The forces behind the gentrification of Miami’s Little Haiti community in Monica Sorelle’s feature debut Mountains are invisible and unstoppable. They go beyond the For Sale signs with the headshot of a gorgeous real estate agent, and the anonymous phone calls the community’s residents receive goading them into selling their homes. Very little mention is made of the corporations behind this urban upheaval. We know they are there, because we have witnessed in our own cities the erasure that takes place when these communities are pushed out of their enclaves to be replaced by ritzy HGTV-like houses and condos with their open room concepts. To the residents of these communities, “demo day” has a darker darker connotation than Chip Gaines’ childish exaltation.
Mountains is not interested in guilt-tripping moviegoers. Quite the opposite. Sorelle wants you to see what we miss once these communities are no more. She shows urban displacement from the point-of-view of the working class families that live there and the workers that unwittingly participate in this process. She taps into the uniquely quotidian rhythms of this community and how slowly but surely they are disrupted by these external forces. Sorelle and co-screenwriter Robert Colom also possess a keen ear and eye for the overt and covert racism that takes place not only in these worksites but also offhandedly. The little signals that say you are no longer wanted here.
It would be too easy and even too cliché to call Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), the film’s protagonist, the center of the story. I like to think of him, with his stern, observant and stoic demeanor, as the film’s pillar. Like many immigrants, he aspires to a better life and is proud to have provided for both his wife and only son, to have worked hard all his life, even though his current job as part of a demolition crew trying to play catch up to the demand from real estate developers makes him complicit in his community’s destruction. Even a family friend, at a first communion celebration late in the film, asks him if he feels any responsibility for taking part in the destruction of a 50-year-old church that long served the Haitian-American community. For Xavier, it’s another job that will help pay the rent, bring food to the table and, maybe, even buy a new larger house for him and wife Esperance (Sheila Anozier). The opportunity seems to be there when, on his way home from work, Xavier sees a beautiful, white house for sale. He convinces his wife to attend an Open House, where they are welcomed by a young black woman who eventually speaks to them in Creole after staring at them disapprovingly.
Esperance works two jobs: as a crossing guard and as a seamstress. In between shifts at school, she wanders through the streets of Little Haiti, discovering one shuttered business after another, talking with and greeting those friends who are still present, resisting, surviving. She may be soft spoken, but there’s determination and common sense in her conversations with Xavier.
Then there’s Junior, their only child (Chris Renois) who after dropping out of college has decided to pursue a career in stand-up comedy while working full time as a valet in a luxury hotel nearby. He stays up until late and spends very little time with his parents who are the target of his stand-up routine. His parents speak to him in Creole; he responds with a mix of Creole and English, but speaks mostly the latter.
Sorelle may be tackling the impact of gentrification on inner city neighborhoods like Little Haiti but she is, above all, telling a story about hardworking immigrants and the choices they and their children make in trying to navigate a new culture while trying to maintain their own connections to the land they left behind. With its cramped rooms and decorative dishes hanging from the kitchen and dining rooms, and tables lined with prescription drugs and aging family photos, Xavier’s and Esperance’s home not only feels fully lived in but, thanks to Nadia Wolff’s art direction and Dezray Smith’s set decoration, it evokes the family homes of those of us born and raised in the Caribbean. Framed almost as living tableaus by director of photography Javier Labrador Deulofeu, we realize that, besides being vivid symbols of this family’s modest accomplishments in this country, that each object embodies countless memories.
There are other little details that are again so relatable to us Caribbeans: shots of Esperance pouring a bit of sauce in her hand from a pot to taste it for flavor and nodding her head in approval; a mother’s insistence that her child is not eating enough; the percussion-heavy parades marching down the street; and the vigilant neighbor who walks around the neighborhood, watching out for everybody’s security white talking on the phone, every day, at the same hour. A neighbor that is replaced later in the film by a young white woman walking her dog on her way to Whole Foods while chattering on her phone about what brand of champagne to buy. But there’s also the racism Xavier and his black co-workers face at the hand of their Cuban co-workers, a rarely explored aspect, on film, of Latino culture: a tacit reminder that whites in this country do not hold a monopoly over racism, that Latinos bring their own racial, cultural and even linguistic prejudices from their countries to this one.
Mountains is sometimes too low-key for its own good. Whenever there is the potential for dramatic tension, Sorelle brings down the heat. But when she does not, particularly in the scenes between Xavier and Junior, the film feels alive, desperate to scream at the injustices. But that’s asking for a different film than the one Sorelle has gifted us with. I am so glad that it exists. I am so glad that this community has been given a voice. That the film stands as a testimonial, as a remembrance. But it also leaves me saddened for the countless stories and memories that have been bulldozed by that carnivorous monster called gentrification.
Mountains is now playing exclusively at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
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