. More turned them into a subtle thought experiment about a perfect society.
If the Caribbean inspired Utopia, it has also forced a reckoning with its impossibility; in time, European nations began to turn those islands into lucrative sugar and tobacco colonies. Written in 1610-11, Shakespeare’s The Tempest describes the fate of those Utopian visions. In the play, a European ship is wrecked off the coast of an island where an exiled prince is living. The Martiniquan writer Aimé Cesaire saw the island of The Tempest as a microcosm of colonial society: Prospero as the colonizer, Caliban the rebellious labourer, and Ariel the ‘house slave.’
Shakespeare’s play is charged with both a grim realism and dreams of freedom. The idealist Gonzalo fantasises of an opportunity to establish a society without landlords and unnecessary consumption, and with only virtuous women. Meanwhile, the enslaved Caliban describes his dreams—an island of “Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not”. Writing from the twentieth century, Césaire saw this dream as a prototype of post-colonial freedom.
If there is an argument made collectively by the actors and crew interviewed in At All Kosts—a film of subtlety and grace—it is that the Utopian dreams expressed in and through art have a real effect: helping to imagine a country where things could be otherwise.
Behind their dreams lies the example of the Haitian Revolution. In the 1790s, enslaved people rose up against the French colonial regime on the island, then called Saint Domingue. In The Black Jacobins (1938), his history of those events, C.L.R. James calls it the most valuable colony in the world. The imperial powers didn’t give it up without a fight, and there were invasions by the French, Spanish, and British armies, all of them successfully repelled. In 1804, Haiti was officially established—the first Black republic.
The events of the 1790s—unthinkable beforehand and widely overlooked by many Western historians since—inspire in the Quatre Chemins team a strange combination of realism and idealism. Régis says he is proud to be Haitian “for the kick in the ass that we gave the world.” The festival team visit the house of the writer Frankétienne, and he speaks to them of Haiti “as anomaly, an intolerable event, a danger.”
Violence is visible in the film only as re-enactment—actors lie on a street, kicked over gently, and performatively; a watchful boy wearing a devil costume gazes at the camera without hostility; we see a mural by Haitian painter Préfète Duffaut, which represents the invasion of Haiti as a ship carrying crocodiles and other beasts. But the danger is not absent: we see members of the team listening to warnings of gang activity in other neighbourhoods. In the distance, we hear the soft pop of gunfire.
They continue their work, cutting costumes and rehearsing dances. The actor Edmond Erthon tells us that the very existence of the festival involves a “dynamic of resistance”; resistance against the gangs, and the daily news. Singer Néhémie Bastien and director Natalia Pericles explain why they don’t want to emigrate. A voiceover lists reasons to stay: the crowds, the laughter, the weather, and Karnaval—officially cancelled this year but still celebrated in some parts. They express a gratitude for Haiti.
On the opening night of the festival, Régis tells the assembled crowd that the festival is taking place because they “dare to dare.” So alien is self-aggrandisement to the people in this understated film that it might not occur to the viewer that this might be a heroic act. There is real courage in the quiet intention with which they carry out their task—at all costs.
Imagine a country with nothing. Then add a space for creation, for reflection, for gathering. For dancing together after the final performance. What else cannot be imagined?
Orlando Reade is the author of What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost, published by Jonathan Cape in 2024.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of At All Kosts (Koutkekout) at Bertha DocHouse, 11 May 2025.
Almost a reality—but not quite. The Quatre Chemins Theatre Festival has taken place in Pacot, a residential neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, every year since 2003. Joseph Hillel’s film follows the festival team as they prepare for the next iteration. The festival’s director Guy Régis says its continuation is a sign that the gangs have not totally stifled life: “If we let them take up all our mental space, we have no country left.”
At All Kosts shows how life in Haiti can be at once fraught and ordinary, and explores the potentially dangerous decision to continue the festival. That is why Régis poses this strangely Utopian thought experiment: imagine a country with nothing left. Only then you will know what art does.
Utopian thought began with the Caribbean. Written in 1516, only twenty-four years after Columbus reached Hispaniola (the island encompassing Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Thomas More’s Utopia describes a perfect society, located on an island hidden far from Europe. He was inspired by the travelogues that had come back after Columbia’s voyage, fantastical stories of monsters and limitless wealth. More turned them into a subtle thought experiment about a perfect society.
If the Caribbean inspired Utopia, it has also forced a reckoning with its impossibility; in time, European nations began to turn those islands into lucrative sugar and tobacco colonies. Written in 1610-11, Shakespeare’s The Tempest describes the fate of those Utopian visions. In the play, a European ship is wrecked off the coast of an island where an exiled prince is living. The Martiniquan writer Aimé Cesaire saw the island of The Tempest as a microcosm of colonial society: Prospero as the colonizer, Caliban the rebellious labourer, and Ariel the ‘house slave.’
Shakespeare’s play is charged with both a grim realism and dreams of freedom. The idealist Gonzalo fantasises of an opportunity to establish a society without landlords and unnecessary consumption, and with only virtuous women. Meanwhile, the enslaved Caliban describes his dreams—an island of “Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not”. Writing from the twentieth century, Césaire saw this dream as a prototype of post-colonial freedom.
If there is an argument made collectively by the actors and crew interviewed in At All Kosts—a film of subtlety and grace—it is that the Utopian dreams expressed in and through art have a real effect: helping to imagine a country where things could be otherwise.
Behind their dreams lies the example of the Haitian Revolution. In the 1790s, enslaved people rose up against the French colonial regime on the island, then called Saint Domingue. In The Black Jacobins (1938), his history of those events, C.L.R. James calls it the most valuable colony in the world. The imperial powers didn’t give it up without a fight, and there were invasions by the French, Spanish, and British armies, all of them successfully repelled. In 1804, Haiti was officially established—the first Black republic.
The events of the 1790s—unthinkable beforehand and widely overlooked by many Western historians since—inspire in the Quatre Chemins team a strange combination of realism and idealism. Régis says he is proud to be Haitian “for the kick in the ass that we gave the world.” The festival team visit the house of the writer Frankétienne, and he speaks to them of Haiti “as anomaly, an intolerable event, a danger.”
Violence is visible in the film only as re-enactment—actors lie on a street, kicked over gently, and performatively; a watchful boy wearing a devil costume gazes at the camera without hostility; we see a mural by Haitian painter Préfète Duffaut, which represents the invasion of Haiti as a ship carrying crocodiles and other beasts. But the danger is not absent: we see members of the team listening to warnings of gang activity in other neighbourhoods. In the distance, we hear the soft pop of gunfire.
They continue their work, cutting costumes and rehearsing dances. The actor Edmond Erthon tells us that the very existence of the festival involves a “dynamic of resistance”; resistance against the gangs, and the daily news. Singer Néhémie Bastien and director Natalia Pericles explain why they don’t want to emigrate. A voiceover lists reasons to stay: the crowds, the laughter, the weather, and Karnaval—officially cancelled this year but still celebrated in some parts. They express a gratitude for Haiti.
On the opening night of the festival, Régis tells the assembled crowd that the festival is taking place because they “dare to dare.” So alien is self-aggrandisement to the people in this understated film that it might not occur to the viewer that this might be a heroic act. There is real courage in the quiet intention with which they carry out their task—at all costs.
Imagine a country with nothing. Then add a space for creation, for reflection, for gathering. For dancing together after the final performance. What else cannot be imagined?
Orlando Reade is the author of What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost, published by Jonathan Cape in 2024.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of At All Kosts (Koutkekout) at Bertha DocHouse, 11 May 2025.