Post-screening discussion with filmmaker Miryam Charles and series curator Yasmina Price, Yale University, in person.
With a wandering poetry of image and sound, Haitian Canadian filmmaker Miryam Charles’s experimental films offer a contemporary lens on how the ripples of displacement, migration, and loss are lived within a diasporic family. This program includes three of Charles’s films:
Fly, Fly Sadness investigates a mysterious explosion that causes the inhabitants of Port-au-Prince to lose their voices. Indirectly summoning the rupture of the Haitian Revolution and the circumventions of exile, empire, and colonization in the Caribbean, this lyrical work speaks to the stakes of disrupted power and unified communities. (Vole, Vole Tristesse, 2015, 16mm, French with subtitles, 6 minutes)
All the Days of May portrays a mother as she reflects on her own life and the passing of time after the production of a documentary about her daughter's death. In dialogue with Charles’s feature film Cette Maison, this experimental essay short creates a meta-cinematic portal to grief. (Tous Les Jours de Mai, 2023, 16mm-to-digital, French with subtitles, 6 minutes).
Cette Maison (This House) is a haunting and tender meditation on displacement, grief, and memory. Charles’s debut feature, it is dedicated to her 14-year-old cousin Tessa, whose tragic death in 2008 made her start to contemplate her family’s history of migration and relationship to Haiti. Filmed in 16mm, Charles renders traumatic histories with a loving touch, recalling classics of Black women’s diasporic cinema such Martina Attile’s Dreaming Rivers (1988) and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991). (2022, 16mm-to-DCP, French with subtitles, 75 minutes)
Part of the Exile and Memory in Haitian Cinema film series, programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Spirit and Strength: Modern Art in Haiti.