The Haitian Trilogy: What Happens to a Dream Deferred?
by Esery Mondesir
Mexico, 2020
synopsis
It’s New Year’s Eve in Tijuana, Mexico. Wood and Colonel are busy making Soup Joumou to celebrate Haitian Independence Day with their friends at the “Trap House”. As their cooking progresses, memories of the perilous journey that brought them to the US/Mexico border two years ago resurface. From Haiti to Brasil and through nine other South and Central-American countries, here they are, sandwiched between their dream of a musical career in the US and an American president who calls Haiti a shithole and believes all Haitians have AIDS.
about the directors
Esery Mondesir is a Haitian-born, Toronto-based artist filmmaker. He worked as a high school teacher, a book designer, and a labour organizer before receiving an MFA in cinema production from York University (Toronto) in 2017. His work takes a critical stance on modern-day sociopolitical and cultural phenomena to suggest a reading of our society from its margins. Motivated by his own diasporic experience, Mondesir’s films draw from collective memory, official archives, vernacular records, and the Everyday to explore migration and exile as sites of identity formation as well as cultural resistance. His work has been shown in Canada and internationally. In 2016, he received the Lawrence Heisey Graduate Award in Fine Arts and, in 2017, he received the Paavo and Aino Lukkari Human Rights Award from the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean at York University.
