THIS HOUSE

CETTE MAISON

By Miryam CHARLES

EMBUSCADE FILMS - as PROD

Drama - Completed 2022

Bridgeport, January 17, 2008. A teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the past causes and future consequences of this unsolved crime are examined, like an imagined biography.

Festivals
& Awards

Berlinale - Berlin IFF 2022
Forum
    • Year of production
    • 2022
    • Genres
    • Drama, First film, Documentary
    • Countries
    • CANADA
    • Languages
    • FRENCH, CREOLE
    • Budget
    • 0.3 - 0.6 M$
    • Duration
    • 74 mn
    • Director(s)
    • Miryam CHARLES
    • Producer(s)
    • Félix DUFOUR-LAPERRIÈRE (Embuscade Films)
    • Synopsis
    • Bridgeport, January 17, 2008. A teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the past causes and future consequences of this unsolved crime are examined. Like an imagined biography, the film explores the relationship between the security of the living space and the violence that can jeopardize it.
      This house documents the shockwave of a violent act over time. By carrying out its history, its archaeology, the film seeks to shed light on the possibility of building and creating from a traumatic event (to eventually free oneself from it).
      The reality of this tragedy eludes me. This project is a quest for truth and justice. The journey leads us into the past where my cousin's story will become intertwined with mine and Haiti's. For her and for me, it is an impossible return home. One of the objectives of the film is to explore this isolated act in order to confront it with the society of which it is the product. With this film, I question the feeling of security that one can feel in one's home. From the elements gathered during my research, I will attempt a task undertaken many times before me. That of building or rather rebuilding a house through art. A space where one fearlessly confronts reality, the pains of the past and the present in order to establish better foundations. The events will be evoked by shadows, objects and bodies framed without being accentuated. It is at the level of the staging and the fictitious reconstitution of a reality that we will be able to grasp the horror of the drama. Women's voices will inhabit the empty spaces, the abandoned places and will cross different eras in order to create a unity that the violence has upset.
      This house is a personal interpretation of my family history and my connection to home and territory. Between documentary essay and fiction that deconstructs traditional classical structures, the film will attempt to transcend the certainty of violence in order to reach the promise of a new life.