"Freda", 100% Haitian film, which shows and "repairs" reality

Tears, laughter and loud applause, after the end credits.

After having seduced at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was selected in the Un Certain Regard category,

, the film by Haitian director Gessica Géneus was presented in Paris in two theaters in front of a conquered audience including Jocelyne Beroard of the legendary group Kassav ' , Harry Roselmack or Audrey Pulvar.

This fiction, which is set in contemporary Haiti, takes us to a working-class neighborhood, among siblings, including two sisters Esther (Djanaïna François) and Freda, poles apart and linked by a love unwavering.

, played by Nehemiah Bastien, awaits the return of Yeshua (Juancito Jean), her lover, who left for treatment in Santo Domingo after a violent assault.

To leave or stay in a bruised country, this is one of the axes of this beautiful film, for which Gessica Géneus wrote the screenplay, the dialogues, signs the production and the co-product.

A first 100% Haitian film

100% Haitian film,

stages different places - the family home, the hotel, the street, the classroom of a university, the church - which are all agoras for discussing the political and social situation. from the country. “What obsesses me is the human but also the Haitian because we share a lot of pain, trauma, emotional handicaps alongside enormous cultural riches. It was essential to put a mirror on the situation and to have this film which allows us to look ourselves in the face and I place myself in the conversation in a place that is not necessarily comfortable ”.

The film is choral, sororal, a celebration of its battered but upright heroines, often invisible.

“All these women that exist in the film, I grew up with her;

this universe is really mine.

My mother, my aunts were heavily involved in the fighting in this country and today we have the impression that things are getting worse and worse, explains Gessica Géneus.

There are some who bear it very badly, like my mother.

She completely sank into mental illness, schizophrenia, depression.

Many of us take the country's situation on us.

We are not just Haitian, we ARE Haiti.

"

A grueling shoot

Already the author of a documentary, where she evoked motherhood, the director, that we could see in the fiction T

 with Jimmy Jean-Louis and Aïssa Maïga in 2012, signs a strong film, with a simple frame, with the reverse of the context in which it was shot in just under a month.

“It was a life and death story.

People were coming out of a three-month lockdown for political reasons, the streets were hectic.

I didn't have the luxury of breaking down, nor of letting myself be intimidated by the circumstances.

A lost day and everything could collapse, ”says the one who experienced the shooting as a“ marathon ”, over which various threats hovered until the end.

A feminist film?

According to some spectators,

obscures the presence and the role of men. However, they burst the screen by their inability to be present and invested in their home or their family, by their violence, their lack of courage and empathy ... Like Moses, the brother of Freda and Esther, centered on his plate and his new pair of sneakers, rather than the difficult daily help. And the women who face them don't tell them anything. “I wanted to show how much they are actors in their lives, even when they make the wrong choices. "

A fierce need for freedom that merges with the personality of the director, who wants to explore and refuses postures and to be labeled.

“Of course the societies in which we operate fit in, influence our desires, our destinies and that I fight against a system of oppression and for laws that protect us.

If dictating to women how to behave and what to do with their bodies is feminism, then I am not ”.

Jeannette, the character of the mother played by Fabiola Rémy is in this sublime sense of subtlety and harshness.

Some scenes are inspired by real events, but the director gives them a different ending.

The project of Gessica Géneus in this film is as well to walk a mirror informing about reality, as to allow fiction to correct it, to spare it its harshness.

World

Haitian migrants expelled: Joe Biden promises "consequences" for these "scandalous" acts

World

Haiti: The prosecutor calls for the indictment of the Prime Minister in the investigation into the assassination of the president

• World

• Haiti

• Movie theater