Genre
Synopsis
After the brutal assassination of his colleague Louis, Hector Celestin, a brilliant lawyer at the Haitian Ministry of Finance is forced into exile with his entire family, leaving behind them the Duvalier dictatorship spiral of violence.
In the Winter of ‘74, the Celestin clan (Hector and his wife Marithé, her mother Mamou, and the children: the teenage twins Nora and Nathanael and the little sister, Olie) settles into a huge apartment between Black and Spanish Harlem in New York City.
The aftermath of the Vietnam War, the women’s rights movement, “Black is Beautiful”, high unemployment, youth culture, the power of television, drugs, and political cynicism make 1970s America a place of great confusion
and chaos for this close-knit family.
Hector lives in the hope of soon returning home and makes no effort to integrate or assimilate. But when he finds out his house in Haiti has been firebombed and that the violence there is far from abating, he is forced to reconsider his life in America. Unable to find work as a lawyer, he eventually accepts his brother’s offer to work as a clerk in a toy factory in Long Island.
Time passes. As the parents wallow in nostalgia and accept their condition as political exiles, America, for the children, becomes a place for new encounters and enriching experiences. Nora kindles a secret friendship with the extravagant Mr. Chanticleer, an elderly Haitian transplanted in New York since the 1940’s, who lives a floor below them with his pet rooster, Charlie. Mamou, the grandmother, pining for her beautiful garden, constantly pesters the family to return to Haiti. She is finally appeased by a new piano on which she finds solace in giving lessons to Olie.
Life in America is not easy for the Celestins, but it is filled with love and a strong sense of loyalty towards one another, until one day a character from the past interrupts their lives.
Bio
Guetty Felin is an award-winning independent filmmaker, teacher, and film curator. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in New York, she holds a bachelor’s in political science and communications from Queens College and a Master’s in cinema from the Sorbonne in Paris, where she began her film career. Felin has worked on factual and narrative films for European and American television. Her films explore haunting themes such as memory, exile, foreignness, and the unending search for home while interconnecting our common global humanities. She produced and co-curated the critically-acclaimed Haiti on Screen in 2004 to celebrate Haiti’s bicentennial. That same year she also helped to launch Haiti’s Film Festival Jakmèl, her filmmaking workshops planted the seeds for Haiti’s first film school, Cine Institute. In 2007, she founded BelleMoon Productions, a U.S.-based company that since has been the producing entity of all of her works. In 2014, the Women’s Film Institute honored her as one of the most vital figures in film, television, and media in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her 2016 drama Ayiti Mon Amour explores the intertwined lives of three people in Haiti five years after an earthquake. It premiered in Toronto and won Best Feature Narrative Award at the 2017 BlackStar Film Festival. The film has traveled to over 50 festivals around the world and was Haiti's first ever entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Category for the 2018 Academy Awards.
