"The buildings have been destroyed. There hasn't been medication in the pharmacy ... and there are no doctors to offer first aid relief," she said. "For the injured, Jesus is their only hope."
Jean is one of 60 students at Haiti's only film school, the Ciné Institute in Jacmel. The 7.0 earthquake destroyed the school but miraculously left all but one of the students alive and accounted for. The next day, they returned to the rubble that had been their classroom and found much of their equipment destroyed. But they unearthed six small video cameras and one still camera, enabling them to get to work.
Andrew Bigosinski
Students at Haiti's only film school, the Ciné Institute in Jacmel, mobilizing after the earthquake on Wednesday.
Now, amidst the ruins and the corpses and the wailing in the streets, 27 students press on into the destruction, cameras in hand. Three days ago they were budding filmmakers, angling for jobs in Haiti's small film and television industry. Now they have a much graver mission: to bear witness to their country's heartbreak and to tell their town's struggle to the world.
"We were a film school until yesterday. Our new mission is to do recovery stories," said Annie Nocenti, one of Ciné Institute's instructors. "Hopefully, stories of Haitians rebuilding."
When the earthquake struck, Jean, 24, was in the school's studio with about seven other students, Andrew Bigosinski, the school's director, and Paula Hyppolite, an administrator. When the floor began shaking, they ran to an entryway and crouched down until it was still enough to run outside.
Jean found her father, mother and brother, but the damage to their house has forced them to sleep outside in the streets at night, afraid that another earthquake could come any minute. Three friends, two cousins, an aunt and an uncle did not survive. Still, she has taken a camera into the streets each day and films the chaos around her.
The Victims In Jacmel: Keziah Jean reports from the field from Ciné Institute on Vimeo.
"We are working, but we are also afraid," she said. "We want to show all people Jacmel has a big problem."
Just before 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Massena César was finishing some homework. He was on the roof of a house shooting a two-minute video when the building began vibrating. He threw himself down as two and three story buildings began crumbling around him. Ten seconds later, he was surrounded by broken buildings.
"Jacmel needs immediate help because there were about 300 or 400 buildings destroyed here and the cadavers are still inside. Now everything smells of corpses," he wrote yesterday, in a translation from French. "It is the first time that I have experienced a catastrophe as bad as this in Jacmel."
Bigosinski returned home after the earthquake to find his apartment had slid down a hillside. He spent Tuesday night sleeping at the airport with 3,000 others.
"You could hear the howling of people crying in town. Nightmarish. I never could have expected the ferocity of this quake," he wrote in an e-mail.
Andrew Bigosinski
Rubble blocked streets as Jacmel residents searched for loved ones on Wednesday.
For many of the students, whose ages range from 16 to 28, this has been the worst catastrophe of their lives, and it is underscored by a fear that the world will focus on Port-au-Prince, overlooking their smaller but equally devastated town.
"I would have rather lived through three floods, it is as if I am in a deep sleep," Vadim Janvier, a 26-year-old student, explained on Wednesday, in a translation from Creole. "Please let me think of this as a dream and when I wake up, everything will be okay."
With their lives in chaos and their buildings in ruins, the students set up a makeshift base at a radio station. With the equipment they salvaged, they have four editing stations and one uploading station. Working with a team at the school's office in New York, they uploaded Keziah's video to their Web site only two days after the earthquake.
At noon on Friday, a second video was up, and six more are waiting for volunteers to edit and produce. Fritzner Simeus's footage shows buildings stacked like pancakes on top of themselves, people freeing a man pinned under the rubble, and thousands at night lying in the grass at the airport with nothing but blankets to cover themselves.
"The idea really now is that we make the world know that Jacmel has been equally hit as Port-au-Prince and need as much support," Bigosinski said. The students have had food and fresh water, but supplies are running low. Already fuel for generators and medical supplies in the town are nearly spent.
Thursday was Ebby Angel Louis's 28th birthday. He spent it helping others in Jacmel. Today, he joined back up with his classmates and manned the homebase in the radio station, editing and uploading footage. For Louis, the importance of their work is not just to send information out into the world, but to let the people of Jacmel know that not all is lost.
Andrew Bigosinski
Most buildings in Jacmel were destroyed by the quake.
The students plan to continue filming, editing and uploading for as long as they can, which may be as long as they have enough fuel to run the generator. And after that, after some amount of calm has been restored and the reconstruction begins, Bigosinski says they plan to rebuild the school so that Haitians can continue to tell their own stories.
"It's amazing that they all got together like this after such a devastating tragedy," Bigosinski said. "We just said 'we have an opportunity to reach out and let the world know what's happening here.'"
One video at a time, the students are pulling their country's story from the wreckage around them and ensuring, in the face of unimaginable adversity, that Jacmel will not be forgotten.
ALSO SEE: Ciné Institute is offering updates from Jacmel on their Web site.
