A sick mother, a need for money to pay for her studies, an opportunity. And this is how Gessica Géneus (born in 1985, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti), found herself, at the age of 17, in the cast of the feature film Barikad (2001), by Richard Sénécal. At the end of this first filming, she continues the university and plays the comedy in other films. She worked to rebuild her country devastated by the 2010 earthquake, then won a scholarship to study at Acting International in Paris.
After three years spent in France, where she was only offered the characters of a housekeeper or a sleazy suburban girl, she returned to Haiti and created her own company, Ayizan Production, in order to develop her projects and write her own roles. From 2014 to 2016, she produced a series of short portraits of the great figures of contemporary Haitian society, then, in 2017, the documentary Douvan jou ka leve (The day will dawn), in which the director, through her mother’s mental illness, questions the identity of her country. Freda, selected in 2021 at Cannes, is his first feature film.
What are the motivations that led you to make this first fiction film?
I wanted to express the point of view of women on Haitian society. I am deeply feminist, even though I am not an activist. I come from a country where machismo is too strong for me to pretend. I therefore wanted to listen to and watch these women who, in Haiti (and not only, for that matter), are absent from the political and media spheres, from spaces of speech where opinion is forged, from all places of speech and construction of thought. I also wanted to bring into existence my mother, my sister, my aunt, then, through them, this small island in the middle of the Caribbean that no one really knows how to locate and which fights despite all the misfortunes that fall on it. This story is mine and that of my family.
“Freda” was filmed in Port-au-Prince, where gang wars and demonstrations generated a lot of violence. How did you manage to film in such chaos?
When we started scouting, there were barriers everywhere, stones were thrown at cars, and everyone told me I was crazy. But I was sure that the population would be there for the shoot. They know me there, they know my films on the country and the actions I carried out for its reconstruction. People knew I was going to tell their story and not another. And they rallied. They formed human shields to protect every place we turned. We stayed two weeks in Freda’s house, and everyone was blocking the area with cars and chairs. There was impeccable silence. This is how, despite the political situation, I was able to shoot this film in twenty-seven days. It is warlike cinema and our reality.
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