Cinema: "Freda", or Haiti my love

Selected in the Un Certain Regard section this year at the Cannes Film Festival, then acclaimed at the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival at the end of August, the powerful Haitian drama

, directed by the young Gessica Géneus, makes a strong impression wherever it goes.

This first film possesses the grace of fictions shot in a hurry.

Like a tightrope walker who is actively moving on his wire, balanced in the middle of the abyss.

stages, in a raw aesthetic inherited from the documentary, two sisters who are opposites.

Esther and Freda live with Janette, their devout mother, and their little brother in a popular district of Port-au-Prince.

If Esther is the big sister, a beautiful young woman destined to meet a wealthy husband who can save her from want, Freda focuses on her anthropology studies at the University of Haiti.

A matriarchal figure who will soon reveal her flaws, the mother runs a grocery store on the street.

It is from this modest stall that the heroine witnesses the rise of the ambient anger, that of the Haitian people torn between hope and despair.

Voodoo exorcism

It is understandable half-heartedly, the tumultuous social and political climate in Haiti tragically worsened following the 2010 earthquake (a continuing tumult since, this summer, President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, when a new major earthquake shook the island again).

Charged with communicative solar energy,

shows the endemic corruption that plagues the ruling class, while a plural culture finds itself caught between the Christian religion and voodoo spirituality.

The real dilemma encountered by Haitian youth simply boils down to staying… or leaving.

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The heroine, in search of emancipation, made the choice to fight for her bruised country, oppressed again and again by a patriarchal society.

Filmed without naivety,

has a raw charm: that of the pride of her heroine with unfailing determination.

Noticed in 2017 for her documentary

, Gessica Géneus transforms the essay from the passage to feature film.

His tonic film is akin to a voodoo exorcism that would courageously attempt to dissolve the skeletons that haunt the closets of this wounded island, in order to restore the foundations of Haitian identity.

Who knows?

A good movie could have such casting power.