Making a film in Haiti, as director Gessica Généus can testify, is no easy thing. When she began work at the end of 2019 on her 2021 feature, Freda, the country was engulfed in the Petrocaribe street protests, named for the vast scandal involving Venezuelan oil that saw billions of dollars vanish.
Through December 2019 and January 2020 she carried on working, at one stage filming while gunfire rang out for hours outside the nightclub where she was filming, prompting concerned calls from her actors’ families.
Généus’s new project, due to begin shooting in the port city of Jacmel next year, will potentially commence in the midst of the even more difficult situation that has engulfed the Caribbean country since the murder of its president Jovenel Moïse by armed mercenaries in 2021.
These days large parts of the country are controlled by rival gangs. Vigilante killings have become widespread. The best hope in mitigating that violence may be a UN mandated intervention, which Kenya has said it is prepared to lead.
Production companies, as Généus acknowledges, have been wary of the risks of filming in Haiti. When I mention an incident that occurred during my own last visit to Haiti in December 2019 – while Freda was filming – the murder of a French couple who were followed from the airport, Généus describes how that killing almost resulted in her production funding being pulled.
“I grew up in neighbourhoods like Freda’s,” Généus explains, describing her awareness of the rhythm of the violence in Haiti over the years.
“I said [to the producers in France]: we have to do it now. Otherwise the violence will spill over. Right now I wouldn’t take that risk. There’s an urge to kill at the moment that I can’t explain.”
For all the problems Généus and her crew faced in getting Freda made, it is an extraordinary film, often ambiguous and avoiding the obvious.
The film follows the story of a family in the Lalue neighbourhood of Port au Prince. Its titular character, Freda – named for a voodoo deity of opulence and sexuality – is a student at a university where the unpaid teachers are rarely present, leaving the students to debate the country’s problems and how to respond to them.
Freda’s mother, Jeannette, a distant figure modelled on Généus’s own activist mother, runs a small shop while struggling to connect with her children’s lives. Freda’s sister, Esther, pursues a relationship with an abusive senator who can potentially lift the family out of poverty.
But it is around Freda herself that the central dilemma is built. We learn at the beginning of the film that she has been raped in her own home by her mother’s boyfriend.
Offered the chance to leave for the Dominican Republic with her disillusioned artist boyfriend – who has returned after seeking treatment for a wound that he got from a stray bullet while lying in bed – she is confronted with the question: should she stay in Haiti, and if so, why?
It is a question that looms large over the film, a reflection of the director’s own conversations with her friends: the constant wondering about who will next “go to the airport”.
“I struggle with Freda’s question myself,” explains Généus, who spends six months of the year in Haiti.
“It’s why I identify with the film so much. Every time I am in Haiti, I ask myself: what am I doing here? My perspective, and that of my friends, is radical and feminist. I can’t understand how a woman can stay with a man who is beating her. But I feel like that about Haiti.
“Violence is part of the way of life. Even if it sounds weird – morbid, even – my experience of life in Haiti has shaped me completely.”
The character of Freda’s disillusioned artist boyfriend, Yeshua, in particular speaks to the difficulties of making art in Haiti.
“There are so many artists, including film-makers, who haven’t been able to be produced outside of Haiti or have their films travel. I don’t feel I have the right to ask the question, ‘What if I can’t film in Haiti?’ I feel that in those circumstances I won’t talk about Haiti.
“I would rather kill myself than film Haiti scenes in the Dominican Republic. But the difference is that I do have access to a producer and money outside the country.”
Généus’s access while working in Haiti, she explains, is in large part due to being well known as an actor there. She began her career in Richard Sénécal’s Barikad (Barricade) 20 years ago, and she believes that her celebrity has helped remove obstacles.
Paradoxically, Généus identifies a dangerous notion of freedom at the heart of Haiti’s anarchy that she believes has become imprisoning.
“It might sound pretentious, but for the longest time I’ve been obsessed with this idea of being free. Because I would watch American films, I always felt that freedom meant running in some big field in a big land.
“I’ve looked at my own country, and I’ve slowly and painfully become aware that this is part of what freedom looks like.
“We’ve been on our own so long, trying to take care of ourselves, and we’ve never had a government that’s taken care of the population.
“I want us to understand that this overwhelming freedom is part of what is destroying us.
“We have no protection, no safe places, and so we’ve never been able to create anything from our own perspective.”
If Freda touches on many of the difficulties that make life in Haiti seems so uniquely challenging – grinding poverty, corruption, violence, the political and economic privileges enjoyed by a small elite, the exploitation of Haitians by outsiders – it counterbalances those issues with a warmer, more optimistic take on Haitian society and culture.
Describing the scenes shot in a Port au Prince nightclub that epitomise this alternative take on Haiti, Généus says: “I wanted to show people still living their lives. I wanted to show how that kind of intimacy has tremendous power. How we still have to find a way to make choices, even in difficult, almost impossible situations. That’s what I am curious about.”
“For me, the Freda in the film is the woman who has gone through this traumatic experience. She was raped in the place where where she lived. And she rebuilds herself. I called her Freda as a reminder that you can reclaim beauty from what is ugly. She represents the one who is standing up.”
Généus’s next film – about a relationship between a minister’s son and a prostitute – will require her to work around Haiti’s violent chaos.
While most of the crew will fly from Port au Prince to Jacmel, the heavy equipment will have to travel on roads that are at present dotted with gang-controlled checkpoints. Whether or not those gangs will still be in control when that journey happens will depend on the success and timing of the Kenyan-led anti-gang intervention.
“We are being drained constantly by gangs. They are keeping us exhausted and unable to think about how to protect ourselves.
“That’s what needs to be analysed in Haiti. It’s what I am obsessed with. How do we get to the bottom of that?
“I look to my mother a lot asking these questions. She was an activist. I used to think about her: ‘You’ll will die without seeing a change in the situation that you so want.’ I needed to know how you live with that as a human being.
“I realised later that cinema has a way of giving access to this kind of humanity, these questions, and exploring them. That’s where I wanted to go with Freda. To look at where things are grey and complicated. I need that to stay alive.”
• The Visions of Haiti season runs at the Barbican, London, from 18-31 October. Freda will be screened on 28 October.
• This article was amended on 18 October 2023 because an earlier version mistakenly said that Richard Sénécal had died. In fact, he is still alive. This has been corrected.
