THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
This year in Cannes, a team danced, laughed and celebrated the applause with a fervor surpassing all others. Think about it! Since The man on the quays, by Raoul Peck, in 1993, no Haitian feature film had been selected by the Festival. And here is theirs, Freda, filmed in Port-au-Prince and in Creole, found itself on the Croisette, screened in packed theaters, while, thousands of kilometers away, an agonizing silence had descended on Haiti, after the assassination, on July 7 , by President Jovenel Moïse.
Contrary to this silence, the Haitian director Gessica Géneus’s debut feature resounds with a thousand noises. They come from everywhere, occupy space and off-screen, act on the film like heartbeats likely to keep us, if not alive, at least alert.
Street fights and shootings, speeches by women subject to patriarchal laws, the demands of a youth revolted by corruption and poverty, charge the film with a fiery, impatient energy. As are themselves, each in their own way, the heroines of the film. The power of Freda is due to this unity that Gessica Géneus was able to compose, around reality and fiction, thus revealing the photograph of a country at the same time as the portrait of a family.
Laughter against disorder
This one makes us discover Jeanette (Fabiola Rémy), the authoritarian and mocking mother, Esther (Djanaïna François), the eldest girl who knows like no one how to seduce boys and take advantage of their largesse, Moïse (Cantave Kerven), the son who the smooth flow, and the youngest, Freda (Néhémie Bastien), student in anthropology, stubborn enough to stand up to her mother, who would rather marry her or see her get a job rather than diplomas. Because the small shop which Jeanette owns brings in very little, in this popular district of Port-au-Prince where disorder and resourcefulness reign. However, if fatigue and the shadow of a few past wounds sometimes mark the faces, it is humor and laughter, discussions and shouts, scenes of jubilation or tender complicity that animate the film.
A sequence testifies to the spirit of the film: Esther dresses up in front of the mirror in her bedroom. Invited by a rich man, she is about to go to a chic club in the capital where Charles Aznavour performs. She offers her sister to accompany her. But Freda, although quite to the euphoria of her younger sister, declines the offer. His argument? She gives it, singing in her Creole language, mischievous and cheerful: “It seems to me that misery is less painful in the sun, especially when you’ve never lived in Port-au-Prince. “
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