‘Mountains’ Review: Touching Story Of Haitian Family In Miami Is Impressive Directorial Debut For Monica Sorelle – Toronto Film Festival
16.09.2023 - 20:57
/ deadline.com
Watching Mountains, which just made its international debut as part of the Toronto Film Festival’s Centerpiece program, I could not help but think of two other landmark films it seems to recall in its own way. One was 2019’s The Last Black Man In San Francisco, a remarkable story of gentrification and its effect on those being edged out of their home that starred Jimmie Falls and launched the career of Jonathan Majors. The other was the 1960 film version of Lorraine Hansberry’s oft-performed A Raisin In The Sun in which Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee Younger played a struggling husband, son, and father with a dream for a new house and a better life for his family.
Put them together and you have the bones of what makes Director and Co-Writer (with Producer Robert Colom) Monica Sorelle’s affecting and meditative debut feature so powerful. The film had premiered under the radar at June’s Tribeca Film Festival where it won a special Jury mention for Narrative Films, but its TIFF placement deservedly gives it a wider audience and shot at distribution. Sorelle worked on casting Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winning Moonlight, set in Miami like this film, and that film’s clear influence on Mountains is a very good thing.
Set in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami, an ever-changing home for so many Haitian immigrant families, it is clearly a time of major disruption. The lead character, Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), works on a construction crew knocking down long-standing houses in the area where he also lives.
His is a modest but colorful house he shares with his wife Esperance (Sheila Anozier), a seamstress and crossing guard. Their adult son, the very Americanized Junior (Chris Renois), works as a parking valet but is really an
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