Mountains

In Miami’s Little Haiti, Xavier (Atibon Nazaire) makes a living as a demolition worker while his wife Esperance (Sheila Anozier) holds down two jobs to sustain their cozy household. Their routine is tested when their son Junior (Chris Renois) returns home after dropping out of college. Xavier and Esperance struggle to relate with Junior, who is no longer interested in speaking Creole with them and harbors ambitions of an artistic career path they do not understand. Xavier aspires to buy a more spacious house for his family, but still wakes up every morning, goes to work, and dismantles his neighborhood brick by brick. Yet even as construction vehicles rumble down the block, Little Haiti remains a vibrant community with traditions and rhythms distinctly its own. Monica Sorelle’s tender feature debut is a multigenerational drama that deftly explores the relationships between immigrants and their children, the looming threat of gentrification, and the pursuit of the American dream.

2023 | 95 mins | US | Color | Drama

About the Filmmaker

Monica Sorelle is a Haitian-American filmmaker and artist born & based in Miami. Her work explores alienation and displacement, and preserves cultural traditions within Miami & the Caribbean with a focus on the African & Latin diasporas that reside there. Monica has worked in the casting department on films and TV shows including Moonlight and Sesame Street. She has also served as a creative producer on the features T (winner at Berlinale, BlackStar, Miami, New Orleans and exhibited at Sundance and on the Criterion Channel) and You Can Always Come Home (winner at Miami, exhibited at BlackStar and New Orleans). Her photo and video work has been shown in group exhibitions at Oolite Arts and the University of Maryland, and supported by Pérez Art Museum Miami’s Caribbean Cultural Institute Artist Fellowship. Monica is a member of Third Horizon, a creative collective dedicated to developing, producing, exhibiting, and distributing work which gives voice to stories of the Caribbean, its diaspora, and other marginalized & underrepresented spaces in the Global South. Currently, Monica is a Cinematic Arts resident at Oolite Arts, where she developed her feature film directorial debut, Mountains, premiering at the 2023 Tribeca Festival. 

Director’s Statement

I think about gentrification daily. As I swerve through construction in Little Haiti, I wonder what kind of person will be able to afford a unit in the condos that will inevitably take the place of the neighborhood where I was raised. Every piece I’ve written, developed, or worked on in the last half decade has examined this kind of alienation and displacement. It’s something I can’t get away from – seeing Miami both as a city of promise as well as a city that rarely keeps them. This film explores Miami’s racial dynamics, its never-ending development and redevelopment, and the sisyphean effort to survive and establish oneself in a system that never seems to keep us in mind. Additionally, Mountains explores the intergenerational divide between immigrant parents and their children, and the dichotomy between sacrifice and expectation. Mountains is a Caribbean narrative as lush and vibrant as the city it’s set in. It moves at its own pace. Between plots lie moments: tenderness between family, laughter between spouses, camaraderie and cultural misunderstandings between coworkers. We recognize and honor these characters as reflections of our own immigrant families, the communities we live and work in, and the tug between aspiration and subsistence.