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Can Sean Penn prove his worth as a humanitarian hero? - The Guardian

Can Sean Penn prove his worth as a humanitarian hero? - The Guardian

May 06, 2021 1 min, 45 secs

The director of Citizen Penn, a film that shows the actor’s reparative work in Haiti, argues that people need to leave their preconceptions aside.

In the new documentary Citizen Penn, director Don Hardy isn’t particularly interested in promoting one image of the actor-director over the other.

“I don’t want to put myself in a place of being a mouthpiece for Sean Penn’s PR,” Hardy tells the Guardian over the phone.

He admits to some of the tough lessons he’s learned through all this, as we take a little trip through Sean Penn history going back to the early 80s.

He ended up stepping in to narrate and executive-produce Witch Hunt, and, as Hardy puts it, “This started my film career.” The premiere a few years later brought him some momentum, and he approached Penn again in 2010 for another project, but the star had more urgent business to attend to.

“I saw him hurriedly set up some way for a plane to get into Haiti with supplies, watched it right in front of me,” he says.

Though Penn ran the show with the Jenkins-Penn Haiti Relief Organization (now renamed Core), he recognized that his authority would have to have hard limits with Hardy.

From that long and candid sit-down, Hardy conjures a glimpse of the transformative effects service can have on a person, rather than any penetrating inquest into the enigma that is Sean Penn.

Staying, listening, finding a way to work together – as Anderson Cooper says in the film, in those early days of Haiti, any help was good help.

“They didn’t go in with an agenda of how they were going to provide water or tents,” Hardy says.

Their operations led to another one of the dustups that follow Penn everywhere he goes; a handful of anonymous volunteers complained of substandard working conditions, which Penn emphatically rejected in a 2,200-word email leaked to the press

“I haven’t had the opportunity to talk to Sean about it,” Hardy says, but it’s the same-old-same-old for a personality with headlines always at his heels

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