Mountains

Based in the immigrant enclave of Little Haiti in Miami, Xavier (a quietly potent Atibon Nazaire) is a middle-aged, working-class Haitian demolition worker who hopes to one day buy his beloved seamstress wife, Esperance (a radiant Sheila Anozier), a new and spacious suburban home. Meanwhile, their doted-on college-dropout son Junior (Chris Renois) struggles against his father's rigid expectations by day while quietly pursuing a career as a stand-up comic by night.

A languid character study, Monica Sorelle’s realist drama first knots then slowly disentangles the intricate symbolism of Xavier's blue-collar livelihood, which renders him simultaneously complicit and vulnerable. The director keenly observes her characters, filming kitchen chatter, marital pillowtalk, community festivity, workplace camaraderie, and neighbourhood gossip with immediacy and an artful naturalism.

Javier Labrador Deulofeu’s elegant cinematography captures driver’s-seat views of shifting residential landscapes: the debris-laden vastness of demolition sites and a warmly familiar but fragile domesticity to reveal an intimate and fatigued psychogeography. Sorelle brings us closer toward her protagonist’s interior wrestling match, stilling at a hermetic conclusion in this exploratory and familial snapshot of fraying class mobility in a diasporic Black and Caribbean Miami — one seldom flanked by a turquoise shoreline but not far from the city’s encroaching skyscrapers.

“[An] affecting and meditative debut.” —Pete Hammond, Deadline

"[An] immersive look at modern Haitian life from the inside out... one of the finer discoveries out of this year’s [Tribeca] festival." —Eric Kohn, Indiewire

“Frames the disappearance of Miami’s Little Haiti with a warm, compassionate gaze recalling the masters of social realism––akin to Roberto Rossellini with the touch of Ousmane Sembène’s lighter films." —John Fink, The Film Stage

“Striking… [a] debut from a filmmaker to watch." —Christian Gallichio, The Playlist