Filmmaker found priest 'extraordinarily charismatic and principled'

Published: 2007-09-26

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Filmmaker Bill Haney, who made the new documentary titled "The Price of Sugar," said one reason he decided to make a movie on the plight of Haitian sugar-cane cutters in the Dominican Republic was Father Christopher Hartley, the British-born priest who worked for several years with the Haitians and appears throughout the film. "I found Father Christopher an extraordinarily charismatic and principled man," Haney said. Although "educated in the spirit of reflection and contemplation," he added, "he was a bold leader taking real-life risks on behalf of the principles that he committed his life to." Another reason was "the kind of startling and stark and almost painful dichotomy between the lifestyle that the resort-dwellers were enjoying along the (Dominican) coast and the deeply, deeply troubling conditions that the sugar-cane workers were enduring just a few miles away," said Haney, a Catholic. "It kind of reminded me of the admonition that where the last among us go, so am I." A third reason for the film comes from Haney's education at Portsmouth Abbey in Portsmouth, R.I., a Benedictine-run school he attended from eighth through 12th grades while his father was teaching there.

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