General Interest, Members' Corner
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The Film ‘Dual Citizen’ Launches Caribbean Tour Across Trinidad, Guadeloupe And French Guiana
Press Release:
Haitian-American filmmaker Rachelle Salnave brings an intimate and humorous father-daughter journey about citizenship, family and Haitian nationality across the Caribbean
MIAMI, FL / JACMEL, HAITI — September 2026 — Following its opening at the Miami Film Festival before a sold-out audience and a screening at the DC Caribbean FilmFest, presented at the American Film Institute’s AFI Silver Theatre, Haitian-American filmmaker Rachelle Salnave is taking her feature documentary DUAL CITIZEN into the Caribbean.
The tour begins September 24 at the 20th anniversary of the Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival in Port of Spain, where Salnave will attend the screening and participate in festival activities. DUAL CITIZEN then travels to Guadeloupe, where it will screen October 2 as part of CinéStar International Film Festival’s Official Documentary Competition, followed by an October 8 screening at FIFAC — Festival International du Film Documentaire Amazonie-Caraïbes in French Guiana.
The Caribbean tour comes as the film is generating a growing response both in theaters and online, suggesting that its deeply personal story is connecting to a much broader conversation about citizenship, migration, family and the relationship between Haiti and its diaspora.
Filmed over several years, DUAL CITIZEN follows Salnave and her Haitian-born father, Edouard Salnave, as they embark on a sometimes frustrating, often humorous journey through Haiti’s bureaucracy in pursuit of her Haitian citizenship. What begins as a legal process gradually becomes a deeply personal father-daughter story about nationality, family, migration and history.
Salnave began the journey in 2018, inspired by changes to Haiti’s Constitution that restored nationality rights to Haitians living abroad and their descendants. But the world into which the completed film is now emerging has changed dramatically.
“When my father and I started this journey in 2018, I was trying to understand what it actually meant for someone like me — born in the United States to Haitian parents — to reclaim my Haitian citizenship. I could not have imagined how urgent these questions would become by the time the film was finished. We are living through a moment when migration, citizenship and borders are being debated around the world. DUAL CITIZEN is our very personal Haitian story, but the questions inside it reach far beyond Haiti.”
The Caribbean tour places those questions within a region whose people have long moved between islands, nations, languages and colonial borders while maintaining powerful cultural and familial connections across them.
For Salnave, bringing the film through the Caribbean also opens a larger conversation about Haiti’s relationship with the region.
“Haiti is Caribbean. Yet Haitians do not always experience the Caribbean with the same freedom of movement as our neighbors. Taking DUAL CITIZEN through Trinidad, Guadeloupe and French Guiana gives us an opportunity to ask these questions together: Who gets to move? What makes us Caribbean? And who gets to decide?”
Despite the political and historical questions at its center, DUAL CITIZEN is not a conventional political documentary. The film is driven by the relationship between Salnave and her father — two strong personalities from different generations who do not always agree on Haiti, politics or even the wisdom of the journey they have undertaken.
Their disagreements provide much of the film’s humor and ultimately reveal its emotional center: a father and daughter whose love for one another survives bureaucracy, politics, history and their own stubbornness.
DUAL CITIZEN — CARIBBEAN TOUR 2026
TRINIDAD & TOBAGO
Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival
September 24 | 8:00 PM
MovieTowne, Port of Spain
Director Rachelle Salnave in attendance
GUADELOUPE
CinéStar International Film Festival
Official Documentary Competition
October 2 | 4:00 PM
FRENCH GUIANA
FIFAC — Festival International du Film Documentaire Amazonie-Caraïbes
October 8 | 6:00 PM
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