Citizen Penn
Director: Don Hardy
Subject: Sean Penn
On Jan, 12th, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, killed 230000, injured 300,000 and left more than 1.5 million homeless. As difficult as it is to wrap one’s head around that, Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn organized a team and went to Haiti to actually help. This documentary, Citizen Penn, chronicles the moment he and his volunteer team landed on the island, just days after the devastating earth-shattering event struck, and reveals details of his ongoing decade-long commitment.
Going there for what was supposed to be a two-week aid mission to drop off supplies and help doctors provide immediate medical care, Penn thought he’d get out and get back to normal life. Instead, he stayed and created an organization called J/P HRO (now CORE) that took over management duties for the largest camp for displaced people in the entire country. For the outspoken political activist, going to Haiti changed his life.
Over the past few years, the organization he founded, CORE, has expanded its efforts across the United States, most recently organizing free COVID-19 testing sites across the country and running the nation’s largest vaccination site at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles.
Citizen Penn highlights his team work on the island and current projects in the U.S. as well. In the past, he had been stereotyped as a provocative hothead because of early-career headlines for punching cameramen, expressing his political views, and marrying Madonna, the world’s most recognizable pop star at the time, Despite previously expressing his forthright views, Penn now seems like a very private person. Nonetheless, director/writer Don Hardy won his trust and got him to speak at length about his Haitian relief effort, his social commitments and the results of his actions. Eventually, this film was fashioned from interviews with and others with his team including Ann Lee, his co-founder and successor.
When Penn arrived in Haiti, he didn’t speak a word of French or Creole and had never visited there before. But through his own insights he came up some solutions that other might not have achieved. For example, he immediately noticed that doctors had to performed amputations without anesthesia so they used vodka to disinfect wounds. Penn contacted the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, to get as much morphine as possible, because Chavez could expedite getting that into civilian hands unlike the system in the United States — an amazing move, indicative of what Penn had to do to be effective.
Once J/P Haitian Relief Organization came to be, it became a significant player. But it still had to raise money to fund itself and some of the events witnessed in this documentary are those fund-raisers. It offers an inside look at Penn fronting these events full of his famous associates such as Leonardo DiCaprio. This offered a fascinating contrast to the backbreaking and dirty, hands-on work he was doing on the ground post-disaster. Most Haitians were living out of tents, and some of were living on the grounds of a private golf course — which was taken care of by Sean’s team.
In the aftermath of an earthquake, people have to rebuild the city from the ground up, especially when the area continues to experience other natural disasters such as hurricanes or flood taking place afterwards. Mudslides and illnesses like cholera also plagued survivors as well. And they have to deal with post traumatic stress disorder as well. In the end, it’s just amazing that Penn’s organization did all that it did, it also created a school to educate kids who might lead their country later on. This is one film that makes you understand that by having enough will and an organizational vision, anything is possible.
Premiering on discovery+, Citizen Penn was originally an Official Selection of the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival. It won the Audience Choice Award at the 2020 Heartland Film Festival and was an official selection at 2020’s Vancouver International Film Festival, Raindance Film Festival and AFI Festival.