Monica Sorelle had gentrification on the brain. When the director of the new film Mountains moved back home to Miami after film school in 2014, something felt off—especially in Little Haiti, the Haitian neighborhood where she spent a lot of time as a child and a teenager. “Art galleries were moving in, longtime Haitian-owned businesses were getting evicted, and developers were buying up properties,” she said during a recent phone conversation. Sorelle had witnessed a similar transformation in Wynwood, a working-class Puerto Rican neighborhood nearby, and she had the sinking feeling that Little Haiti was next. She feared development would destroy this community that meant so much to her. “It was one of the only spaces in Miami—or in the country—where I felt connected to my culture as a Haitian American,” she said.
One day, while Sorelle and her co-writer and producer Robert Colom were working in Wynwood, they saw a demolition worker say goodbye to his coworkers and walk across the street to the residential part of town. She wondered if he lived there, and what it must feel like to be this man demolishing his own neighborhood to make room for rich people and non-Haitian businesses to move in. A lightbulb went on.
Sorelle’s debut feature, Mountains, is the story of Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), a thoughtful, middle-aged man who lives in Little Haiti with his wife and son, and earns a living as a demolition worker. While feeling frustrated with his son, Junior (Chris Renois), for dropping out of college to pursue a career in standup comedy, Xavier dreams of buying a house he saw for sale in the neighborhood. A bigger house with two bathrooms, a nice yard, and a designated sewing room for his wife, Esperance (Sheila Anozier), who juggles work as a tailor and crossing guard. It takes Xavier a while to realize that men like him aren’t buying nice houses in his neighborhood anymore. Instead, they are paid to tear them down to make room for the mansions and high rises devouring the neighborhood.
The dialogue of the film is in Haitian Creole, a language with its roots in 18th century French. While the language preserves a lot of French vocabulary, its accent, syntax, and the meaning of certain words are distinct, and even fluent French speakers might wind up relying on the subtitles more than expected. While there are other French-based Creole tongues—among them Louisiana Creole and Antillean Creole—Haitian Creole is the most widespread, though it hasn’t always received much formal recognition. (The language only became available on Google Translate as recently as June 2024.)
Sorelle and I spoke about the gentrification swallowing Little Haiti, and why it was so important to make her film in a language that is a living testament to the multicultural heritage of the neighborhood’s inhabitants.
Q&A with Monica Sorelle, Director of Mountains
How is this story personal for you?
My mother and a lot of other Haitians of the diaspora got their start in the United States in Little Haiti. When I was a kid, we lived two neighborhoods north, and I would go to work with my mom there and was very familiar with the neighborhood. This is just another injustice toward the Haitians in America since the mass migration in the 70s. The disappearance of this neighborhood feels historic.
What is the movie about for you?
The movie is about a reverence for a space and for the people who have built the culture of that space. It’s also an archive. I don’t want to be totally doom and gloom, because there is still a strong population and a lot of advocacy working to maintain the Little Haiti I grew up with, but there are buildings in the film that have been demolished since we shot them. Practices like the Ra-Ra parade [an Easter-time Haitian festival of music, dance, and traditional Vodou ceremonies] that you see in the film are still happening, but much less frequently. Things are changing, and we’re interested in using this film as a way to remember.
There was a quote in the Hollywood Reporter. The writer called the film “a proclamation of presence,” and I think that’s on the money. It’s a way to showcase Haitians on screen, which is so rare. The only examples of Haitians I’ve seen in film are played by people who are not Haitian, speaking English with a bad accent, or Americans playing Haitian drug dealers in a thriller. I was excited to show a family and ground them in love and joy, in spite of what’s happening around them, and portray Haitian culture in America as I know it.
Can you talk about your decision to shoot largely in Haitian Creole?
We never for a moment considered doing the film in English, because we wanted to make sure that we were being as true to the space as possible. And what is true to us is there are these three dominant languages in the city, and when I go home, my family is not speaking English to each other. When any Spanish-speaking culture is together, they’re not speaking English, they’re speaking in their language. We didn’t think of shooting in Creole as a revolutionary act. It was only after I shot the film that I learned this is very rare. It’s not something that the industry or Hollywood is used to, but we trusted our audience to come along with us and be interested in this culture and the way we speak, and the authenticity that we wanted to portray.
How did Haitian Creole emerge as a language?
The French colonized Haiti, and after the Haitian Revolution, Creole emerged as a way to communicate with one another. It’s a mix of French, Spanish, English, and West African languages. It’s an evolving language, something born of that time. A lot of Haitians do speak French, because even after Haiti was emancipated, it was still a dominant language in schools and government, which is another reason Creole is so important to us. It’s only now that there’s been a resurgence, and advocacy for Creole as its own language, with its own syntax and its own valid history.
The film begins with the Haitian proverb, “Behind mountains, there are more mountains.” What exactly does that mean?
In Haiti, proverbs are used all the time. I think some people hear that particular proverb and put a positive spin on it, but really what it means is that once you get over one hurdle there are a million others. We wanted to use the proverb to talk about the Haitian experience, but we also wanted to be a bit cheeky and think about mountains visually. Haiti is the land of mountains and Miami has a completely flat terrain. Our mountains are skyscrapers, cranes, and mountains of rubble.
The film often feels like a documentary. What was the intention behind this?
We followed the path of Italian Neorealist cinema, a tradition that was sparked after the economic collapse of Italy after WWII. There are a lot of talented actors in the film, Atibon Nazaire being one of them, but there are also a lot of non-actors and community members. Our cinematographer Javier Labrador Deulofeu has worked on feature documentaries in the past. We knew there would be an aspect of run and gun with this film in terms of capturing the city as things are happening, and capturing live demolitions. One could say it’s a documentary in that way, or at least a hybrid, reflecting what’s going on with the community right now.
The last image is a gut punch. Xavier’s crew is tearing down the house where he’s dreamed of living with his family. Then this parade pushes through. It’s defiant and joyful, but there’s also such hopelessness in the moment.
I wanted to ground Xavier in culture that really mattered. Prior to that scene, Xavier had this talk with his wife where she said, “This is just a building at the end of the day. No matter what happens, if we’re forced to move or can’t get the house of our dreams, the foundation of the home is me, you and Junior.” We did not want to show that house coming down. It felt really violent, so we thought how do we avert his eyes? And we wanted this sort of magical parade to come and sort of remind him who he is and reground him and protect him from material aspirations. There’s something so powerful about this culture. This is not the first time that Haitians have experienced loss or tragedy and it probably won’t be the last, but we’ve survived through a lot of hardship. We’ve survived together.
Mountains is playing in select theaters nationwide. Find screening times in your town here. The film will be available on digital platforms on September 24.
Andrea Meyer has written creative treatments for commercial directors, a sex & the movies column for IFC, and a horror screenplay for MGM. Her first novel, Room for Love (St. Martin’s Press) is a romantic comedy based on an article she wrote for the New York Post, for which she pretended to look for a roommate as a ploy to meet men. A long-time film and entertainment journalist and former indieWIRE editor, Andrea has interviewed more actors and directors than she can remember. Her articles and essays have appeared in such publications as Elle, Glamour, Variety, Time Out NY, and the Boston Globe.
