THIS HOUSE (CETTE MAISON) Documentary

Screening to be followed by a conversation with director Miryam Charles and actors Schelby Jean-Baptiste and Florence Blain Mbaye.

On a wintery day in Bridgeport, Connecticut, 2008, a teenage girl named Tessa was mysteriously murdered in her own home. Ten years later, Canadian filmmaker and Tessa’s cousin, Miryam Charles, reopens the cold case in this enigmatic, imaginative debut. Combining aspects of monologue, dialogue and reenactment, Charles examines the decade-spanning family trauma through the reconstruction and excavation of her own memories. Evoked in the hazy warmth of 16mm film, we see an apparition of Tessa (sensitively portrayed by Schelby Jean-Baptiste) haunting, consoling and questioning the aftermath in an imagined coexistence between transformative temporalities and staging, marking a poetic parallel between the African Diaspora’s disconnection to a collective home and one’s isolation from a lost past. Impossible to categorize yet profoundly reflective, CETTE MAISON proposes cinema as a circulating, continuing conversation between filmmaker, subject and viewer. –Anna Li