Michèle Stephenson’s Stateless unwraps layers of institutionalized oppression
One of the takeaways filmmaker Michèle Stephenson has from her most recent documentary is that statelessness is an example of extreme anti-Black racism: “it is bureaucratic violence and it’s state sanctioned … we have to eliminate that.” The former Montrealer spent more than five years completing Stateless, a revealing documentary that pried into “the depths of racial hatred and institutionalized oppression” behind the Dominican Republic’s act to denationalize more than 250,000 Haitian born nationals and their children. On September 23, 2013 the DR’s Constitutional Court ruled retroactively that anyone born after 1929, who does not have at least one parent …