An Excavation of Us
by Shirley Bruno
Haiti / France, 2017
synopsis
The shadows of Napoleon’s army fall upon a boat traveling through a mysterious cave named after her legend Marie Jeanne, a female soldier who fought in the Haitian Revolution. It is this battle inside her cave that will become the most successful slave revolution in history.
about the directors
Working between France, New York, and Haiti, Shirley Bruno draws from her Haitian heritage to create modern myths that merge ancestral memory with contemporary experience. Her films explore the porous borders between the physical and metaphysical, the sacred and everyday, tracing how unspoken histories shape generations.
Her work has screened widely at festivals, galleries, and museums, including Zinebi Bilbao, Hamburg, Uppsala, Palais de Tokyo, and the National Gallery London. She is a laureate of the StudioPrix Collector, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts grant. Her recent animation An Excavation of Us premiered at the International Short Film Festival Winterthur, and she is currently developing her first feature with the support of La Cité Internationale des Arts and Le Groupe Ouest’s LIM program.
