Cité Soleil, Sun City, smacks of some Riviera golf-and-tennis retirement community, relocated to the “earthly paradise” that Columbus termed his  Christmas Eve landfall in 1492. This Port-au-Prince shantytown, once envisioned by dictators Duvalier as a beautiful Caribbean tourist attraction, is now investigated in Ghosts of Cité Soliel, a first feature from Denmark’s Asger Leth and Serbian co-cinematographer Milos Loncarevic. Bravely documented at the height of madness in the U.N.’s “most dangerous place on earth” and, incorporating some of protagonist 2pac’s compositions, subsequently scored by Wyclef Jean and Jerry Duplessis, the 85 minutes are searing, not on gore quotient but through an aura of appalling violence in every frame.

Freed as Saint-Dominique from Napoleon’s France to become the hemisphere’s second republic, new-named from the exterminated Taino-Arawak “mountain land,” Haiti has borne 203 years of cynical French, North American and general exploitation, intervention and occupation, suffers poverty and deprivation on a par with Sub-Sahara Africa, and, not a catchy media hotspot, festers as the area’s most underreported cancer. Essentials of those centuries of Western duplicity and complicity are assembled in Nicolas Rossier’s 2005 Aristide and the Endless Revolution, while this new consideration emphasizes the “present,” that is, the early 2004 weeks sandwiching the second, definitive ouster of that island nation’s first-ever elected (by 67 percent) president. More, that present is made immediate and personal, backed by what appears a scattering of newsreels but centering on boyishly built twenty-something brothers 2pac and Bily and attractive French relief worker Lele.

Interpretation varies according to who speaks, Aristide backers or else supporters-turned-rebels-turned-liberators as the Cannibal Army. The slum’s 300,000 inhabitants exist in misery and terror under either side but for the early moments are in the self-proclaimed protective hands of the ex-priest president’s heavily armed Chimères, or Ghosts. 2pac is one of five leaders, each charged with a separate district, all pledged to quash opposition.

The film appearing spontaneous on-the-spot reporting, some sources nevertheless credit young Leth as writer; surely the several cellphone calls are not merely fortuitous and elicit doubt as to how much more is unrehearsed or at least not set up. In any case a great advance on the director’s participation in his father Jørgen and Lars von Trier’s Third World-insensitive The Five Obstructions, this film scarily, effectively impresses viewers with a relentless sense of unstoppable violence, capped by the final irony of a seeming escape willingly reversed and proving fatal.

Section 19 leader, seconded by colorfully named “soldiers” loyal but trigger-tempered and Uzi-, automatic pistol- and shotgun-armed and barely held in check, 2pac is intelligent in assessments of slippery reality. In the film’s lilting, obscenity-larded but unnecessarily subtitled English, he expounds his dream of rap composing-singing, phones Brooklyn-based countryman Wyclef Jean (also co-executive producer), loves baby daughter Taina, and voices doubts about Aristide (soon to disown the Chimères) tempered with concern for fellow slum dwellers and a personal involvement prompted by younger, loved-hated brother Bily.

Beyond blood, beyond families they have started, the siblings are linked through blonde Lele, astonishingly cool or else foolish in the extreme in this exclusively male world where early death, or worse, is an obsession and there is no out because, “Lele, I stop I die. Anything I do I die.” All talk of killing, and all brandish firearms, although the only dead bodies actually seen are apparently the handiwork of uniformed army and police and 2pac’s one shot is to the knee, to restrain an out-of-control subordinate.

Giving faces to Haiti’s desperate situation, the documentary tells a story, all the more chilling for it, rather than compiles statistics or contestable facts. The Frenchwoman’s romantic involvement with, and preference for, 2pac over Bily, is the budding of normal emotion in a cesspool environment where it cannot reach fruition. Neither Medellín’s La Sierra nor Rio’s City of God offers hope that its teens will live to see twenty; Cité Soleil’s young men won’t make it to thirty. Sooner better than later, the sight of such very real, very truncated lives must move audiences to outrage and, who knows? even to action. 

(Released by THINKFilm; not rated by MPAA.)