Mountains is a portrait of a family living and working in Little Haiti, as it’s being changed very rapidly by the gentrification of the area.
Mountains follows a demolition worker, Xavier, whose commute to work gets shorter and shorter as the demo sites inch closer to home. He’s trying to buy a new home for his family during all this, while his son, Junior, is secretly pursuing a career in standup comedy, which totally goes against his parents’ practical view of what he maybe should be doing with his life.
Esperance is the heart of the movie as the wife and mother who has two jobs – as a seamstress and a school crossing guard – and is the only one wise enough to really gauge what’s going on in the neighborhood.
Some fun facts: We were on a few big (active) demolition sites for the movie; a good chunk, maybe 75%, of the movie is in Haitian Creole. Two of our leads had never acted for the screen in their lives (and they’re so good). The movie was filmed almost entirely in Little Haiti, and exists almost as an archive of the neighborhood as it looked in Summer ’22.
We premiered the film at Tribeca last Summer, took the film to Toronto International Film Festival, and since we’ve traveled around the world with it until now, when it has its big homecoming at Miami Film Festival on Sunday, April 7, at 7 pm at the Adrienne Arsht Center.
Here’s the link to buy tickets to the Miami Film Festival screening of the film.
