Freda: a vivid portrait of Haiti

Freda marks the feature directorial debut of Haitian actor turned writer-director Gessica Geneus. Previewing to a rapturous reception at the French Institute in London in early spring, it has proved a hit with both Haitian and international audiences, earning accolades across the festival circuit and finding a champion in Francis Ford Coppola, whose endorsement of writer-director Geneus’s cinematic feat supported the film’s bid as an Oscar contender earlier this year.

Set in Port-au-Prince in 2018, the drama explores the life of Freda (Néhémie Bastien), a young Haitian anthropologist, as she grapples with the choice of leaving Haiti for a better life with her boyfriend Yeshua (played by Haitian singer Jean Jean) or remaining in the country to continue with her education and support her family. Freda’s mother Jeannette (Fabiola Rémy) runs a shop at the front of the family’s dwelling to sustain her two daughters and their brother Moïse (Cantave Kerven). But Freda’s mother’s main focus is on getting her fairest-skinned daughter, Esther (Djanaïna François), married off to a wealthy man, while she encourages the darker-skinned Freda to give up her studies and find employment. Geneus’s film is based on her own experience of growing up in Haiti.

“I went through that in my own family,” Geneus says. “My older sister was a bit darker than me and my mother would tell her, ‘You’ve got to study hard because you will never find a man that will take care of you!’ She would say to me, ‘You don’t need to go to school, you’ll find a man.’ So it was the two extremes.”

Against Haiti’s politically precarious backdrop, Freda remains strong in her own political identity. The sense of cultural resistance is cleverly portrayed in the university students’ debate on the politics of the Creole language: although they are taught in French, the students speak to each other in Creole, decolonising themselves. “Creole is a beautiful language,” Geneus says. “There is a freedom when you speak Creole. French is about social status, so I love how Creole makes you think.” Youth politics is an everyday reality in Haiti, according to Geneus: “This generation is questioning – all generations have questioned, but it is happening more and more within the universities. This discussion is not something I have created for the film – students are always talking about colonisation. I literally filmed five hours of their debate. It’s hard to believe because we haven’t seen Haitians on screen very much, so people may not appreciate the reality of those scenes. But this is a Caribbean dynamic.”

As in the rest of the world, student activism in Haiti can sometimes become violent. This happened in 2018 during protests against the regime for diverting education funds and depriving them of teachers, and ended with a young student being run over by a car carrying a government official. This real-life student protest is re-enacted in Freda but with a less violent conclusion. Although Geneus intersperses real documentary footage of the demonstrations in the film, she chooses not to include footage of the actual violence that took place, preferring to focus on the spiritual side of Haitian culture to present her narrative.

Filmmakers often have difficult ethical decisions to make in how they present or use reality to convey the narrative. Geneus says, “I re-wrote the scene because I couldn’t believe that this young guy’s friends could let this happen to him. You can fight but we need to protect each other: you know you are living in a country where the government official who did this would walk away and he has never been charged for that crime, so it was not worth this young man becoming a paraplegic. I argued with the students about this, insisting they should have prevented this happening.”

Another dilemma for filmmakers is how they portray belief systems that underlie the society where their story is set. Geneus is aware of the disconnect between Vodou and so-called rational thought: “You are always divided by analysing things from the scientific point of view and the spiritual point of view,” she explains. “In Haiti, if you ask anybody, they will say, ‘Yes, you can be cursed’ – you can’t escape that, so you have to build your own way of seeing things so as not to go crazy.”

In the film, the relationship between Freda (the name of a Haitian Vodou goddess of love) and her boyfriend Yeshua (Joshua, a prophet from the bible) also represents the conflict between Vodou and Western religion. Having been a victim of gang violence, Yeshua is keen to leave Haiti, and wants Freda to come with him to pursue a new life together. Geneus uses this romance as a narrative device to state her own position on the interference of Western religion in Haiti, while acknowledging the feminist aspect of the film’s narrative.

“People rarely notice the significance of the two names and that it is Yeshua who left the country,” she says, adding that while Freda and Yeshua have “a beautiful relationship… it cannot co-exist the way people want them to. Freda has to find herself and be strong before she can truly open herself to someone else.” It is a symbolic characterisation that exists on two levels: Freda as a woman living with trauma, and Freda as a representation of spirituality in Haitian culture.

“Haitian culture needs to have pride in itself in the face of other cultures and this is the tension represented in the names and the ambitions of the two lovers.” Freda also has a close relationship with her sister Esther that is marked by a similar tension, one that arises from Esther’s compliance with the patriarchal structure and Freda’s refusal of it. Geneus creates a cinematic female space for the two young women to work out their differences, and again draws on her own experiences. “I remember when I was younger I would go on the rooftop of the house and this is where I would find my peace, so it was important on a human level, you don’t have this space when you live in precarious conditions – you are not allowed to have it.”

With its monumental history of uprisings and independence movements, Haiti has also birthed and inspired some of contemporary culture’s greatest minds – among them artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Frank Étienne, the writer and MacArthur ‘Genius’ honoree Edwidge Danticat and filmmakers Raoul Peck, Arnold Antonin and Guetty Felin.

I asked Geneus how she learned her film craft. “I was an international actor for 15 years and it was not working in the way I wished it could happen, so I thought maybe I should learn how to write and maybe I can find a way to tell my own stories. I studied in France and realised I could not work in France, with the perception they had of Black women.” Geneus made a series of docs before writing Freda, but it was with her documentary short The Sun Will Rise that she was able to understand and appreciate creative freedom. Thinking back to the moment that ultimately inspired Geneus to make a feature film, she cites the experience of watching Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley (1983) and recalls with pride the realisation that a fellow Caribbean woman filmmaker, from Martinique, was the creative force behind the film.

Geneus is ambitious about her future as a filmmaker but laments that there is not enough money for production in Haiti: “Embassies give a little and the Fokal Foundation helped a lot, but there are not enough resources to allow you to produce. My dream is to create a cinematic and a cultural bridge between the Caribbean countries. I would love to create a dynamic production infrastructure to economically support films made in the region to reach audiences and travel to festivals.” However, the Haiti film school – the Cine Institute – has been active since 2005 and some of the students worked on Freda. “Thanks to my producer we had a mainly Haitian film crew,” Geneus says. Her next project will also look at Haitian life – its crises and contradictions, and its potential. We look forward to Geneus’s growth and to more of the sort of award-winning work that inspired Coppola to cite her vision in having shone a spotlight on contemporary Haiti, illuminating a glimpse of “a people who refuse to be defined by their tragic moments and who thrive”.