“Art as an act of resistance” has always been a phrase that seems to beg me for scrutiny. 

Not in the sense that it’s incorrect—art has often been a vehicle for resistance—but in the sense that the conditions many young Canadian artists near me often live in do not scream oppressive. This often makes me wonder what real resistance through art looks like, and whether I should even be allowed to arbitrate what real resistance through art should resemble. 

At All Kosts or Koutkékout in Haitian Creole, is a Canadian Documentary directed by Joseph Hillel, which premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. The story revolves around theatre director Guy Regis Jr. and the artists behind Quatre Chemin, a theatre festival that has been hosted in Port-au-Prince Haiti for the past twenty years. Its fate is left ambiguous, however, as the tumultuous situation in Haiti’s capital city worsens each day. 

After the assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse, Port-au-Prince and the rest of Haiti have been overrun by gangs vying for power and leaving trails of blood wherever they walk. These gangs are a constant threat to everyday life for Haitian citizens, and yet, as prominent and oppressive as they are, they only act as a backdrop to the lives of the artists preparing for the next iteration of Quatre Chemin. 

Joseph Hillal—born in Port-au-Prince—reveals the striking contrast between the mundanity of an artist’s process as they rehearse, refine, and rework their productions, and the chaos of living inside a pseudo-compound guarded by a massive sheet-metal gate and a man with a shotgun, while near constant gunshots ring out in the distance. 

With all this destruction comes the creative work of artists involved in Quatre Chemin, and the meaning their community derives from it. We are treated to artists like Edouard “Youyou” Baptiste, and his gruff-voiced monologues of the nature of man, or the history of colonialism in Haiti and its ties to Voodoo and spirituality. 

At All Kosts asks the audience if they can imagine a society without art or culture, and shows them the artists who adamantly cannot. The B-roll lingers on people who are not defined by the threat of gangs that roam their home but by the art they create to resist them. 

An artist is driven from his neighbourhood in the middle of the night, forced to carry his mother who cannot walk under the threat of death, and the only thing he wants to focus on not even days later is improving his performance so that he can have a chance to express himself through his art. 

A common North American liberal attitude is to take pity on people living in harsh conditions which we can barely imagine, such as those the people of Haiti experience. 

At All Kosts rejects that mentality and shows its audience what it’s like for artists in Haiti to just live as people. No pity is required; they are heroic, but they don’t need to be heroes. They resist through their breathing, their living, their sparks of extraordinary ideas shared with everyone. Every thought, consideration or critique they prompt is a tiny act of resistance. Through existence they resist, at all costs.