A movie, shot on location in Little Haiti, and directed and written by Haitian-American and Miamian Monica Sorelles and co-written and produced by Robert Colom, opened Friday, Aug. 16 with a hometown premiere at the Coral Gables Art Cinema. It's now in an extended run at the cinema this week. Meanwhile it continues to open nationwide after being picked up by distributor Music Box Films.
Xavier, played by Atibon Nazaire in "Mountains."
"Mountains," about an immigrant demolition worker named Xavier in Little Haiti, dreams of buying a bigger house for his family. Yet, his day job has him knocking down houses in the neighborhood to make room for high rises and he slowly watches as his neighborhood becomes a place he may one day not even recognize.
[RELATED: See Photos From Red Carpet Opening At Coral Gables Cinema]
It also playing in Miami Beach at O Cinema South Beach and at theaters across the country. On Friday, Aug. 30, it opens in North Hollywood, Calif., and Chicago, along with cities in Massachusetts and Iowa. The rollout continues where, on Sept. 6, it will open in Key West.
Atibon Nazaire as Xavier in Monica Sorelle's "Mountains," shot in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood. (Photo courtesy of Music Box Films)
miamiartzine.com spoke to Sorelles about the film.
miamiartzine.com: The film's beginnings were from a Miami Cinematic Arts Residency that you were awarded from Oolite Arts. Is that where it started?
Monica Sorelles: Yes, we were in the first cinematic residency in 2019 along with Xavier Medina. I think it gave us a lot of the freedom to write the script. Robert and I wrote it that whole first year of the residency and it was nice to be surrounded by community in that way. We had planned to shoot in 2020 and obviously we could not (because of the pandemic), and so we were just very happy and gracious that we were extended an extension to be able to make the film that we wanted to make, and take the time to sort of reconfigure what the production of this film would look like post pandemic.
In his first feature film role, Chris Renois, a stand-up comic from Miramar, stars as Junior. (Photo courtesy of Music Box Films)
miamiartzine.com: You couldn't have found a better person to play Xavier. and where did you find him? Atibon Nazaire is perfect.
MS: It was a film called "Forever Yours," a Haitian-indie romance film. We were looking at it to see its lead actors. No one seemed right for Xavier, but the lead of that movie is in our movie as the brother-in-law who you see at the dinner table in one scene. Just before I turned the movie off, there was a scene where the lead is talking to his friend and it was Atibon. And then we did some digging and we saw that he had beein in other TV shows and indie films. It happened to be that he was best friends with a Haitian filmmaker who was in town at the Miami Film Festival and I mentioned Atibon and she hooked us up.
In a scene from "Mountains," Xavier (Atibon Nazaire) and Esperance (Sheila Anozier) sit in the yard of their dream house. (Photo courtesy of Music Box Films)
Miamiartzine.com: You have built such a lovely relationship between Xavier and his wife Esperance played by Sheila Anoizer. It's nice to see a film where a couple isn't fighting when things around them are difficult.
MS: I think we definitely could have had everything pile up on (Xavier) like from his work to his son to his relationship. But I think that we were averse to that because I think we also were very sensitive to how we wanted to portray a Haitian story and an immigrant story. And I think in a lot of immigrant films that I've seen, it's always kind of loveless, like it's sort of more less romance and more like duty. I was really interested in just seeing a romance between two, you know, middle aged immigrants, because I've never really seen that before, but I also know it's real. I have a friend that I think inspired this. Her parents are in their 70s, and they've been together for 50 years, maybe something like that, maybe longer. And she talks about how sometimes when she was living with them she would walk by their door to the bathroom and she could hear them giggling and whispering to each other, like they were friends. It's not necessarily my experience, like something that I've experienced, but it's something that I think humanizes our characters a lot . . . They're not just work, home, go to school, weird robots who are loveless, I wanted to portray immigrants with full lives.
Producer and co-writer Robert Colom, left, with director and co-writer Monica Sorelle. (Photo by Aaron Kudja, courtesy of Music Box Films)
miamiartzine.com: Much of the film is in Creole and you have subtitles that I felt weren't intrusive. Why did you choose to have Xavier and sometimes Esperance speak in Creole?
MS: I think language and how language is expressed was a really important part of the film. When we were thinking about the film, we wanted it to be realistic about a Haitian family, so why would they be speaking English in their own house? That's just not what happens.
Actor Atibon Nazaire with filmmaker Monica Sorelle of "Mountains." (Photo by Aaron Kudja, courtesy of Music Box Films)
miamiartzine.com: Is there a meaning to the title?
MS: Proverbs are really big in Haitian culture. When we were trying to figure out the name of this film, I was looking at proverbs, and that one in the film “Behind mountains, there are more mountains” has always been one of my favorites. It’s essentially a way to say just when you figure some shit out and went through some shit, there's some more shit that you're gonna have to figure out. It could also be interpreted as behind the horizon, there's more. So it can be a positive as well. But I think, generally, there's always something down the line. And it resonated with me because of the Sisyphean journey the working-class immigrant in America feels, where you try to roll this ball up the mountain, but there's always something that knocks you down.
- WHAT: “Mountains,” a film by Monica Sorelle
- WHERE: Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables
- WHEN: In an extended run.
- TICKETS: $12.75, regular admission, $11, senior, student and military, $8 member price.
- INFORMATION: (786) 472-2249 or gablescinema.com. For a complete schedule of other openings, click here.
