AMERICAN REGIONAL FILM COMPETITION
While looking for a new home for his family, Xavier Sr. (Atibon Nazaire), a Haitian demolition worker, is faced with the realities of redevelopment as he is tasked with dismantling his rapidly gentrifying Miami neighborhood. Little Haiti has for decades been home to working-class immigrants, mostly of Caribbean descent, but as the value of their land skyrockets, their culture and community have come under increasing threat.
Winner of the Special Jury Mention U.S. Narrative Feature at the 2023 Tribeca Festival, Mountains is the debut feature by Monica Sorelle, a Haitian-American artist born and based in Miami. Sorelle is a member of Third Horizon, a creative collective that gives voice to stories of the Caribbean, its diaspora, and other marginalized and underrepresented spaces in the Global South.
Sorelle has described the daily struggle of people like Xavier and his family as a "Sisyphean effort to survive and establish oneself in a system that never seems to keep us in mind." Mountains recalls Lorraine Hansberry's tragic depiction of an American Dream deferred in A Raisin in the Sun, but Sorelle's visual language and story is wholly her own. Mountains is a clear-eyed and compassionate ode to family and to the honorable work of living with hope.