Monica Sorelle’s touching feature debut, “Mountains” centers on a Haitian family eking out a life in Miami amid encroaching gentrification and an unstable housing market. Working-class demolition worker Xavier (Atibon Nazaire) wants a bigger, even suburban (i.e. whiter) house for his family, which includes his seamstress wife Esperance (Sheila Anozier) and even their disappointing, college-dropout son Junior (Chris Renois). By day, Xavier helps knock down the very houses that the forces of gentrification are paving over, making him complicit in the bureaucratic machine that’s increasingly pushing out the immigrants, like Xavier and his family.
Haitian-American filmmaker Sorelle patiently observes their days and ways, while Esperance works as a crossing guard and Junior works as a parking lot attendant but has aspirations of becoming a stand-up comic. Everybody is dreaming of something bigger, and far out of the shadow of the tragic circumstances from which they’ve emigrated. “Mountains” is a patient, subtle movie that doesn’t imbue its telling with grand tragedy or ill-fated vicissitudes; rather, it basks in the loveliness of the life this family lives with a neorealist touch. Haitian-American cinema rarely gets a spotlight outside of festivals in the United States, with “Mountains” also the rare example to play many of them.
Sorelle won the “Someone to Watch” Award at the 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards after the film played the Toronto and Tribeca film festivals. It also garnered an Independent Spirit nomination for Best Breakthrough Performance for actor Atibon Nazaire. Music Box Films will release “Mountains” in theaters on August 16, starting with a hometown premiere in Miami. The film will then head to New York on August 23 with a national expansion in major markets to follow.
The film was co-written and produced by Robert Colom, a fixture of the Miami filmmaking community. Both Colom and Sorelle are key members of the Caribbean creative collective Third Horizon, which recently programmed a selection of films on The Criterion Channel.
Watch the trailer for “Mountains,” an IndieWire exclusive, below.
