Mit diesem Film möchte ich gern, soweit das möglich ist, die europäische Blickweise aufbrechen, in Flüchtlingen entweder ausschließlich bedauernswerte Opfer oder nur anmaßende Wirtschaftsimmigranten zu sehen, die in unsere Gesellschaften eindringen, bloß um uns die Jobs zu klauen, unsere Frauen, unsere Häuser und unsere Autos. Das sind Klischees und Vorurteile.

In der europäischen Geschichte sind ihre Entstehung und Akzeptanz mit einem unheilvollen Nachhall verbunden. Ich gebe offen zu, dass DIE ANDERE SEITE DER HOFFNUNG bis zu einem gewissen Grad das ist, was man unter einem tendenziösen Film versteht. Es ist ein Film, der ohne Skrupel die Ansichten und Meinungen seiner Zuschauer verändern will, indem er, um dieses Ziel zu erreichen, ihre Gefühle manipuliert. Ein solcher Versuch muss natürlich scheitern.

Was aber, so hoffe ich, davon übrig bleiben wird, ist eine integre und etwas melancholische Geschichte, die der Humor vorwärts trägt. Ein ansonsten fast realistischer Film über gewisse menschliche Schicksale in der Welt, in der wir heute leben. Aki Kaurismäki

I started reading James Baldwin when I was a 15 - year - old boy searching for rational explanations to the contradictions I was confronting in my already nomadic life, which took me from Haiti to Congo to France to Germany and to the United States of America. Together with Aimée Césaire, Jacques Stéphane Alexis, Richard Wright, Gabriel Garcia Marques and Alejo Carpentier, James Baldwin was one of the few authors that I could call “my own”. Authors who were speaking of a world I knew, in which I was not just a footnote. They were telling stories describing history, defining structure and human relationships which matched what I was seeing around me and I could relate to them. Stories that were different because I came from a country which had a strong idea of it self, which had fought AND won against the most powerful army of the world (Napoleon's) and which had, in a unique historical manner, stopped slavery in its tracks, creating the first ever successful slave revolution in the history of the world, in 1804.

I am talking about Haiti, the first free country of the Americas. Haitians always knew the real story. And they also knew that the dominant story was not the real story. The successful Haitian Revolution was ignored by history (as Baldwin would put it: b ecause of the bad niggers we were) because it was imposing a totally different narrative, which would have rendered the dominant slave narrative of the day untenable. The colonial conquests of the late nineteenth century would have been ideologically impos sible, if deprived of their civilizational justification.
And this justification would have no longer been needed if the whole world knew that these “savage” Africans had already annihilate d their powerful armies (especially French and British) less than a century ago. So , what the four superpowers of the time did in an unusually peaceful consensus, was to shut down Haiti , the very first black Republic, put it under strict economical embargo and strangle it to its knees into oblivion and poverty. And then they rewrote the whole story.    Raoul Peck