THIS HOUSE (CETTE MAISON) Documentary

THIS HOUSE (CETTE MAISON)

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

Of Haitian descent, Miryam Charles is a director, producer and cinematographer living in Montréal. Her films have been presented in various festivals in Quebec and internationally. THIS HOUSE is her debut feature film. Her work explores themes related to exile and the legacies of colonization.

Christina Demetriou
Oyster Films
oyster.films.info@gmail.com

Details

Country: Canada

Year: 2022

Director: Miryam Charles

Screenwriter: Miryam Charles

Producer: Félix Dufour-Laperrière

Directors of Photography: Isabelle Stachtchenko, Miryam Charles

Editor: Xi Feng

Production Designers: Georges Michael Fanfan, Annick Marion

Music: Romain Camiolo

Cast/Featuring: Schelby Jean-Baptiste, Florence Blan Mbaye, Eve Duranceau, Matthew Rankin, Yardly Kavanagh

Running Time (minutes): 75

Languages: French, Haitian Creole

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