Filmmaker Miryam Charles is not afraid to play with shapes. Nor even to bring the dead back to earth to allow them to live a piece of life that has been confiscated from them. That’s what she does with the movie This housea documentary essay presented at the Berlinale at the Forum, either in the category of innovative narrative forms and new trends in world cinema.
The idea for this film came to him as a result of the tragic death of his cousin, murdered at the age of 14 in her Connecticut home. The circumstances of his death remain obscure, and the film does not aim to elucidate it. What is less is the extreme sadness of his mother, following the events.
But now this girl comes back to life as an adult, the time of a film, or that of living with her mother a cherished dream: to visit Haiti, her native land. The experience allows the filmmaker to make her main character say unusual phrases such as: “I died in 2008.”
We therefore find ourselves halfway between fiction and documentary, in an unusual genre that makes the film interesting. And while the diction of the characters situates us rather in fiction, certain scenes, like that of a Haitian family who fears being expelled from Quebec at the end of the 1995 referendum, are completely realistic.
The film “is based on the story of my cousin who died at the age of 14. I imagine him as an adult, looking for what happened to him, but also looking for a connection with his mother, as an adult”, sums up the filmmaker. The work is taken “from a story of a real moment in my life,” she adds. I pay tribute to the members of both my immediate family and my extended family.
A hard past to face
In fact, the filmmaker wanted to shed light on this dark event. “When we lose someone violently, we stop at that moment, and we forget that the person existed before, and that they can continue to exist inside us. We are in a way the carriers of the memory of those who are no longer there, ”she says.
Miryam Charles’ freedom allows her to look back on the 1995 referendum, when her Haitian-born family lived in Quebec and feared deportation, to imagine what might have happened if she had moved to Bridgeport with his cousin. Would she still be dead?
The murder of the cousin of Miryam Charles, whose suicide was first simulated, has not been officially elucidated. And Miryam Charles continues to have “difficulty confronting what really happened. This is reflected in the film, insofar as it is evoked without ever being tackled head-on”.
The process, in any case, attracted attention, since it had also been selected at Cannes in the category of works in progress.